Florian

I am Florian, florian is Dutch and Florian is he/him. I tend to talk about a myriad of different things, including #accessibility, #linguistics, #infoSec, #music, #programming and #gaming. Also #books, loads of books. Twitch streamer, LGBTQIA+-friendly and, oh right, fully #blind, as well. Anything more would be telling.

website: https://florianbeijers.xyz
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/zersiax
Pronouns: he/him

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npub1glywh42cx2pk4txukhy76jhcyyra5hryw3kxz94sgaclg4yxs7qqhsx4dg

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsy0j8t64vr9qm24nwttj0dftuzzp76t3j8gmrpz6cywu052jrg0qqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dss2rpc7

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Last Notes

2026-06-30 12:00:46 UTC

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Depends on the font, the way its rendered ... good to test :) sometimes the names make very little sense so you might end up with gibberish in your text :)

2026-04-16 20:39:04 UTC

Using any kind of #AI is unethical. Denying huge groups of people the use of applications, operating systems, websites, physical venues and events is, however, perfectly fine, because #accessibility is hard, doesn't make money, or doesn't feel fun/sexy/productive.. Having those people, sick of said being excluded, figure out AI workarounds because humans have failed them for decades is, again, unethical and how dare they for considering such a thing.
I'll see myself out :)

2026-03-30 18:51:45 UTC

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I mean ... yes ... but post-update Apple Maps-quality satnavs. They work to a degree and then suddenly make you turn right into a ditch :)

2026-03-30 18:19:27 UTC

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yeeeah ... I have seen those youtube shorts/tiktoks that ironically show a guy asking for first date advice from chatGPT and ... uhmmm ... I guess if it means fewer creepers treating their date horribly that's nice, but it does seem to paint a rather concerning picture :)

2026-03-30 16:49:50 UTC

RE: https://mindly.social/@Ranger1138/116319139236408422
I can absolutely see this being true. But, devil's advocate, how many similar studies were conducted when the pocket calculator became a thing?
#note14w0…hzav

2026-03-29 12:10:34 UTC

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Personally, I feel it's the language :P Making a sentence where everything agrees with each other and where you still get to play fast and loose with word order AND mostly have it make sense to the listener must be some kind of micro-dopamine hit every time it happens haha

2026-03-27 12:49:23 UTC

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hoo boy :) I grew up in the south where we drop the occasional curse. I once went to a sleepover as a ... maybe 9-year-old and kept that practice up. Some places in the east are ...uhh ... a bit more religious. I ruffled some feathers :P

2026-03-02 14:27:44 UTC

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Cool! :) Congrats on taking that step.

2026-02-25 23:25:50 UTC

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bonus points if you mix it all together first 💀

2026-02-25 22:07:41 UTC

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Challenge: Picture right after taking a sip of nice luke-warm room-temperature beer :P

2026-02-22 09:57:47 UTC

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Thank YOU, for sharing all that. I'm sure that took effort and I for one appreciate reading about your journey. I see some touchpoints with my own, although in a rather different way.

2026-02-21 11:40:32 UTC

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I'd just like you to know that I saw this post zip by without looking at it closely, and I initially thought you said "the happening has potatoed". How's that for a misheard lyric? :P
Still learning the language and it leads to fantastic glitches like this :) Hope it brightens your day!

2025-12-31 16:38:51 UTC

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Happy new year to you, as well :) guessing you don't eat these, they are just decoration? Unless you wanna up your iron intake I guess :P

2025-12-30 23:38:01 UTC

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I actually found out through an offboarding email from the IT department as I hadn't looked at Slack yet that day, primarily because of the fact i had been reduced to 10 hours a week. So yeah ...that was a mild shock to the system.
I do feel at the very least a zoom meeting would have been appropriate, but no ... just a "hey bad news, gotta reallocate funds, thanks for all ya did" seems ... mildly dismissive, pun intended

2025-12-30 23:17:19 UTC

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I should probably slightly amend that statement.
If someone needs help with their #accessibility from a native #screenReader user with a coding background, keep me in mind.
If you want your product to be more #accessible as a new year's resolution, also keep me in mind. i won't even judge if you drop the resolution two weeks after.
If you've received complaints your product isn't accesssible but decided they weren't worth addressing, please realize you're deliberately choosing to exclude a bunch of people, decide you want to be a better human than that, and THEN keep me in mind :)

2025-12-30 22:55:16 UTC

Welp ... I was just informed through a Slack DM that I will no longer be working at the place I'm working at in two weeks' time. That is, evidently, how we handle that now. Not entirely unexpected as the writing on the wall was evident, but still not loving that approach for reasons I haven't quite worked out yet.
If anyone needs help with their #accessibility from someone with both native #screenReader experience and a coding background, keep me in mind I guess :) #fediHired #layoffs

