Accessibility veteran. #Blind from birth, live in #Germany, worked for Freedom Scientific on #JAWS and #Braille displays, and for Mozilla #Firefox. Shaped web #accessibility with work on #WAI #ARIA. Happy early retiree.
Public Key
npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Profile Code
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Published at
2026-09-12T11:18:57Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe @nprofile…awd8 Thank you! npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe As previously announced, I am starting a new blog. Here's the first post. Enjoy! https://marcozehe.eu/2026/04/27/a-blogging-reboot/ npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe I just informed Envision that I am cancelling my preorder of the Ally Solos Glasses. It's been stuck in Customs for ten f*cking days, even thoguh I filled out a largely inaccessible PDF form that was absolutely atrocious and complicated. I also told Fedex that I am refusing reception. of the package. With that hassle with a shipment alone, I simply don't trust them to be able to handle things if the glasses need repairing. Furthermore, I've read too many less than favorable reviews. I find the app itself unnecessarily complicated, and the combination with the glasses seems to make matters even worse. Nope, I want my money back, thank you very much. npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe Over the next couple of days, this Braille display will move into my home. For almost thirty years, I've come back to Help Tech displays time and again, despite trying out other display vendors' products in the interim as well. But because of their quality and endurance, I keep returning to these displays, and am proud to add the Activator to the list of Braille displays I own, or owned.https://www.helptech.eu/braille-displays-activator npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe Hey y'all! I put the iPadOS 26 beta on my iPad Pro M4 and must say while many general things feel quite allright, there are definitely some areas that are very beta with regards to VoiceOver. Control Center doesn't talk at all, the multitasking control at the top of apps isn't accessible, in Files, none of the file or folder names read, and so far, I haven't found a way to activate the much talked about menu bar in Mail, Notes or any other app. So yeah, unlike previous years, the beta feels like a beta indeed from the getgo. Has any other VoiceOver user experimented with the beta on iPad and found ways to accomplish accessing the menu bar? npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe Visual Studio Code Accessibility is getting better and better: https://marcozehe.micro.blog/2025/02/26/visual-studio-code-accessibility-is.html npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe I know I am late to the party, but I am just now getting into Remote Incident Manager (RIM) by @nprofile…m3rg. So far, I am only testing with myself, from one Mac to another, but I am finding it a very cool solution. With RIM, a blind person can assist another person, regardless of that person also being blind and needing a screen reader, or not. I plan to use it to log into my home computer from the road occasionally, but also have purchased the weekend add-on so I can help others if the need arises. I can see how RIM can be a great training tool also. npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe Phew, after my recent survey about code editors for screen reader users on the Mac, I just now installed VS Code on my current Macs and started with a fresh install. And wow, in the over two years I hadn't used it, because I wasn't doing any coding, a lot has changed! Announcement sounds, signal sounds, accessibility help, hover support, viewing everything in an accessibility view, which is essentially a plain text view, and some other new features are really making this a joy to use. And the accessibility documentation alone is quite massive now. Of course, with new editor features there will also be new accessibility challenges, but the overall consistent system of mechanisms is quite nice to use. Here's the documentation for your enjoyment: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/accessibility npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe @nprofile…pye9 @nprofile…jpw4 Not sure about the combining categories and tags on a single page, but you could theoretically pull from both, but you would then still have two separate lists, but on one page. Prhaps others in the #11ty community have an idea. As for the page footer, this, and also page headers that are static to all pages, go into so-called includes, and maybe even partials. So includes combine multiple partials, and they themselves make up the whole resulting page. Includes are, in essence, templates for the main content njk files. The Learn Eleventy course describes this quite well, especially lesson 6. https://learn-eleventy.pages.dev npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe @nprofile…pye9 @nprofile…jpw4 Great choice! There are a few options available who can deploy the result pages directly, since this is all static content. They even build the project each time you commit to the repository, and keep the existing result if there are build errors. One of those is Netlify, which is quite popular among the #11ty community. npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe Cycling back here npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe I just logged into my @nprofile…0n4t account after over two-and-a-half years. Surprisingly, it was still working, and I could even recover my encryption keys to decrypt even encrypted chats I had started way back. At first I used the @nprofile…2mmz iOS app and found its VoiceOver support better than I remembered. However I was then notified of the availability of Element X for iOS and found it to be very accessible. And better yet, it can also be installed on Apple Silicon Macs, giving me a much better experience with VoiceOver than the original Electron-based Element desktop app. Besides the accessibility of the web React app, with Electron apps you also have to cope with accessibility problems of the Chromium stack, and Mac accessibility bugs in that project are usually notoriously slow to get fixes. That impacts all Electron apps, which makes it even more frustrating. So having a native SwiftUI app available is just really nice! npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe Update your #eleventy, they said. It's easy for a small project like yours, they said. The update from @nprofile…jpw4 v1.0.2 to v2.0.1 went fine. The update from that v2.0.1 to 3.0.0 made the chamber explode. And the most frustrating bit: Someone kind enough to try and clone my repository and try for themselves, couldn't reproduce. So it must be some freakish difference in Node, its various sub modules, or something. Even clobbering my node_modules folder and doing another npm install didn't fix it. It just won#t build any more. Here's the link to the issue: https://github.com/11ty/eleventy/issues/3625 npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe @nprofile…8x0h Thank you for the quick reply! Since there's no time like the present, here's the issue: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/6621 npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe @nprofile…8x0h Hi! I just started contributing to a project hosted on Codeberg for the first time. I'm a blind user using a screen reader, and my initial mmpressions of the website interface are quite positive! However, as is my habit, I did find an issue. If I view a project and am logged in, there are bits of information like how many forks are there, etc. These are links with just numbers as text, interspersed with some unlabeled buttons. My screen reader doesn't tell me which number means what or what the buttons do. Where is the best place to report this? The community issues page, or the Forgejo repository directly? That was a bit confusing when I tried to figure it out. npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe @nprofile…pye9 I am using mailbox.org and am very happy with it. It has good IMAP and SMTP support, custom domains, server-side filters, and the web interface is, although quite powerful, accessible for the most part. It uses Open-Xchange as the front-end, and I know both teams and have worked with them. It offers much more than just email, like contacts, calender, file storage, task management, and all based on open standards like CalDav and CardDav, as well as WebDav. It also has word processing and some spreadsheet capability, but that is something I don't use much these days. Have been a happy customer there for ten years now. npub15xhlf6zta9cnes9vqddgl25srffjdnelg2xrsq0z9q7f9yg8e2vqp9v06f Marco Zehe #Introduction #Reintroduction Hi! I'm Marco, accessibility veteran and former employee at Mozilla and Freedom Scientific. I'm retired now and enjoy every minute of it. I just moved instances and thought I'd reintroduce myself. I was born in 1973, and live in Hamburg, Germany. German is my primary language, with English a close second. I'm blind from birth. I'm also the owner of two cats, a previous guide dog owner, and able cane user. ;-) Also, I enjoy music, audio books, mostly in the fantasy and science fiction genres. Podcast listening and occasional creation are also things I enjoy. Some sports and swimming, too. I have a life partner, am bisexual, and also diagnosed with autism at the age of 46. So yeah, quite a package here.
