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Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

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331–340 of 624 posts

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP and not blind, but I've worked with a blind programmer before. You move your cursor in the code and it reads you the line. The screen readers can be adjusted so that the speed of reading is really fast. To someone who is not used to it, it sounds like gibberish. But it's pretty amazing how fast the speech can be. After that, it depends on the editor. My colleague used vi (this is a long time ago -- before…

But how does it sanely pronounce things with abbreviations or even something like: NSDictionary *myCompoundedWord = @{@“key: [NSNumber numberWithInt: 7] }; And know that it’s missing the terminal “ in the string and has an extra space after the ]? Seems very difficult. Would be great if it could understand the language enough to verbalize it at a higher level.

With the punctuation level set to all, the NVDA screen reader for Windows reads your code snippet like this:

n s dictionary star my compounded word equals at left brace at left quote key colon [pause] left bracket n s number number with int colon [pause] 7 right brace right bracket semi

It's a lot to absorb, but people do program productively this way. For example, the NVDA screen reader is itself developed primarily by blind people.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP and not blind, but I've worked with a blind programmer before. You move your cursor in the code and it reads you the line. The screen readers can be adjusted so that the speed of reading is really fast. To someone who is not used to it, it sounds like gibberish. But it's pretty amazing how fast the speech can be. After that, it depends on the editor. My colleague used vi (this is a long time ago -- before…

But how does it sanely pronounce things with abbreviations or even something like: NSDictionary *myCompoundedWord = @{@“key: [NSNumber numberWithInt: 7] }; And know that it’s missing the terminal “ in the string and has an extra space after the ]? Seems very difficult. Would be great if it could understand the language enough to verbalize it at a higher level.

Screenreaders usually break it down into chunks it can pronounce or spell it out character by character, with added cues to indicate punctuation and some other things. It's not as slow as it sounds though, most blind people have their screenreaders set to read at a speed that is totally incomprehensible if you're not used to it. It requires a very good memory to manage something like programming, but blind people get really (almost unbelievably) good at that sort of thing simply because they practice a lot by necessity.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#333
post #96
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absurd. How is it so high? Mine uses around 700MB pretty consistently.

Are you insinuating 700MB for a chat app is sane?

Implying more like. I see the word "insinuating" misused here often.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#334
post #69

From what I have seen the best solution for bridging chat protocols is a "tube" from https://sameroom.io - not free though.

Free for some providers that have Sameroom-operated "BridgeBots". Any combination of Hangouts, Skype, GroupMe, Telegram, and Gitter is free to connect. We also had a Freenode BridgeBot, but couldn't get around the max connections per user issue.

Freenode permits I-lines for multiple users from the same IP. Have you looked into that?

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#335
post #153
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding was Google supported XMPP until a few companies including Microsoft only allowed their integrations one way and then abandoned it as they felt they were opening themselves up to being exploited rather than pushing an open standard.

They could have made two-way integrations mandatory and block organizations who did not comply.

Right, so eventually they'd block every major organization and then it's practically the same as abandoning XMPP federation. Commercial incentives just don't align with XMPP, that's the underlying problem.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious — how do you effectively program blind? Seems to me like a really difficult problem because coding is about jumping around so quickly and needing to be able to scroll and grok at high speeds. You also have the issue of all kinds of specialized characters that are difficult for any kind of text-to-speech. Are there specialized Braille displays for this kind of stuff? How do you go back and forth between k…

Not the OP and not blind, but I've worked with a blind programmer before. You move your cursor in the code and it reads you the line. The screen readers can be adjusted so that the speed of reading is really fast. To someone who is not used to it, it sounds like gibberish. But it's pretty amazing how fast the speech can be. After that, it depends on the editor. My colleague used vi (this is a long time ago -- before…

> You move your cursor in the code and it reads you the line.

That's somewhat similar to how ed works. You choose a line number or range and print those lines to the screen.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#338
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team. Not just that, but it took them months to implement some (mind you, still not all) features that are useful for blind users that someone already did in a userscript in a few days. So yeah, I…

As a developer community, we need to get to the point where accessibility is not an afterthought, not even something that has to be considered at all; that just is. I'm stating this from experience; I'm blind myself, so I know exactly what is being referred to. My group used to use Slack, and we stopped using it for this very reason. It's not hard to fill out the accessible label field. If it's present in the framewo…

What do you use instead of Slack? I'm a blind developer and find it usable enough, but I'm also on a fairly small team with out a tun of slack traffic.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#339
Why is anyone surprised? Almost every software company embaces "open standards" when they're starting up, because it helps them get a foothold. But once they're established, they want to kick out that ladder, in case the newer competitor comes along.

Establish yourself, then build a moat.

This is also a sign that they may be planning to IPO. How else would they sell a walled garden?

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free for some providers that have Sameroom-operated "BridgeBots". Any combination of Hangouts, Skype, GroupMe, Telegram, and Gitter is free to connect. We also had a Freenode BridgeBot, but couldn't get around the max connections per user issue.

Freenode permits I-lines for multiple users from the same IP. Have you looked into that?

We’re all whitelisted in terms of IPs. The issue is with # connections from the same nick. We worked with Freenode to find a solution and it didn’t pan out.

The overwhelming majority of customers connect to Slack though, so it wouldn’t matter price-wise.

I think I’m the only one reading #stripe from Skype :-)

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