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

Post by avhon1 » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #348

u801e wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Since you mentioned ed, I know of a blind programmer who actually likes and uses ed (or did last time I heard from him). In fact, he wrote his own version of ed that also includes a web browser, and called it edbrowse. To be sure, he's in the minority even among blind programmers. But for what it's worth, you can find an article that he wrote about his approach here: http://www.eklhad.net/philosophy.html

Post by jmagoon » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 6:46 PM UTC

edaemon wrote: post #204

jmagoon wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love matrix, but the OP just described the big adoption problem. Non-programmer wants to set it up for his company. How do you do that with a matrix server? Slack makes it pretty damn easy for non-techies to get set up and invite people. Matrix currently does not do that.

Maybe I'm not understanding you correctly, but with Riot.im you can just sign in, create a room, and then invite people to that room. It gets a bit more complex if you want to run your own server, but that's not something you can do at all with Slack.

Post by Pete_D » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 7:05 PM UTC

agroot12 wrote: post #446

mwcampbell wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it would be much better if the screen reader could use sounds for punctuation, like the sound of a typewriter typing to indicate a dot, and some meep-like sound with the frequency goes up for an opening parenthesis, and down for a closing parenthesis.

Post by panopticon » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #226

panopticon wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web-based implementation means you only have one codebase for both Slack in the browser and Slack in Electron. So adding Qt in addition to their browser client means they have two disparate clients instead of one client (plus Electron glue code).

So what? You're saying that like it's this terrible thing. It's not. Especially because, as has been shown, Electron apps are extremely sorely lacking in things like accessibility.

Post by darekkay » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

welder wrote: post #267

blindgeek wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this! I happen to be a blind software developer who has had just this sort of experience in years gone by. Web apps mean that you are at the mercy of the developers. Something can work one day and break the next. This is even more true for blind people than it is for the general public. Even if there is accessibility testing, I doubt that it covers my particular toolstack. I'm on Linux. So I'm doubly a niche…

Besides building accessibility into frontend/React component toolkits, how do we automate testing for accessibility? I've turned on text dictation and tested apps with a blindfold, but that doesn't scale and I'm not even sure if it's how people really use an app without sight.