Them: Stop being a weirdo. Just be yourself.

Me: Make up your mind.

I'm randomly reminded that the other day there was a very loud boom. It didn't sound like thunder and there didn't seem to be any lightning. It had the frequency spectrum of an explosion, very full with a long tail, not a crack but really a boom with a long rumbling aftershock.

I have no idea what it was. We didn't hear anything about it in the local news, such as it is. My hope that it might have been the city records building exploding and canceling my property tax bill and various pending annoyances about permits was dashed. I suppose it could have been demolition of some kind, but it was a weekend afternoon. There were no sirens or signs of trouble.

In my neighborhood, we play a game we like to call "Gunshot or Firework???" This was more like "Bomb or Thunder???!!!???"

The other fun noises we've occasionally had:

We've had several car crashes. Those are easy to identify. Sound seems to carry down the street a fair distance, so it's not always clear where the car crash has taken place. But the way people drive in this neighborhood, it's inevitable. A car crash down the block sounds remarkably like it does in movies. Glass breaking, metal shearing and crumpling, and there's usually sharp tire squeals which lead into the actual crash medley, though sometimes I guess no one hit the brakes. There is an impact noise but either the collisions I've heard have been low enough speed that the actual impact has been drowned out by the higher-pitched noises of zones crumpling and so forth, or most car crashes don't have distinct impact sounds.

We get car stereo systems with subwoofers powerful enough to vibrate my house with enough severity to set off the burglar alarm. I don't get it, I really don't. Thankfully they've become rarer since COVID for some reason.

There are occasionally motorcycles traveling at approximately the speed of light circling the area, apparently in the belief that they can pull a Superman and return the neighborhood to the prehistoric past when apparently motorcycles ruled the Earth? Or maybe the drivers of the motorcycles are velociraptors?

There's infrequent construction noise, which I would accept as a matter of course save for the fact that it takes place before dawn sometimes. I can't get a contractor to return my calls, but apparently someone in the neighborhood is holding their loved ones hostage to get that kind of service from them.

One time, a transformer blew up on a pole just down the street. That was kind of neat, really. It was loud and slightly terrifying, but it was a very sharp crack, no tail at all. And then it looked a bit like Frankenstein was trying to animate something down the block for a while until the emergency crews got the power shut off, I guess. We didn't even lose power. Go fig. We've lost power because a squirrel sneezed seven blocks away, but a bona fide explosion didn't touch our power supply.

There is yelling. So much yelling. People in this neighborhood communicate everything by yelling at the top of their lungs. If anyone ever proposes to their inamorata on my block, it'll go like this:

Person 1: "FUCK! I REALLY FUCKING LOVE FUCKING BEING WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKER!"
Person 2: "THAT'S SO FUCKING SWEET! I FUCKING LOVE YOU TOO! OH HOLY FUCK, ARE YOU? ARE YOU FUCKING GETTING DOWN ON YOUR MOTHERFUCKING KNEE? OH FUCK!"
1: "CLARDELLA, WILL YOU MAKE ME THE HAPPIEST FUCKING ASSHOLE IN THE FUCKING WORLD RIGHT NOW?"
2: "HOLY FUCKING SHIT! OH MY FUCKING GOD RIGHT NOW! FUCKING FUCK YES I FUCKING WILL YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!"
The crowd: "HOLY FUCKING SHIT THEY FUCKING SAID YES! FUCKING AWWW! FUCK!"

But at a climactic moment like that, one could almost understand why the yelling would be necessary. Nothing like that ever happens though. What does happen is that one person will have a screaming argument with themselves, apparently, on the subject of god only knows. Or they'll have a shouting contest with a person with whom they are on the telephone, on speaker while holding it to their chins like they fully expect to sense the other party's depth of feeling by how their goatee vibrates. Or they'll walk down the street together shouting about the grocery list. Any and all occasions are perfect for yelling the word "FUCK" at the top of your lungs in this neighborhood.

The best part is that these people don't seem to live here. They come from other areas to shout outside my windows. Which is very civic-minded of them, of course; how else will I learn the news of the day or be treated to the edifying Greek chorus of the symphony of the city? It's like getting free poetry slam tickets stapled to my forehead by a guy who is doing primal scream therapy for his drug problem.

