Technology

I spent thirty years believing I hated writing. The problem was never writing. It was the barrier between my thoughts and the finished words, and the mom who saw that before I did.

Apple disables touch accommodations when VoiceOver is active. Disability services prescribes dictation for someone who can’t use it. Both come from the same assumption: that disabled people have one condition, one accommodation, one box to check.

NVDA doesn’t tell you whether a window is maximized when you query the title. JAWS does. I built a small add-on that adds this feature, with a dedicated command and an optional NVDA+T enhancement that matches the JAWS behavior.

The existing word prediction tools don’t work with NVDA. So I built my own add-on that predicts words using n-gram analysis, announces them through NVDA’s speech engine, and works inside the screen reader instead of against it.

The privacy community pushes self-hosting, de-Googling, and more private alternatives as universal goods. But for disabled users with multiple conditions, those solutions often cost more, work less, and break when we need them most. Privacy shouldn’t require giving up the tools that keep us functioning.

I went from a fragmented Franken-System of incompatible tools to a cognitive prosthetic I couldn’t afford to one AI that knows me, doesn’t break my budget, and meets me where my brain actually is. This is the story of building a digital nervous system because the physical world’s infrastructure doesn’t work for mine.

A personal update on why I am moving away from the backend developer path, what Boot.dev did teach me, and what I want to build next with accessibility and sustainability in mind.

Why I moved my Linux workflow from a Raspberry Pi to openSUSE on WSL, and why reliability, reachability, and lower cognitive load matter more than theoretical elegance.

A practical breakdown of the VoIP and messaging options I tried as a blind, desktop-first user with coordination, fatigue, and cognitive disabilities, and why I ultimately chose Google Voice with a second number.

Text-first and keyboard-first interfaces aren’t outdated for many multiply disabled users. They’re access. This post argues for terminal-like transparency, desktop-like discoverability, and AI that can turn messy intent into action.