2025-12-21 22:47:10 UTC

What magic incantation do I need to perform to make #Vmware Workstation and modern #linux audio work together? Seeing major choppy audio in various distros when running within this host-hypervisor combo, any fix? Assuming a compatibility issue with #pipewire and vmware's emulated audio device, but not sure how to fix

2025-11-24 13:08:42 UTC

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I got something from a brand called Wemax ... it does this odd thing where when not in use, it comes on every x minutes for a few seconds, engages the fans and a few LEDs and goes back off. I have no idea WHAT it is doing during those spin-ups but i just disconnect it from power when not in use now

2025-11-23 22:33:11 UTC

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I got one for double that, and it is quite good, runs Android and everything. I think in particular making sure it does automatic keystone correction so you have a lot of freedom how/where you place it is a good thing to look out for but apart from that you should be fine? :)

2025-11-20 12:33:59 UTC

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sounds particularly healthy and vibrant :)

2025-10-19 12:42:49 UTC

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hahaha I love that me being unusual is a compliment but yeah, you're not wrong. I AM unusual to such a degree that I actually need to do some serious unconscious bias checking when I do audits and dumb myself down to an average user, as it were. As for downloading something sus ... not my fault local streaming services geolock other countries from seeing otherwise free content 😏

2025-10-18 18:17:46 UTC

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I first looked at devtools to see what was even happening but then I used OCR to find the mouse coords for that button and emulate a click. Pretty quick once I knew what was happening, I just figured the download button was blocked by my ad blocker at first :)

2025-10-18 18:10:35 UTC

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For who is curious, what is actually happening is that a CSS background-image directive has been used to render an image of the button with "DOWNLOAD" on it, and I guess given there's no other things on that spot z-index-wise, background is now foreground. This is a classic case of "you could've just used a freaking button", but that's not the point. Visually, and mouse-centrically, this works fine, therefore it works fine. That is the short-circuit.

2025-10-18 18:06:24 UTC

This is a perfect example of how nebulous #screenReader #accessibility is, and why it confuses so many laymen. I am looking at a web page right now that has a "Download" button. The button is an a (anchor) tag, with a div inside of it with the CSS class for a download button.
Obviously this is awful HTML, but it works fine, if you can see. There's a big fat button with "DOWNLOAD!" in all caps on the screen. Clicking this button starts the download. Seems good, no?
Well, no. This div has no actual textual content, and the anchor tag has no href or text either. So this huge honking button is entirely invisible to screen readers. How do I even begin to explain this to, say, a customer support rep? :)

2025-10-11 00:16:57 UTC

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I am getting really tired of that word 'Just" in these kinds of rants. For a huge amount of people, there's no such thing as "just switch", because in a lot of cases these people are considered "just" a minority that are "just" so difficult to keep in mind when developing these alternatives, I bet I only "just" made you think of them again "just" now. So with all due respect, kindly "just" f*ck off telling me what I should "Just" switch to until #accessibility actually "just" works. Until then, "just" do better at being "just". Ok? Can we do that?
This coming from "just" another #accessibility professional who sometimes "just" gets a little tired of bringing it nice and polite and "just" wants to tell people to "just" feckin' follow the myriad accessibility standards that have only existed for, I dunno ... "just" a couple of decades?

2025-09-30 12:23:18 UTC

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from what I can see, it messes with contrast and makes text larger/smaller, and it can generate audio versions of a thing, click&read, that kind of thing. It doesn't seemingly run a bunch of code to outright change the elements in the DOM and add a bunch of HTML properties to magically make things accessible, that's generally the difference :) but some might call even this an overlay, it's a little wishy-washy at times

2025-09-30 12:17:15 UTC

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No ... I don't think so 😔 looks more like a very enthusiastic ReadSpeaker alternative. Overlays are generally more invasive, this looks ... relatively harmless, just not particularly useful either and a bit of a stop-gap measure

2025-09-05 14:29:47 UTC

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hyvää nimipäivää! :)

2025-09-05 12:07:12 UTC

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lol that actually sounds like it'd be a fun experiment :)

2025-08-25 10:26:28 UTC

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Do you mean testing for free or testing in general? I'd argue that hiring disabled users to do your testing for you would actually be a good idea, but yeah ... not rando's on the internet by pushing it live :)

2025-07-05 17:41:25 UTC

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yeah amusingly I am pretty sure there IS a dutch keyboard layout but I've never actually used it, always used USA International even as a kid

2025-07-05 17:31:56 UTC

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I tend to use the US international layout where I have my shift+accent character to get my ä ö Å ö. Also this conversation got this song stuck in my head so suffer along with me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1ijHiQ2UlU
EDIT: I uhh ...forgot how that might be a mite bit controversial right now :P Lemme CW.

