I must start using typst - nice blog post on accessible pdfs typst.app/blog/2025…

The Joy of Making Bricks: https://willwa.de/2025/11/05/the-joy-of-making-bricks.html

Oh! Of course you can make a headmouse from apples headphone range! Genius developer.apple.com/documenta… (from HN)

I’m doing a ton of work on languages at the moment. This article is a good read why we don’t have diacritics in the English language. Love it. "After the Conquest, French took its place for centuries … But the period of French dominance left it... https://willwa.de/2025/09/17/im-doing-a-ton-of.html

Winning the Access Award for Echo: https://willwa.de/2025/09/16/winning-the-access-award-for.html

Made a little tool to print alphabets (in alphabetical order, frequency, uppercase or lowercase) in a wide range of languages - and then keyboards for each of these languages.. for python or nodejs github.com/willwade/…

Just found out that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, written around 1948, describes a "versificator" that composes the words for songs "entirely by mechanicsl means" simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/6/n...

I woke up this morning to see a ginger cat looking at me. Now I’m sure many of you are thinking “ ah that’s nice. you’ve got a new cat!” I haven’t got a cat. I have no idea how this cat got in my house.

Correcting Text in AAC (or a failed computer scientist figures out how to correct text): https://willwa.de/2025/06/25/correcting-text-in-aac-or.html A very light hearted - non-research friendly exploration of our model generation process.

AI doesnt hallucinate. Its not a bloody person. Lets be clear - it get its wrong. If we want to anthropomorphise our technology we could say “Poor AI it got confused” or “That shit. It just lied”. But no. Its a statistical inference machine. It got it wrong.

AI doesnt hallucinate. Its not a bloody person. Lets be clear - it get its wrong. If we want to anthropomorphise our technology we could say “Poor AI it got confused” or “That shit. It just lied”. But no. Its a statistical inference machine. It got it wrong.

Owls in Towels is what you need. Not AI. owlsintowels.org

So I went to use sharedrop.io WTF? Limewire.. Didnt that die back in the 90’s - so fine a fine OSS bit of web has been gobbled - but why does a file sharing system need a bloody “Create with AI” button? Like seriously. How to ruin a good bit of software. Use pairdrop.net instead I say..

Donnie 2 Dolls. The best thing I’ve read today.

“I just want to look at my bank balance and say fuck it. I’ll buy a Dyson”

Does anyone know how I submit a bug report to Microsoft Azure Team on their translation tool? I keep coming across problems - like Eng->Pashto - all strings are “Afghanistan National Cricket team”. Is nobody checking these lang pairs? Seen similar problems in Kurdish and other langs..

Who the hell would be crazy enough to buy this? Shaking hands with my friends? How did that reach the top of the pile for v1 must have features? I’m more concerned that this would “Memorizes your kitchen inventory..”.. “Memorizes your clean home layout”. Go on, cyber overlords. Take everything.

Direnv - and reinventing the wheel with envloader: https://willwa.de/2025/02/18/direnv-and-reinventing-the-wheel.html

So we built this aacprocessors library. Intention was to read and manipulate any AAC software. Its not ideal but just made a new method just for the grid right now. def replace_cell_with_xml( self, gridset_path: str, ... https://willwa.de/2025/02/17/so-we-built-this-aacprocessors.html

If anyone out there is a python dev - and wanting TTS support in theri code - I’d love someone to help roadtest this python library. I think its probably the most extensive TTS wrapper accessing pretty much every online and offline TTS engi... https://willwa.de/2025/02/16/if-anyone-out-there-is.html

Adam did this marvellous reprint of the poppy mini trackball for a client needing a chin controlled trackball. This modification stops it falling out. It’s a win as the designs are all open source. @[email protected] ploopy.co

Want to access Panels editor in Mac? Access it here /System/Library/Input Methods/Assistive Control.app/Contents/Resources/Panel Editor.app Pin it to your dock (saves you opening in rather wierd way via system settings)

Been working with Sherpa-Onnx TTS a lot over the last year. It’s a nice project to make a onnx runtime for lots of different languages and interfaces. Just whipped together a Gradio demo to show all the voices and hear them - most notably MMS Onnx models Sherpa-Onnx Demo

Great episode on TTS on the BBC www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/e…

Monkey Management : https://willwa.de/2024/04/15/monkey-management.html

From Ask for Advice, Not Permission "The problem with permission is that you are implicitly asking someone else to take some responsibility for your decision. You aren’t inviting them to participate in its success — permission is hardly seen as a ... https://willwa.de/2024/08/18/ask-for-advice.html