We also regularly have people wander through the neighborhood singing unrecognizable tunes at the top of their lungs, to give us a break from the obscenities. There's one person who is pretty good, actually. I respect the hustle, there. If you've got the balls to wander through my neighborhood singing along to whatever is playing on your mp3 player or whatever, kudos to you. I like your moxie. Sometimes I worry that maybe you don't have an mp3 player and the music may be coming from your untreated mental illness, but if that's what it takes, shine on you crazy diamond. I've been there, only I didn't handle it as well.

We have lots and lots of drugs, but they don't make much noise. We've had two occasions where someone who was having an extremely bad time of it spent an hour or so wailing on the street. I'm not judging. They were clearly in crisis. Others handled it, but it took a lot of wailing, and of course, since it was this neighborhood, everyone who was attempting to handle the situation were forced by municipal code to communicate with each other via yelling obscenities. I suppose I could have joined in, but I reserve my yelling of obscenities on steet corners for my birthday.

Our next door neighbors who aren't the dead are regularly raided by the police. I have no idea who actually lives there anymore. There used to be a couple who had a yappy dog and the wife had a voice that could cut glass. She communicated, as one might guess, entirely in Shakespearean sonnet. I am, of course, lying through my teeth: she communicated entirely in yelled obscenities that etched my kitchen windows and made the baby Jesus weep.

I haven't heard her in a while though, probably because, based on what little we've been told about happenings transpiring, she and her son had turned the garden shed into a drug warehouse. Fortunately for us all, it seems to have been opioids rather than meth, otherwise I would have assumed that any loud booms were the meth lab next door blowing up, if I had time to assume anything before my death by Pyrex shrapnel. She and her son were picked up in the first raid, which was noisy as one might expect. There have been subsequent raids, but nothing ever seems to come of them and they're much quieter, to the point where I almost hesitate to call them raids. They seem more like the police coming to the door and asking politely if any more drugs have shown up. I don't understand the criminal mind though, so who knows?

Our dead neighbors are very quiet, although during the summer months their caretakers are a bit noisy what with gas powered implements of lawn-care and so forth. And to be honest, most of the drug addicts keep pretty quiet too. It doesn't seem to be the addicts who are the ones who yell. In this neighborhood, who knows who the addicts are though.

Lastly and also leastly, at 3am or so on trash days, the city sanitation workers do their best to be quiet, by which I mean that they drive an incredibly loud truck incredibly slowly down the street, engaging incredibly loud hydraulic machinery every few feet to test the integrity of the garbage cans provided to us by the city, cans which I'm fairly certain were designed solely for the purpose of magnifying sound. The hydraulic machinery performs these tests by beating the cans like the bass drum in Moby Dick by Led Zeppelin, only less rhythmically. I'm not sure what happens to the garbage. Maybe they use the sound waves generated by the forceful striking of the cans to vibrate the constituent molecules of the garbage out of alignment with our spacetime, phasing them into another dimension and harvesting the resultant energy to mine cryptocurrency. Who can say?

Anyway, the hydraulic machinery replaces the cans on the street, or in most cases in the middle of the street, with a delicacy usually reserved for annexations of rival principalities by cadres of stormtroopers riding giant warthogs. Having generated the same sonic energy as the entirety of the Battle of the Somme, the garbage truck, which it must be remembered is so quiet in itself that its every internal combustion is only audible as close as the surface of Venus in a methane storm, moves three or four feet, an action which is accompanied by a noise comparable to the sound you might hear right before you go deaf while observing an erupting volcano, and then the process begins anew. Sleeping though this auditory onslaught is possible, but powerful drugs are involved and I've had terrible trouble sourcing them ever since my neighbors got busted.

So you can see why I found what sounded like a nuclear explosion in the next county to be worthy of remark. Or not. I'm not your mother.

For the past five days, we've had to go to the bomb shelter several times a day to protect ourselves from Iranian missiles. This morning, they sent 20 missiles closer to our apartment than any of the previous attacks. One of the Missiles landed in the next town and created a great big hole.

This is what it sounded like from our kitchen window.

