Hi everyone,
I built an SSH terminal with accessibility as a core feature, not an afterthought.
WIA SOOM includes:
- WIA Braille β universal Braille for 7,000 languages (IPA-based)
- Terminal Braille Overlay β shows braille translation below each terminal line, works with
refreshable braille displays
- Screen reader mode with xterm.js accessibility tree (tested with NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, TalkBack)
- Built-in setup guides for each screen reader
- High contrast mode, TTS (reads pages aloud), reduced motion
- RTL support (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian)
- 254 languages, fully translated UI
- Multimodal β paste images into SSH, AI analyzes them
- Free
I'd love feedback from this community on how to improve the accessibility experience.
wiasoom.com
58s demo: https://youtu.be/Rv_bSDcHVJo
Discord: https://discord.gg/QNcDSGRzAT
Comments
This is so cool
This is a really cool idea and concept. I have a bit of feedback, though I went to go look at your website and it is not very accessible at all. Thereβs lots of links that are unlabeled and it seems to be reading in a different language entirely other than English and thatβs the only language I know how to speak so if you could fix those things so I can know what Iβm reading on the website. I would love to try to download it to play around with it and test it out.
I prefer Cygwin/openSSH on Windows
7000 braille langs? Sounds like it was coded using AI and not truly tested. You can't just make IPA based braille rules (whatever that even means and yes I know what IPA is) and expect that to work. I'll point this out more later, but let's continue with the problems.
Whenever these supposed magic accessibility apps come out that do relatively basic stuff but with a ton of "this is supported that is supported" buzz words, I always wonder and avoid.
For mobile (least IOS), nobody seems to give a damn about terminal apps. The most simplistic app that just scrolls by, and someone Can't make the output read with VO by default. This isn't an AI solvable problem; it's sheer laziness. So I just use Windows or macOS wherever possible when I need ssh.
An AI terminal app? No, there's no way that can go wrong.
And why would I want to paste images into my terminal window anyway? To get a vague description of details AI thinks is relevant?
Somebody a few years ago tried to come out here and write this Typeahead AI thing and it was supposedly a screen reader in his words. Or the AI's words, whatever. It was nothing more than a glorified clickbot that had nothing to do with access and screen reading.
So for Windows, , I use Cygwin or SecureCrt. I know it works because I've used it for fifteen years.
Your website isn't laid out very nicely, is either coded half in Korean or you have bad header tags somewhere. Result: my screen reader alternates between KO and EN every few words.
The YT demo you linked also has no speech/audio. Not exactly helpful in a mostly blind users forum discussing an app.
Braille support is reliant on the screen reader most times, not on some visual aspect of the dots shown on screen. I'm assuming that's what AI calls accessible, but it's not.
You can generally tell when a description is 99% AI also without ever having to open the links provided: Look at the way stuff's written these days.
"it's not this, it's that." "THESE things aren't A, but B instead." Like everything's written with true false statements everywhere and people can't understand gradients of effort put into a program description.
So if AI can't even write a decent Product description without sounding forgettable and tired, why are people coding full apps with it? No wonder modern computing is such a joke.
I don't have issues with someone using AI to do the basics or implement something if necessary, but for the love of all things still able to think with biological brain matter, TEST IT PROPERLY IN THE REAL WORLD first.
sighs
The video. no speech nor audio so don't even know what I'm looking at accept the subtitles. Second, if you want half of us to take you seriously, please, for the love of God make your website in English for the rest of us or have a way to switch. Not very accessible so how do we know that this thing will be accessible judging by of these two things above. I was hoping some sort of video demonstration of the app when I clicked on the video but I was not impressed when no audio was in at all, which tells me one thing. You have no idea of accessibility works and if you did, you'd truly cater to show it as such. Seems like yet another dev who don't know how to develop or the dev is scamming us. Either way, not a good look at all! Not one bit! Man I swear, devs these days think they can just throw their code into AI with out even testing and call it a day. I'm getting sick of yet another form of mentality we're starting to see and it needs to stop. Perhaps I'm being too harsh here and please tell me if I am so but this screams not accessible and is totally done with AI with out testing as it claims to be. Please, do, better!
@HMC
Two years ago, when I was doing my Cisco networking CERT courses, we got a brief overview of something called Solar-Putty, from solarwinds.com. It is a free SSH client, and at the time I got to check it out, it seemed fairly accessible with NVDA.
https://www.solarwinds.com/free-tools/solar-putty
Just thought I would share with the class. π
@brian
Good point. :) I haven't tried PuTTY or the multitabbed version (solar-putty) in many years. I remember back in 2009 or so I ended up using Plink, a fully CLI version with the puTTY backend. NVDA wasn't reading the output of graphical puTTY and I was viewing the putty.log every few commands to see if things had executed as expected.
Then I got pretty interested in Linux and wanted that same kinda thing on Windows. Cygwin was/is kind of awesome, although using it strictly for ssh is probably overkill lol.
SSH on Windows
On Windows, you can just open CMD or PowerShell and use SSH from there, because Windows comes with OpenSSH now. I use MSYS2 for a UNIX-like environment; from what I remember when I tried Cygwin a few years ago, the installer was inaccessible and there was no way to choose which packages I wanted, and I couldn't figure out how to install packages after installation. Msys2 uses Pacman which is of course completely accessible since itβs a command line package manager. It even has an ARM64 version now, and it has both Cygwin and Mingw environments which are useful for different things depending on what software you are installing and what kind of software you are developing if you are developing software.
This is useless at best, scam at worst
Along side what other people here have said, the overall presentation doesn't really make me wanting to trust this.
Let's create a new subcategory in the AI Slop dark age, a11y slop. I feel this is a prime example of it.
I hope nobody downloaded this
*Points to subject line*
Seriously, do not attempt to download and install this. This whole thread just screams of, "trap"!
I told moderators
And nothing has been done yet to remove this horrible thing. Heck the user specifically created the account just for this! There must be a 24-48hrs wait period before allowing newbies to post.