Italian, progressive, non-religious; blind since birth, accessibility consultant, WordPress blogger and Fediverse ambassador, HIV awareness advocate. Creator of @plusbrothers fiction/satire project. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🇪🇺🦮🦯 #a11y #blind #WordPress #accessibility #hiv #fedi22 #fediverse #advocacy #activitypub #StopStigma #UEqualsU

BTN-1YI5IZ

  • 5 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 1st, 2025

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  • @sytone @selfhosted Hello, let me contribute with my 2 cents of experience in automated generation of code, I won’t say “vibe coding” as it means nothing and marketing always uses meaningless words to make concepts more appealing.

    I started it the last week of July and for my YunoHost based selfhost echosystem I’m building a multilingual framework for WordPress.
    There are so many plugins, paid or free, for this CMS but I’m totally blind and most of them don’t cover my accessibility needs. So, I’m experimenting AI use to create what I personally need. This on-demand code generation, lets me be self-determined on what I want, because I guide the machine with words. Text only. And it responds.
    Am I a developer? No. Unfortunately I don’t know how exact the code is, if something written in 10 lines could be managed just with two.
    But I have something working for my own project, still in development in fact it’s called MARS (Multilingual Accessible Rudimental System), used “rudimental” without hiding anything, to signal that it’s not hardcoded by a very experienced dev. And chose the acronym “Mars” because this planet is the longest and most difficult human ambition, full of obstacle, exactly how my web experimentation journey is.
    I can’t deny I’m trying to study ways to share it with other devs, when it’s ready, I have no ideas of dates and I won’t ask for any money back, if it will ever be shared. But my most relevant thought is not to share it as I’ve got no first-hand verification on vulnerabilities.

    Last but not least, I’d invite to read this article on blindness, AI, and also coding.

    https://mosen.org/ai/


  • @null @fediverse I’m blind and have used OCR systems since 1990s. Computer at first, with scanners. Then camera-driven devices.
    OCR products pre-llm, were very poor - it’s not the first time they detected “O” letter instead of “D”, “m” in place of “rn” and vice-versa, Llm has brought some improvements in that approach. The one I’m currently using, called “BeMyAI” inside the “Be My Eyes” desktop and mobile app, provides better information; it’s OpenAI API trained with blind people’s need and it corrects possible errors. Is it always right? No. It always needs human verification especially for sensitive data. But to read names of a food or a medicine they’re OK. Never used those, to read a paper book. It’s not worth the effort, buying paper when there’s a high risk of error, if there’s the digital.
















  • @bytepursuits @selfhosted I’ve tried one mini-pc about 10 years ago; what a disappointment! It was a small jewel, touching it. It ran Win10, 64GB hard disk. For a couple years it has been my emergency portable aid - I installed NVDA (non visual desktop access) screen reader in it, as JAWS for Windows, the commercial one, is very heavy. So, after a few updates from Win10, this poor machine literally became so, so slow. And, hot. It seemed to have a little oven in my hands.
    Now, I don’t find anything interesting; those machine, low-priced, sold in extra-EU e-commerces, don’t seem trustworthy. The second one I bought was bigger, about the size of an iPad mini. But it arrived with broken LCD screen. As a blind user, I was relying just on audio. But in the end, gearbest said “you have broken it” - money thrown in the toilet.



  • @selfhosted @_elena

    DONE!!! FINALLY! Multi-site works, and fun can begin!

    Our presentation page is up, and I’m impressed as the site seems super-fast. I won’t try activitypub at the moment, maybe next week.
    Content for now, no visuals, it’s still the default WordPress theme; I’ll however continue using Gutenberg block editor for site design, sighted lady will help me with styles, sizes, colors, flags, logo. For now I have what I need: my best friend in POSITIVE (pun very intended) mood ☣️ and my intermediate web dev technical skills, let me build nav bar and HIV glossary before anything else, testing new multi-language echosystem.

    Before starting involving the sighted designer I want the interface to work properly.

    ENGLISH https://plusbrothers.net/english/about/

    ITALIANO: https://plusbrothers.net/cosa-facciamo

    Detail: I had to create a solo Nginx conf file to instruct it to accept main URL, placed on /etc/nginx/conf.d/plusbrothers.net.d/; I can’t deny or hide that for this, AI helped. And precisely, the Hostinger embedded chatbot, trained with main provider base configurations.

    Unfortunately YunoHost has a limitation and wants WordPress to be installed into a subdirectory such as domain dot tld slash wp.

    And leaving it as it is, with its /wp/ at the end of each content, would have generated 404 errors to folks searching for old posts. I wanted to have at least the presentation page published, within July 3rd - the day where New York Times in 1981 talked of HIV for the first time, identifying it as an untreatable disease affecting 41 homosexual men.

    And the weird destiny is that my best friend, and content writer for this project, was born July 3rd 1975. 6 years later AIDS come out in the USA. He’s gay, and turned poz (HIV+) in 2013 due to a cheating partner.

    #selfhosting #yunohost #wordpress