Paweł Masarczyk

Somewhere between podcasting, accessibility testing, travelling and tweeting in Braille. #a11y #Android #iOS #music #languages pol/eng

Last Notes

2026-05-22 08:04:00 UTC

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Firefox under Windows 11 didn't manage to load my 22 mb. HTML presentation but that contained some resources like audio files and images and Javascript which might have been linked to externally.

2025-08-13 14:47:14 UTC

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Is this with any accessibility service enabled or just certain ones? In Europe, many banks used to do the thing where certain services were whitelisted and could access their apps just fine. The one left out was Samsung's Talkback as the package name differed slightly from the Google variant.

2025-03-17 17:21:32 UTC

Thanks to a meetup at our local hackerspace @npub19dn…yh9f , I have learnt about a web-based, open source, highly accessible video downloader frontend you can fire up at https://cobalt.tools. Really easy how it works: 1. You open the site; 2. you paste the link into the edit box; 3. You press enter; 4. The standard "Save File" dialog comes up. All the extra stuff like formats and qualities can be set in the settings and a choice between a video, audio-only or video-only version is offered under a button below the link input. #Accessibility #Blind

2024-12-26 20:15:49 UTC

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The Braillnet project exists to this day, although the BBS and phone numbers are down, users can still access their e-mail, the personal websites the users could create under the Braillnet domain are still up serving software, literature and music created by the community and the FTP with anonymous access is a treasure trove of early notetaker goodies, DOS and early Windows software and useful information in txt files that would have been of great use to the community back then. Always worth exploring it with a translation service of your choice. http://braillnet.cz/sons/bplus.htm

2024-12-26 20:12:05 UTC

It's almost past the holiday season and I hope you've had one that you were dreaming of all year. I realized, I haven't ever repeated my advent calendar event which many of you seemed to have liked. That does not mean I have stopped researching good practice examples of accessibility implementations around the world. As a way of making up for it, I wanted to share a story that I digged up by following a thread of references from a podcast I was listening to, through somebody's personal website like it was done 30 years ago, through an anonymous FTP to the main site of the Braillnet project. I found the story really inspiring. It's 1993 in then Czechoslovakia. and the Internet is slowly becoming a thing alongside some, often locally produced, ways of making DOS and Windows 95 PC’s talk, at least with the most common software. It is apparent to the employees of the local blindness organization that the net will be a game-changer in access to information for blind and partially sighted users, some of whom own notetakers like the Eureka or even PCs. By cooperating with the IT centre of a university they set up a BBS under a phone number in Prague and offer, for the first time, access to digitalized books and magazines, an e-mail account, a Telnet and FTP client. Public transport schedules might have been a thing too but I'm not 100% sure about that. The network develops but the limitations are apparent: access mostly to internal information and only through a number in one city. Four years later, an idea is born to give all persons with disabilities access to regular, dial-up internet with prominence of locally sourced material but not excluding the entire world wide web. They manage to secure state funds and support of local ISP's and set up numbers for all major numerical zones in already then Czech Republic, giving unlimited access to the Internet to any person with a disability for the fixed price of around 4 USD per month. #Accessibility #RetroTech #Blind

2024-10-15 21:05:25 UTC

It took a while but the developer has finally added the required accessibility enhancements so I can finally share a fun little game called Language Guessr. You're given a short audio recording and it is your task to guess what language it is in. Should you give the wrong answer, you have the option to hear a sample recording in the language you indicated so that you can learn the difference. A great little toy for language geeks. There's an edit combobox at the top to search for the country so that you don't have to navigate the map view which doesn't work with screen readers. Happy playing! https://languageguessr.io/ #Accessibility #A11y #Blind #Languages