The recording Starts with the air raid sirens, and then just before they finish at about 90 seconds, you start to hear the interceptions.

All known improvements for screen reader and braille users in the upcoming Apple software updates below.
iOS:

- The default behavior of the Magic Tap gesture (two finger double tap) of playing media can now be removed. This means no more unexpected music when trying to end a call.

- There is a new button at the bottom of the main VoiceOver Settings screen where you can reset all VoiceOver settings to their defaults.

- There are now Pan-Indian VoiceOver voices for Gujarati and Marathi.

- Share your accessibility settings with Another Device with Share Accessibility Settings
- Go to Settings > Accessibility > Share Accessibility Settings, and press the “Share Accessibility Settings” button. Then either select the device from the list with which you’d like to share your accessibility settings, or put the top of two iPhones together to prompt the share request.
- No VoiceOver on the other device? No problem. Once you’ve initiated sharing from your primary device to the target device, hold three fingers on the target device to turn on VoiceOver. Note that this gesture only works when the popup exists to share accessibility settings, so the VoiceOver user can accept the share.

- In Maps, performing a three finger single tap on a point of interest now provides much more information about the surrounding area.

macOS:

- Enhanced VoiceOver Screen Sharing Support
- You can now use Screen Sharing to control a device that does not have VoiceOver enabled on it.
- You can change the voice and VoiceOver cursor color to be distinct from that on your local device, so it’s convenient to know which machine you’re controlling at that moment.
- You can make VoiceOver speech and sounds silent on the remote device, if you wish.
- You can hide VoiceOver visuals on the remote device entirely.
- To leave Screen Sharing, uninteract, or use VO-Command-Shift-R.
- Go to VoiceOver Utility > Screen Sharing to see all of the VoiceOver-specific Screen Sharing settings
- Note that both machines need to be on the latest OS for all of this to work properly.

- Toolbar Customization
- In a toolbar, use the VO shortcut menu (VO-Shift-M) to get to the “Customize Toolbar…” button.
- While customizing the toolbar, use VO-Command-Space on items in the toolbar collection to insert at beginning, insert at end, or remove the item from the toolbar.
- Similarly, when in a toolbar and not customizing it, use VO-Shift-Space on its items to move them around or remove them without entering full customization.

- In Maps, using VO-Shift-H on a point of interest now provides much more information about the surrounding area.

- Improvements to Signature Accessibility in PDFs
- Signature fields should be proper signature fields now which bring up the signature selection popover when activated.
- Signature widgets are now supported and should be accessible to VO..
- When a signature is inserted into a PDF, VO should be able to land on it and move it with VO shortcuts for layout items, or mark the signature for drag and drop.

- Performance improvements when using Safari with VoiceOver

- Improvements to the Google Drive/Docs experience with VoiceOver and Safari

Braille Changes (Mixed Platform):

- Command Customization for Command Mode and Braille Keyboard Input You can now customize the Braille commands for Braille Screen Input Command Mode, and Braille Keyboard Input. Go to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Commands > Braille Screen & Braille Keyboard Input.

