Recently, I was talking with people in the blind community about programming. Whenever these kinds of discussions come up, people make claims along the lines of writing code on a Mac with VoiceOver isn’t ideal, to put it mildly.

Last month, Zac Hall wrote on 9to5Mac about what sounded like a helpful feature on Apple Watch. Time in Daylight, as the name suggests, shows you how much time you have spent outdoors in daylight. Just wear your Apple Watch, and it will record the data. I’m all for these types of features that can make you aware of your habits while leaving it up to you to act on them. Time in Daylight seemed like a great candidate to pin to the Health app overview for quick access.

Many years ago, I tried to use some of the Alfred workflows designed to send messages directly from Alfred. None of them worked, and I moved on.

Now I’ve discovered a working workflow by Vítor Galvão. It is brilliant! This workflow is especially handy since, after the Messages app became a Catalyst app on macOS, it got more clunky to use with VoiceOver. Thanks to this Alfred workflow, I can now efficiently send messages to my contacts without having to interact with the Messages app itself.

After becoming blind, I had no idea that I would still be able to use my iPhone without vision. Thankfully, I was introduced to VoiceOver, a screen reader developed by Apple. Through a set of custom gestures and interactions, I learned to navigate my iPhone in an alternative way that allows me to perform most of the same functions without relying on standard gestures.

Mark Alldritt, writing at Late Night Software:

As of January 2025, Script Debugger is declared end-of-development. We will continue to offer Script Debugger for sale and provide support and maintenance releases until the product is withdrawn from sale in June 2025.

I’ve never been a customer of Script Debugger, but it is unfortunate to see the deprecation of one of the main products for the language I learned first, namely AppleScript.

The MarkItDown library is a utility tool for converting various files to Markdown (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc.)

This library will improve my workflow as a student who has to deal with DOCX, PPTX, and PDF files frequently during the semester. I ran a few tests on some files, and it works well!

Previously, I tried Pandoc, but I never got the results I wanted.

Unread 4.0 was released just a bit over a month ago, but the Golden Hill software is already rolling out handy features:

This update adds new article actions for GoodLinks and Omnivore.

I have used GoodLinks for years, and this new feature is more than welcome. I find the coincidence of installing Omnivore just about a week ago to try out their text-to-speech functionality amusing, especially now that the developer of Unread is adding support for it.

As I wrote in my review of Unread 4, Article Actions is my favorite premium feature. By adding two new services in Unread 4.1, the feature becomes even more appealing to a broader audience.

I listened to an interesting and inspirational interview with Stephen Hackett on Paper Places by Kerry Provenzano:

Kerry is joined by Relay co-founder, podcaster and blogger Stephen Hackett. They delve into Stephen’s 16 years of writing at 512 Pixels and uncover the key advice writers should follow if they want to write successful blog.

They even discussed a topic that bothered me earlier this year, namely choosing a name for your blog. In addition to that, they touched on the renaming history of Stephen’s blogging journey.

I had my blogging on pause for over a year, but I came back to it this spring. I spent a few months figuring out what I wanted to write about, but I have now found a clearer trajectory for my writing.

Relay was one of the inspirations for my blogging, so having a dedicated show from the same company focused on writing is fantastic.

On the latest episode of The Omni Show, David Sparks shares a great real-world story about using ChatGPT for blind people:

My daughter is a teacher, and she’s an art history teacher, and she’s got a blind student, so we need to get very detailed descriptions of paintings for the student to read in Braille. And I told ChatGPT, “Pretend you’re an art expert. You need to describe it for a 17 year old who’s blind, and be very descriptive,” and it did a pretty good job. And then I said, “Okay, now convert that to Braille,” and it did.

It is one thing to hear theoretical, generic examples of using AI versus real-world use cases. This concrete solution is excellent and demonstrates how AI can be practically used to improve life for both blind individuals and those around them.

As a screen reader user, you may stumble over inaccessible webpages more often than you would like. One solution that may work is to enable Reader in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.