2025-07-04 22:16:51 UTC

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It started out as me misremembering it as actually being jyväskyllä and it became this whole extended lore where hyväskyllä is really short for "jyväskylä: hyvä? s! Kyllä", complete with set pieces and a commercial around that exchange. I've been told multiple times I should go represent you guys because I keep coming up with stuff like this by complete accident

2025-07-04 13:11:16 UTC

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hah, I've been driving a certain person crazy with crosslinguistical puns like this for months :P Most notably deliberately typoing hyväskyllä because that should totally be a slogan :P

2025-07-04 13:03:16 UTC

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ahh, but did you finish it ? Or did you Finnish it? :P

2025-06-29 10:32:38 UTC

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It always felt like an odd cost fallacy expression to me... like ... I must lean into the decisions I've made by deriting others who didn't make that decision, in order to justify the time/effort I myself put in against the inaction of others, maybe? It's an odd thing and I wish it didn't pop up as often as it does...

2025-06-28 08:07:54 UTC

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OUt of curiosiy how are you feeding the audio into the model? I've bee thinking of setting up a language learning/sentence mining pipeline doing something similar but the art I haven't looked into yet is how to effectively do it on streaming audio

2025-06-24 08:44:28 UTC

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hey, it makes phishing campaign creation accessible! I can be a proper blackHat now 💀 /s :P

2025-06-21 15:17:31 UTC

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I think you are, honestly. Particularly in the case of social networks, I think it's tricky to just decide to "quit" if you can't get your actual social network, the people you talk/hang out with, to quit along with you. If Threads is where your loved ones are, just deciding to quit is difficult because you'll essentially just become a hermit. As a fully blind individual, I run into the problem that a lot of alternatives that aren't commercialized up to the gills just don't have enough #accessibility features to allow me to be productive, and while that's all fixable (FOSS), I can only do so much on my own :)

2025-06-21 15:12:44 UTC

hyvää Johannusta, suomalaiset ystäväni :)

2025-06-16 08:17:08 UTC

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this is how language learning works doncha know? :P

2025-06-06 13:47:20 UTC

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That does sound like something that exists but I can't think of the name for the life of me.

2025-05-24 11:55:22 UTC

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No personal experience but doesn't Astro kinda fit that "I don't want a static site generator but I kinda do" ask?

2025-05-10 17:15:35 UTC

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Possibly. Germanic languages tend to call them earthberries likely for a similar reason :)

2025-04-19 12:22:29 UTC

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THis may be a left-field suggestion but have you thought of picking up an instrument? For some it can be a great way to ground, but it's not a great fit for everybody

2025-04-10 11:04:59 UTC

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ahh I miss Showdown, used to play as a kid :)

2025-03-31 20:12:01 UTC

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I saw it referred to as face with bag under eyes, perhaps thats it?

2025-02-07 22:38:24 UTC

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yeah ... I've given it more difficult things to do: "Right now, function x does Y. I'd like it to do Z instead. Do not edit any other file, do not edit any other function". ANd it just goes ahead and edits the whole entire universe ultimately NOT doing what I said :P

2025-02-07 22:28:50 UTC

I know maston as a whole hates #AI but I'm curious. Has anyone actually gotten any ... good results with GitHub #coPilot dedicated chat where you give it multiple files/your entire workspace? I feel like everytime I try it just provides a bunch of garbage output that doesn't remotely do what I asked, and yes, AI = bad, I should know better, boo boo boo, but it does make me wonder if it DOES work well for anyone

2025-01-05 15:35:56 UTC

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sounds like a party to never forget :)

2025-01-05 13:32:53 UTC

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Did you know Sanoma, the Finnish publisher, in particular their learning division is a big player here in the Netherlands? I helped them out with some accessibility demos last year, which was actually my first meeting with the #Finnish #language. I had to figure out how to pronounce all the words in their educational portals so I could tell them their labeling was wrong 😂

2025-01-05 12:40:01 UTC

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That is scary ... the only Finn I actually know well lives in your home town

2024-12-21 20:05:12 UTC

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we're hearing about it here too... people can be assholes

2024-12-16 16:03:16 UTC

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something something opinionated variants of already existing primitives something something :) I'm mostly sad that this is such a PITA that most probably wouldn't even really try to fix it

2024-12-12 16:12:11 UTC

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congrats! :) always nice to get that click-moment after being stumped by something for a bit

2024-12-01 23:13:46 UTC

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honestly that one annoys me but not because people use it but rather because they tell others not to. A blind spot is just that, a spot where you're blind, most notably when looking in your car mirror, yes. So I find it an apt analogy for something someone keeps missing/seems to have in their blind spot, but I've seen it rangle a few people and I quite honestly have no idea why

