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Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

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Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#51

Post by wunderwaffe »

mikhailt wrote: post #42
wunderwaffe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't use apps. Apps can do millions of things you don't want an untrusted party to do on your device.

Browsers are apps too and your statement is too vague. Please explain what you’re afraid of. To me, it sounds like you’re talking about third party apps, and your fear is about third party developers having access to your web accounts. In that case, that makes a bit more sense but then I hope you’re not using any browser extensions as well.

Yes, with untrusted parties I mean developers of third party apps.

And yes, I don't use browser extensions either.

Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#52

Post by tarboreus »

I'm blind and am reading HN right now.

On an iPhone:

1. Hold down the home button to summon Siri.

2. Say "turn on Voiceover."

Now when you touch parts of the screen, that element will be read to you. If you're focused on a button or link, tap twice to activate it. Scroll with a three finger swipe.

Will definitely take some getting used to, but in some ways it's actually superior to sighted reading. No strain or fatigue, you can control your phone without taking it out of your pocket, and you can listen while walking around.

An alternative, and I also do this, is to do this workflow:

1. Get an RSS reader with HN hooked up to it.

2. Read all the article titles and open the ones you think sound interesting in the browser.

3. Use the Pocket for Chrome extension to add those items to the Pocket app. It's Mozilla, it's not particularly evil or leaky.

4. Read the articles on your phone in a readable font You can change the text size in settings.

There are some other alternative workflows for getting text read aloud on the laptop, message me if you're interested.

Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#53

Post by mike-cardwell »

wunderwaffe wrote: post #50
mike-cardwell wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a style element should have worked too. The HN CSP policy has unsafe-inline which covers both of these things. Perhaps your problem wasn't with CSP at all, but something else. Maybe a CSS specificity issue? [edit] - Yeah, I just created this bookmarklet and it worked fine: javascript:(function(){s=document.createElement('style');s.textContent='*{font-size:20px}';document.head.appendChild(s)})()

Even better! My solution was a link element with a data: URI. Yours is much more elegant. And works! Thank you very much!

That would be the problem. The HN policy for styles is:

style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline'

This means they can include CSS from the same origin, or inline. It would need "data:" adding to the list to allow data URI's as an accepted source.

Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#54

Post by rishav_sharan »

tarboreus wrote: post #52

I'm blind and am reading HN right now. On an iPhone: 1. Hold down the home button to summon Siri. 2. Say "turn on Voiceover." Now when you touch parts of the screen, that element will be read to you. If you're focused on a button or link, tap twice to activate it. Scroll with a three finger swipe. Will definitely take some getting used to, but in some ways it's actually superior to sighted reading. No strain or fatig…

If you dont mind me asking, how do you reply on HN? Your post is very well formatted to have been done using any speech to text service.

Re: Ask HN: My eyesight is not good enough to read HN. What can I do?

#55

Post by tarboreus »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #54
tarboreus wrote: post #52

I'm blind and am reading HN right now. On an iPhone: 1. Hold down the home button to summon Siri. 2. Say "turn on Voiceover." Now when you touch parts of the screen, that element will be read to you. If you're focused on a button or link, tap twice to activate it. Scroll with a three finger swipe. Will definitely take some getting used to, but in some ways it's actually superior to sighted reading. No strain or fatig…

If you dont mind me asking, how do you reply on HN? Your post is very well formatted to have been done using any speech to text service.

I used my computer. But it's entirely possible to type while blind on the iPhone using Voiceover, though I admit I'm rather slow. If I have to send an email on the phone, I usually use TTS, then go through it one character at a time to correct formatting using Voiceover.
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