Accessibility

What’s Within?

This post contains a breakdown of how I use a computer, laptop and phone. I’ve made some significant changes over the last few years due to worsening health hassles. Everything here has been iterated over time in order to create a compute environment that makes my life easier to manage. Especially when my my health hassles are at their worst.

Feel free to borrow ideas, adapt things and generally use the contents of this post as you see fit. As always: this is a highly individual approach to computering. Take what works, leave the rest.

It would seem I’ve regained the ability to write more frequently and regularly despite my health hassles

My Preference

Normally I write posts for this blog by hand using a pen, Tomoe River paper and a clipboard. Sadly, my health hassles make this approach to writing very difficult and I do not have the capacity to write using analog methods regularly or reliably. Over the last few years I’ve had to patiently wait for windows when my health hassles doesn’t interfere with my writing. With analog I have to slowly write blog posts over the course of weeks and sometimes months. It’s quite frustrating but I enjoy writing and refuse to give it up, even if frustrated by my health hassles.

Prelude

I’ve been sitting on this post for awhile (read: months) as I wanted to write something longer, robust and full of detail how I worked through re-thinking how I engage with my portable compute devices like my Samsung Z Fold 4 and Boox Palma. Annoyingly the re-think of my Android devices triggered a much deeper re-think of how I approach ‘focused time’ and some other things. The bigger re-think is a super set of the information I hoped to put forth here and, frankly, I’d rather use my few spoons and energies to just write the ’total re-think of compute’ blog post.

For a few years now I’ve been trying to make mobile and cloud gaming an option for me…. I started writing this post with examples, information and more.

Instead I’m going to put it quite simply: the game industry needs a clue bat to the head, a complete gutting of leadership and massive studios broken up (lol @ that thought given the Microsoft/Activision/Blizzard deal being approved).

I’ve spent years fighting the inaccessible nature of mobile, cloud and PC gaming. I went deep enough down this rabbit hole to deploy my own cloud based compute environment, I sorted workarounds for all the things so I could continue to use strong passwords and I’ve found bugs with controllers that claim mobile support. I even put up with the random UI overhauls that broke every one of my workarounds that allowed me to actually use the software being pushed by studios and others.

I’ve never hid the fact I try to make my ‘stuff’ accessible for folks. It’s A Thing for me and I’ve spent considerable time working on this blog to maximize it’s utility and accessibility.

I should be in generally good shape overall and I wanted to share a few links for how I pulled this off.

I ran ARC Toolkit (link) as my first pass with WAVE (link) as a second pass. I also looked at axe (link) but have not run it locally yet. These tools seem to give good results on the whole and will cover the core needs from what I can figure out so far.