2024-12-01 21:34:11 UTC

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haha :) not a purposeful joke, just proof I didn't grow up in a vacuum, but that is rather amusing now you mention it :)

2024-12-01 19:59:21 UTC

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oh yeah, keeping a close eye on it

2024-11-23 20:15:37 UTC

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that is the eventual fate of all my favorite pants :(

2024-11-20 18:09:01 UTC

Here's an idea for those #fedi evangelists that want more people to show up: maybe don't hate on them for being where they are now?
I see so much nastiness being flung about on my timeline about #blueSky being run by billionaire bastards/dicks/every insult in the book, that they support fascism, that they are turning a good product bad. You realize that for most people they just want a place to share cat pics and keep track of book releases, right? Like... do I need to explain that for the majority a social media is just a social media, nd they couldn't care less WHO runs it as long as the people they care about are on it? Sure, ideology is important but good god, looking from the outside in the fediverse really looks like a bunch of salty geeks arguing over semantics sometimes and that's a shame because it CAN be great. Maybe just a little more happy and a little less judgy. Can we do that?

2024-11-19 20:05:00 UTC

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my life has been taken over by degensidle.com as of late :P

2024-11-01 19:55:09 UTC

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huh. I had no idea a movie was made about him.This'll be fun to word mine :)

2024-10-27 09:03:33 UTC

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meep, I did not know of this. now I do. this is gonna buzz through my head while waiting on a plane now :P

2024-10-26 21:31:44 UTC

Me: Alexa, when's thanksgiving this year?
Alexa: Thanksgiving will be observed on November 7th, 2024.
Me: Wait ... right after the elections? I don't remember those being so close together, the fuck?
*googles and finds it's on the 28th*
Me: ok so where *frantically googles* Why the everloving fuck is Alexa telling me about thanksgiving in Liberia of all places?

2024-10-26 20:08:09 UTC

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ok ... so why do juoksu and joukseminen both exist? :) Is one puhukiela?

2024-10-26 17:50:35 UTC

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lol as a person who's currently looking into the Finnish language it makes my inner language nerd happy that those last three hashtags are all versions of the word run/running and that I have absolutely no idea what the difference is :)

2024-10-19 10:44:22 UTC

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pretty much my sentiments. I honestly feel I've not nearly found everyone I was following on Twitter on here or on Mastodon so I kinda sorta just keep it perpetuating but also it's a hellscape and it really feels like the boiling frog effect is happening on that platform

2024-10-12 11:45:52 UTC

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hmm ... is it a shortened form? I've been looking into the language some over the last two weeks and I've seen that particularly that really throws it off :)

2024-10-12 11:37:05 UTC

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huh if that is Finnish, google doesn't know it :)

2024-10-10 12:09:06 UTC

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I honestly am not sure, I'd need to see an example. I know that people were concerned about this when the concept was first introduced, but I believe screen readers and browsers largely mittigated it today

2024-10-10 11:18:19 UTC

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oh and as for the explore by touch things on phones ... that will only find DOM elements as well. If you were to make, say, a canvas with elements on it that you can see but not perceive on a DOM level that will just look like empty space to a screen reader. In my stream I show this off by having two copies of Zork running in a browser, one is accessible, one is not , for that exact reason :) gotta stay faithful to the classics :)

2024-10-10 11:08:54 UTC

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now videogames ... that is a different can of worms. In videogames, the screen reader usually has nothing at all to work with unless that's been specifically added, and OCR is pretty much the only way to get info off screens so you'd use it far more rapidly, and manipulating interfaces like that involve using a game controller, keyboard (arrow keys enter) or mouse (OCR to find stuff and route the mouse, then simulate a click), but you'd still not use a mouse as a primary way to actually find and click content, it just happens to be the most convenient tool to activate very specific things sometimes. I did a stream on this this week actually :)

2024-10-10 11:06:20 UTC

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That would almost never happen, I'm afraid :)
People who use magnification first and screen reader second, perhaps, yes. But on the web, the mouse is always a bit of a last resort, and for that last resort to work you'd need to first find the element you want to click using other methods (i.e. it needs to be in the DOM and somehow labeled) for a screenreader-fueled mouseclick to work well. OCR is the last try of the last try, where all else has failed and you're just really persistent in making a page work and yes, you'd use the mouse at that point but again, only to click things that the OCR has found.

2024-09-27 11:32:28 UTC

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because RSI, basically. And there's handy utilities like Shortcat that can let you keep your hands on the keyboard way more :)

2024-08-29 22:10:56 UTC

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omg thank you! I have been looking for this thing for years :)