Published our py3-tts-wrapper python library finally this week. Should power a lot of funky things. Supports all the major TTS engines online and new ones offline. Use alongside this app to see what voices are available (API here)

Sometimes you have to do the hard graft as nobody else wants to. huggingface.co/willwade/… - all ONNX models of the Meta MMS Text to Speech models (code: github.com/willwade/… - and all suitable for sherpa-onnx)

Poor Henry

I made a quick video demonstrating our relaykeys dongle-dongle setup. I’m pleased we did this—it makes the headache people have of pairing devices, etc., go totally away, and we can also use it on things that don’t support Bluetooth well. .embed-containe... https://willwa.de/2024/07/03/i-made-a.html

After my dad died, I ran and sold his company (and I was completely clueless) "“Lawyers, as they should be, are often about risk mitigation for both sides. But it’s important the parties in the deal be clear on what is valuable to them or understand... https://willwa.de/2024/06/22/after-my-dad.html

This is just the most awesome radiolab episode. I can’t believe I have missed this one. It’s about Emilie and path through rehabilitation. I can’t even start to explain the aweseomeness of this. Just listen radiolab.org/podcast/f…

A lot of dictation tools takes a little while to get used to as you have to mentally prepare what to say. Aqua is quite different. You just chat away and it works out what you really wanted to write. https://withaqua.com/home

I’ve often pondered on a deceloping a rotary encoder with a push down action as a technique for accessing our auditory scanning app echo. One day we might do it and if so I’ll look at this project. GitHub - carlosefr/spinner-mouse: Arduino-base... https://willwa.de/2024/03/27/ive-often-pondered.html

inclusive sans. Brilliant name. You had me at “character level”. Excellent font. Particularly like the nod to the minority languages close to home for Olivia; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. "I was inspired to create a typeface th... https://willwa.de/2024/03/26/inclusive-sans-brilliant.html

Iterative rapid development can lead to success.. (aka Judith Part 2). : https://willwa.de/2024/03/26/iterative-rapid-development.html

Cognitive effect on breaking sitting time : https://willwa.de/2024/03/26/cognitive-effect-on.html

This is truly marvellous. www.youtube.com/watch

Objectified. "if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.": https://willwa.de/2024/03/15/objectified-if-we.html

Back to the 90s with my retro dataset of SMS, TXT abbreviations.. huggingface.co/datasets/… Maybe of use to someone out their creating a GEC model ;)

I’ve been considering LLMs' potential in autocorrecting AAC input. They offer significant gains, but user-guided inference still excels. Yvette’s video demonstrates this: 32 WPM using a glide pad in Dasher. Anyone faster?! We must get a new version developed. youtu.be/va1WufK86…

I love ASL’s switches. And in particular, the ‘Egg’ Switch (who knew it wasn’t its proper name!). Anyway, I was chatting with Mike in the office today as he wanted it to fit neater in the hand. We are down on Engineers/Masters-of-CAD right now, so I asked GPT to SCAD one. It did a great job.

Mad idea of the day. We have people who have a Speak Unique voice but need to use an iOS device and AAC app that doesn’t support it. Can I use the iOS app on a Mac to train Apple Personal Voice on the Mac using Apple’s own computer vision techniques to read the training text?

If you were to classify and detail “AAC-like” “writing” (yes, its spoken but I’m talking corpora here) how would you define it? Probably different groups of people here but I think you would see a push towards: Short utterances generally 2-5 words long, typo heavy, little grammar.. what else?

"one Silicon Valley investor said to me. “Apple feels more and more like a tech fentanyl dealer that poses as a rehab provider.”" From this Vanity fair article interviewing James Cameron’s e experience of the Apple Vision product (via Slashdot

There is a lot of evidence for many students (mainly dyslexia in research) that autocorrection software is far more efficient than using a wordpredictor1. I’m convinced this is needed more in AAC. Still, in general, for writing support, it makes heaps ... https://willwa.de/2024/02/02/there-is-a.html

Anyone who knows anything about BCI generally 🙄at the neuralink PR output. [The BBC](Elon Musk says Neuralink implanted wireless brain chip https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68137046) found a professional to give a good balanced quote but you can still hear the “sigh” within their comments

Apple Vision Accessibility features: https://willwa.de/2024/01/31/apple-vision-accessibility.html

Oooh Bard is getting really good now. I’d say that its as good as GPT 4 for coding tasks for sure (thanks Bard for figuring out my latest SwiftUI issue!)