Quitter

Accessibility is not always related to disability, and improving it makes everyone's life better; which is not to say that it would otherwise not be worth considering (I myself am disabled). There's chronic disability, and situational disability (being pregnant, having a broken arm, being in a noisy environment...).

I'm a special case because accessibility and ad nauseam customization are a special interest of mine. But I'd like to see more abled and disabled people experiment with tools they would not initially consider using because they're not geared towards them.

Here are some examples of things I use to make my life easier or just for fun.

Reading

I do not have vision problems, but I sometimes have to use screens in the sun and I'm often in a state of mental and sensorial burnout.

I block all adds and cookie popups, use reading mode (here's how to use your browser's reading mode if you don't know what it is) and my smartphone's font size is set bigger than any of my friends' my age. I make ample use of zoom (ctrl + +/-) in the internet browser.

I also use screen readers. Sometimes, I want to use my phone in a car or train without getting car-sick, or while walking. I also prefer reading books with a synthetic voice rather than listening to audiobooks read by people. The regularity of robotic prosody and pronunciation is less distracting and easier to parse for me, besides just enjoying the texture of some of these voices. Readera's text-to-speech function is really useful for that.

Audio games

I've only played a couple audio games, but being able to play in the dark while resting is useful when not just cool. Manamon, a Pokemon look-alike (sound-alike?) took me a long time to get used to, but I felt it expand my brain (it is free to play until the second stadium and does not have micro-transactions).

Speech synthesis

On some occasions that I've gone through Covid or throat infections, I've used a text-to-speech voice synthesis app to communicate. I talked by writing what I wanted to say into a textbox and pressing play, or by directly pressing customized buttons with my most used phrases, objects or care needs.

Text input

I've used MessagEase to write on my smartphone since 2013, so for a little more than a decade as of writing this. It allows me to write one-handed on the street or while carrying something, and faster than with QWERTY. I cannot quite recommend it due to being closed-source and the only one of its kind, as far as I know. I use the .apk file from the version before it got paywalled, because you cannot one-time buy it, you must pay a monthly subscription. So the moment my future smartphone stops supporting that version, it's over!

There was a time when I could use Android's Talkback braille keyboard (not anymore as I've forgotten the dot positions), which contrary to what most people think, just requires a regular smartphone as it doesn't work by feeling braille bumps on buttons or the screen. Here you can see how the braille keyboard works. I've never been able to read braille; I have not really practiced to get perceptive enough with my fingers.

Captions

I have no problem hearing, but I turn on captions on videos whenever they're available. I think they just help me get less tired in the brain. Not much else to comment about this one.

tenpo sike pini la, mi tawa ma-tomo ni tan pali sin. mi pilin-ike tan ni: jan lawa pi+ma-ni li ike-mute. ona li weka e kasi, li weka e mani tan jan pi++pana sona, tan jan pi+pona-sijelo. mi wile-ala tawa ma-tomo ni a.

taso, tenpo li tawa la, mi kama pilin-pona tan ni: tomo-mi li lon nasin pi++kalama ala, poka ijo-pona mute. ma+kasi pona li lon. ma-kasi li jo kin e tomo-lipu pi++wile-mani ala, e tomo pi+tawa-sijelo, e tomo-esun pi+suli-mute lon poka ona. ijo-ale ni li wile e tawa-noka lili tan tomo-mi.

mi lon ma-kasi lon tenpo-mute la, mi kama-sona e soweli pi++olin jan lon ona. ken la, mi sitelen e ona, li pana e sitelen tawa sina.

tenpo-ni li ike tawa mi, taso ma-kasi li pona e mi.

Our brain is very good at wanting things, and not so much at liking them. It is simply wired like that. Evolutionarily, I guess it's more dire to have ourselves want things than to like them once we already got them. The areas of our brain that 'want' are big and interconnected; feeling deep pleasure is more difficult, as several small isolated 'hotspots' must be active at the same time.

From Liking, Wanting and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction:

Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psychological process of ‘wanting’ a particular reward is dissociable from circuitry that mediates the degree to which it is ‘liked’. Incentive salience or ‘wanting’, a form of motivation, is generated by large and robust neural systems that include mesolimbic dopamine. By comparison, ‘liking’, or the actual pleasurable impact of reward consumption, is mediated by smaller and fragile neural systems, and is not dependent on dopamine. The incentive-sensitization theory posits the essence of drug addiction to be excessive amplification specifically of psychological ‘wanting’, especially triggered by cues, without necessarily an amplification of ‘liking’.

This has been in the back of my mind for some time now. I've been coalescing and digesting this same concept as seen through the lens of productivity habit coaches, buddhist monks and Arahants, orgasm denial kink, neural network training and neuroscience papers.

I feel that having an intuitive understanding of this idea should be profoundly useful once one can get past the sadness or concern it might instill. I am still exploring it.

For now, I just feel like mentioning a silly daily life example from this week: I've been enjoying walking to the library, browsing, and picking the books I would take home as much as actually reading them.

I'm still behind this project, but I got a full-time job and have much less time for hobbies. However, I haven't really made an effort to find some time for blogging. I've been struggling with burnout.

Since my last posts I've been interested in Gregg shorthand, spanish sign language, German, meditation and heart rate variability as a tool to measure health (since my partner got me a Garmin smartwatch), among other things. I would like to write about these topics here.

I've been taking notes about these topics in Obsidian, but I don't know if my scattered notes and attention will translate well into blog posts. So I've been thinking about another site project, or subsection for this site, that would mimic the non-linear, node-link approach of Obsidian and other similar note-taking systems.

I think my writing problem calls for a two-pronged approach:

1. Reduce anxiety about writing perfectly. Stop trying to rewrite past posts because everything I write makes me cringe. Keep reflecting on why that happens.
2. Reduce the effort required for writing. Set up alternative systems for writing modularly or non-linearly instead of needing to order thoughts in paragraphs, such as templates or linked nodes. Think about other ways of sharing my experience or mood that do not require being verbal: emoji log, image and link collages, code snippets, color composition, data graphs... Use simple languages like toki pona (a 120-word constructed language).

These are not the same:

1. A 6 in the pain scale while the patient is depressed and unable to do much activity.
2. A 6 in the pain scale while the patient is not depressed and is able to carry tasks and socialize (pain may be due to these activities).

Pain medication may have helped with chronic pain even when pain scores remain the same.