I just read about a blind person vibe-coding a new email client for Windows.
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@alexchapman @alexhall @matt there you go! And I’m glad someone with accessibility challenges is finding ways to get a product out faster to solve the needs of their community.
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I just read about a blind person vibe-coding a new email client for Windows. Not linking because I don't want people to pile onto this person, who is a respected member of the blind community and long-time accessibility advocate, though not a professional programmer as far as I know. Instead, I want to point out how badly the commercial software industry, particularly Microsoft in this case, has failed us such that an individual feels the need to do this. Don't know what to do instead though.
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@matt Yeah, I'd be perfectly happy if Microsoft would open-source Outlook Express, especially if I could have it as a portable app.
@jaybird110127 @matt forgive me but what's so great about Outlook Express specifically?
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I just read about a blind person vibe-coding a new email client for Windows. Not linking because I don't want people to pile onto this person, who is a respected member of the blind community and long-time accessibility advocate, though not a professional programmer as far as I know. Instead, I want to point out how badly the commercial software industry, particularly Microsoft in this case, has failed us such that an individual feels the need to do this. Don't know what to do instead though.
@matt There's a few of them now. As much as I'd love to find something fast, lightweight, portable and probably Win32, I'm not smart enough to audit security here. Rock and hard place comes to mind. I wonder whether anyone's forked Thunderbird and purely concentrated on GUI accessibility? Is the codebase too sprawling to do that with help from an LLM on a reasonably priced plan?
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@jcsteh @matt I don't know about open bugs or requests. From here it's more about being dissatisfied with how cluttered the GUI is. There's an NVDA add-on that makes keyboard navigation more consistent but I'm guessing that's doing some pretty heavy lifting because it makes an already slow app feel even slower.
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@jcsteh @Scott @matt I use Thunderbird as my only email client, and I've learned to work around issues, but I think part of the problem is a11y sometimes is completely screwed in releases. For example I filed a bug on something I consider very serious and basic: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2019407
When an email got deleted, the selected/focused email on the list would not be read, and this results in very weird behaviour having to move up and down to know where one is. The bug got solved, as far as I can tell, by accident on a new release. But being in the situation of an email client failing to do very basic a11y things is not ideal.
Even now, NVDA review cursor commands don't work on the email listview, so 4, 5, 6 won't read the words.
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I just read about a blind person vibe-coding a new email client for Windows. Not linking because I don't want people to pile onto this person, who is a respected member of the blind community and long-time accessibility advocate, though not a professional programmer as far as I know. Instead, I want to point out how badly the commercial software industry, particularly Microsoft in this case, has failed us such that an individual feels the need to do this. Don't know what to do instead though.
@matt I'm not a fan of vibe coding, but in this case I am going to turn a blind eye, pun intended, and say “finally”
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I just read about a blind person vibe-coding a new email client for Windows. Not linking because I don't want people to pile onto this person, who is a respected member of the blind community and long-time accessibility advocate, though not a professional programmer as far as I know. Instead, I want to point out how badly the commercial software industry, particularly Microsoft in this case, has failed us such that an individual feels the need to do this. Don't know what to do instead though.
As someone who has spent all weekend trying to get dovecot to work, i understand
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I just read about a blind person vibe-coding a new email client for Windows. Not linking because I don't want people to pile onto this person, who is a respected member of the blind community and long-time accessibility advocate, though not a professional programmer as far as I know. Instead, I want to point out how badly the commercial software industry, particularly Microsoft in this case, has failed us such that an individual feels the need to do this. Don't know what to do instead though.
@matt Exactly this. We used to have several choices of email clients back in the day, whether that be Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus Mail etc. These days they're either gone and replaced with webmail alternatives or the current version of the software is highly niche and not at all convenient to use with a screen reader. It may tick the boxes for accessibility but convenience is another matter.
