#accessibility

Windows Central - March 3, 2026:

"Following Microsoft's recent announcement that Xbox head Phil Spencer is retiring and the company's CoreAI Product president Asha Sharma is stepping up to fill the role of Microsoft Gaming CEO, a patent the firm filed that describes helpers — human or AI — stepping in to assist players when they get stuck on difficult in-game challenges has rapidly become the target of public scrutiny.

"Some have run with the idea that this represents the start of aggressive AI expansion into the Xbox gaming experience on consoles and PC by Sharma. Something that needs to be understood, however, is that this patent was filed by Microsoft in 2024, long before Sharma entered her new position.

"The "State management for video game help sessions" patent itself describes a process in which a system recognizes when you're struggling with a particular game segment, encounter, or puzzle, and offers you a choice to connect with a helper. If you accept it, the system saves your game and a helper briefly takes control of the game over the cloud and completes what you're stuck on for you, explaining how they did so over text chat.

"Notably, the patented system includes the option for players to immediately get control of the game back from a helper at any time if they want it. It also mentions machine learning that determines when assistance should be offered and how long it lasts, which would hopefully ensure the system doesn't feel intrusive."

#Xbox #GamingNews #Microsoft #VideoGames #GamingAccessibility #InclusiveGaming #AI #MicrosoftAI #TechEthics #AssistiveTech #Accessibility #Disabled #Elderly

https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/an-old-xbox-ai-patent-is-going-viral-for-the-wrong-reasons-assistive-tech-is-actually-one-of-the-best-use-case-scenarios-for-ai

Question to all #DotNet developers caring about #Accessibility: what do we have of really robust and accessible besides WindowsForms and (with some quirks) WPF? anything cross-platform yet? I quickly sketched Avalonia, MAUI and Uno, and everything seems absolutely disastrous accessibility-wise. I don't need anything fancy-schmancy, like usual windows with menu bar, dialogs, buttons, check boxes, modals, text boxes, list views, combo boxes etc. Thanks!

That's it, people. With lots of emotion I announce the first release of my first ever open-source desktop app. Who happen to know I'm blind will laugh (and I share that laugh, so feel free and don't hold yourselves): it's an image converter. I was in need of an accessible solution for well… converting images from one format to another and didn't find anything, especially that supported ICO needed, for example, for making favicons for websites.
Anyway, it's a dead simple and of course accessible #Windows app that can work with most popular image formats, can convert in batches, can do favicons, application icons, resize with keeping proportions or cropping as you wish (very useful if, for example, you need a photo of yourself but 128x128 pixels and not a pixel wider). You can paste images straight to the main window, and you can even paste direct links. It also supports detecting and downloading files that are stored in clouds (I tested with OneDrive).
Anyway, it's called SIC! (for the Latin word "Sic" and for "Simple Image Converter"). Oh, and it's multilingual, supports English, French, German, Ukrainian and Russian for now. And yes, you can use it as installed software or in portable mode, and it doesn't go to the Internet (only to check for updates), unless you add an image by link or prefer to update automatically. I reiterate: your images are converted on your device and don't go anywhere.
Official page: https://oire.org/software/sic
GitHub: https://github.com/Oire/sic
Issues are welcome. Discussion of the 1.0.0.23 release: https://github.com/Oire/sic/discussions/29
#Accessibility #OpenSource #Software #SelfPromoting