- Braille Access is a new mode, available on both iOS and macOS, that extends the existing functionality for Braille displays where you can launch apps and choose items (the “dot 8” functionality). In addition to those two functions, we now have Braille Notes, BRF Files, Nemeth Calculator, and Live Captions.
- To toggle Braille Access on and off, press Dot7 and Dot8 together.
- Braille Notes
A Braille note taker style “app” in Braille Access where you can write and read notes in non-backtranslated Braille. Since you’re typing in Braille, there is no Braille code to follow — you can write in standard Braille codes of any language, math codes, music Braille, or anything you want to type. You can create nested folders, move them, rename them, etc. These notes and folders will exist in the Notes app under the auto-created folder “Braille Notes" and will be synced via iCloud. You can copy text into and from Braille Access, in which case it will be translated according to your active output table.
- BRF Files
Opening Braille Access will create a folder called “BRF Files” in your iCloud Drive. If you put BRF files in that folder, you can view them using Braille Access on a Braille display. It supports automatic reflowing to fit your display size, and an option to strip away page indicators used in US and UK. Press Dot7 inside a BRF file to access bookmarking, and use an F chord to find inside a BRF.
- Nemeth Calculator
An in-line calculator where you can type a math expression in Nemeth and see the computed result. You can use parentheses, fractions, radicals, exponents, constants like e and pi, and functions such as sin, log, etc. Variables are not supported. You can copy the result which you can bring outside Braille Access or put back in Nemeth calculator as Nemeth. The visual UI will render the math expression you typed in Nemeth as a visual math formula.
- Live Captions
Live Captions is integrated into Braille Access to meet the specific needs of DeafBlind users. You can press any router key to jump to the most recent transcript, get notified by the alert indicators that there are new incoming transcripts, summarize the transcript using Apple Intelligence on supported devices and language/regions, and directly access Live Speech inside this “app” to generate speech by typing in Braille. When inside Live Captions, press Dot7 to access the context menu of available choices.
- Braille Access Settings
On iOS, go to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Braille > Braille Access. On macOS, go to VOiceOver Utility > Braille > Braille Access. Here, you can configure the “apps” you want to use, reorder them, and set various options for Braille Access.
- Visual UI
There is a non-interactive visual UI on the screen by default, which you can turn off in the Braille Access settings. The UI shows the Braille Access content with its print equivalents, translated according to the current Braille output table.
- Multitasking
You can use the Apple device’s screen or keyboard while you’re using Braille Access. This lets hearing users take Braille notes while web surfing, for instance. The visual UI goes away automatically when you interact with your phone using the screen or a keyboard.
- You can use Braille Access using a (QWERTY) keyboard instead of a Perkins keyboard if you have a Braille display connected. This applies to users of Mantis Q40 or iPad Magic Keyboard, for example.

- More Braille Commands
Map Braille chords to more VoiceOver commands.

- Item Overview
Read the first few cells of multiple items at once if you know what you’re looking for. Press dots 6, 7, and 8 at the same time to toggle Item Overview on or off.

- Single Hand Braille Screen Input
On iPhones, use Braille Screen Input in the Portrait orientation. This can be useful for simple tasks like app launching, and in the case where you have access to only one hand. You can double-tap and hold with three fingers to start BSI in single hand mode, even if your locked orientation is in the Landscape orientation. In the BSI settings, you can choose one of the following three modes of input for the Single-Hand BSI.
- Input Columns
By default, you can type a column of dots at a time, and swipe right to enter an empty column. This means you need two taps to enter one Braille cell. Dot1/4, Dot2/5, and Dot3/6 are oriented from left to right so it’s possible to tap them with your index, middle, and ring fingers. To enter a letter “a”, you would tap your index finger, then swipe right with one finger, since the second column of dots is empty. To enter a “p”, you would tap your index (Dot1), middle (Dot2), and ring (for Dot3) fingers at the same time, release, then tap your index finger (Dot4).
- Slate and Stylus Style
Imagine your iPhone screen as a giant Braille cell with 6 dots, where dots 1, 2, and 3 are on the right side, and the dots 4, 5, 6 are on the left side. Poke all the dots you want to include in the cell individually as though with a stylus, and swipe right to enter the cell when you’ve entered all the dots you wanted.
- Reversed Slate and Stylus Style
The same as Slate and Stylus Style but the left and right side are reversed.

- Dot Position Learning option for Braille Screen Input Turn off the new Learn Dot Positions setting in the BSI settings to fix the BSI dot positions to where you calibrated them. Leave the setting on to allow the dots to slowly drift towards your tap positions over time.

- Korean Braille Input
Previously, Korean Braille Input was impossible due to the lack of good table support. A new Korean (2024, Uncontracted English) table is available to input and output Korean in BSI or hardware Braille.

- Dot 7 Support for HIMS displays
Previously, Braille chords involving the dot 7 were impossible to issue using HIMS displays for technical reasons. Now you can go into the “More info” of the setting for the Braille display and turn on a toggle to allow using the dot 7. Turning this on may break typing for BrailleSense U2 QWERTY.

- Word and Line Selection
A new selection method to improve text selection for Braille display users. In any text field, outside or inside Braille Access, double press the routing touch cursor to select a word. Triple press to select the line.