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I just read about a blind person vibe-coding a new email client for Windows. Not linking because I don't want people to pile onto this person, who is a respected member of the blind community and long-time accessibility advocate, though not a professional programmer as far as I know. Instead, I want to point out how badly the commercial software industry, particularly Microsoft in this case, has failed us such that an individual feels the need to do this. Don't know what to do instead though.
On the one hand, it's good that blind people are taking initiative to solve our own problems, rather than begging big tech companies and/or under-resourced open-source projects to give us what we need.
On the other hand, I still believe that relying heavily on an LLM to generate large volumes of code is dangerous, and that we don't fully understand the pitfalls.
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On the one hand, it's good that blind people are taking initiative to solve our own problems, rather than begging big tech companies and/or under-resourced open-source projects to give us what we need.
On the other hand, I still believe that relying heavily on an LLM to generate large volumes of code is dangerous, and that we don't fully understand the pitfalls.
@matt Yes this is what is concerning with vibe coding. I think I'm one of the few blind people that has no interest in vibe coding, or coding in general. My brain just doesn't work like that.
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On the one hand, it's good that blind people are taking initiative to solve our own problems, rather than begging big tech companies and/or under-resourced open-source projects to give us what we need.
On the other hand, I still believe that relying heavily on an LLM to generate large volumes of code is dangerous, and that we don't fully understand the pitfalls.
Check out what Ron Pressler wrote about Anthropic's PR stunt of having agents build a C compiler. He looked at the actual results, not just the hype. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48170244
> Today's models are not yet capable enough to build non-trivial production software without close and careful human supervision, even with perfect specs and perfect tests. Without a perfect spec and a perfect human-written test suite the task is even harder.
An email client falls in that latter category.
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On the one hand, it's good that blind people are taking initiative to solve our own problems, rather than begging big tech companies and/or under-resourced open-source projects to give us what we need.
On the other hand, I still believe that relying heavily on an LLM to generate large volumes of code is dangerous, and that we don't fully understand the pitfalls.
@matt I think this is true of vibe coding or AI in general. That said, vibe coding has reduced the friction for many of having to struggle with some of the complexities of less than accessible code writing experiences while trying to learn.
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@matt I think this is true of vibe coding or AI in general. That said, vibe coding has reduced the friction for many of having to struggle with some of the complexities of less than accessible code writing experiences while trying to learn.
@kellylford @matt Also I think it somewhat depends on what you're trying to do. I think it's very important to understand the concepts behind programming, and if code is given to you, you should be able to read and understand what is going on. That being said, an LLM used in moderation, e.g. auto complete, maybe giving it a few lines of code to look at and fix potential problems, etc., I don't see an issue with that. I agree that vibe coding can definitely get you into trouble, especially if you're working on big architectural stuff or anything involving the web.
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@matt use OE classic. it's an email client that almost exactly mirrors outlook express but has been designed to work with modern, secure email accounts
@sparksexist @matt When I last looked at OE Classic, it was still using an outdated HTML rendering engine from the Internet Explorer era which made it a non-starter for me.
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@matt vibe coded or hand coded, all that matters is it works, especially for the person who wanted it. I never understood the problem with how a person arrives at a working solution. I mean who would complain about taking a car to get to a shop that's 3 miles away, sure you could walk there, the weird thing here is "people piling on them" If the code works and does what is requested, who cares where it comes from. Vibe coding is not as simple as "Write me an accessible email client." For quality there's still testing, spec design, more testing, redesign, etc. Vibe coding done correctly is still a lot of work. I say congrats to this person for taking the initiative and solving not only their problem but the same problem for anyone else smart enough to use the working code whether written by machine or man, who cares?
@storm @matt People use email clients to access a lot of confidential information, or their workplace has specific email security requirements, or... the list of reasons that email security matters goes on and on.
The problem with a vibe coded client is that the author did not write, and we can't assume they have read and understood, every character of the code to avoid security issues.
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@VE3RWJ I believe I'm done now. I was DM'ing with this person, and as he told me about all of his experience and contributions, I realized that I didn't present him in nearly a positive enough light.
