New Mexico St. Aggies at Sam Houston St. Bearkats.

From Conference USA, the Sam Houston Bearkats college football team will be hosting the New Mexico St. Aggies in a game tonight starting at 7:00 PM CT. My meds, prayers, and sleep schedule should allow me to catch the radio call of at least the 1st half of the game before putting head to pillow. At least, that's my plan.

And the adventure continues.

JOURNAL 21 octobre 2026

Mon frangin m'a téléphoné, il a trouvé quelqu'un pour me remplacer trois après-midi par semaine. Il m'a même dit que ça me plairait et il me laisse la surprise. Je crois que j'ai une petite idée 🤗😍 Le reste sera assuré par les deux K´ ( ils ont presque le même nom, j'avais jamais dit je crois ) pour un mois et demi ça ira. Et lui-même ira de temps en temps. Le vieux a eu son compte, il n'a pas bronché,il est cuit, sinon ça va nous faire bien rigoler ce soir je pense. Maintenant on va se faire un super thé avec gâteaux parce qu'on est passées par la pâtisserie. Une qui est à la fête je vous dis pas, de plus sa tante arrive demain...

#dojo

I played about 10 games or so of overwatch today with T and S, And we only won one of them. But surprisingly, I had a lot of fun, we were even rage beating each other and blaming each other for the losses.

The demand for convenient laundry pickup and delivery services is creating opportunities for businesses in Kuwait to build dedicated digital platforms. A well-designed laundry app can help customers schedule pickups, track orders, choose services, make payments, and receive delivery updates from their phones.

The cost of Laundry App Development in Kuwait typically ranges from KWD 7,500 to KWD 45,000+, depending on the application's features, platforms, integrations, backend requirements, and level of customization.

For businesses planning mobile app development in Kuwait, understanding these cost factors before starting development can help establish a realistic budget and avoid expensive changes later.

Laundry App Development Cost in Kuwait

There is no fixed cost for developing a laundry application because the required functionality varies between businesses.

A basic laundry booking MVP may cost around KWD 7,500–15,000. A mid-level platform with customer, driver, and laundry-partner functionality can range from KWD 15,000–30,000. A more advanced solution with automation, real-time tracking, multiple service providers, advanced analytics, and custom integrations may exceed KWD 30,000–45,000+.

App Type Estimated Cost

Basic Laundry App KWD 7,500–15,000

Mid-Level Laundry Platform KWD 15,000-30,000

Advanced Laundry Ecosystem KWD 30,000–45,000+

These are planning estimates. The final cost depends on the development scope and technical requirements.

What Factors Affect Laundry App Development Costs?

1. App Features and Complexity

Features directly influence development time and cost. A simple application may only allow customers to book a pickup and select laundry services. A larger platform may require separate interfaces for customers, drivers, laundry businesses, and administrators.

Common customer features include:

Registration and secure login

Laundry service selection

Pickup and delivery scheduling

Address management

Order tracking

Price calculation

Online payments

Order history

Push notifications

Ratings and reviews

Offers and promotional codes

Advanced platforms may also include subscriptions, recurring orders, loyalty programs, automated pricing, digital invoices, and personalized offers.

1. Number of Applications

A laundry delivery business may require more than one application.

The customer app manages bookings and payments, while a driver app can handle pickup assignments, navigation, delivery status, and order updates. Laundry partners may require a separate dashboard or application for managing orders, services, pricing, and availability.

An admin panel is also necessary for managing users, orders, payments, drivers, service providers, and reports.

Building multiple interfaces naturally increases development hours and testing requirements.

Payment and Location Integrations

Payment integration is an important consideration for a laundry platform operating in Kuwait. The application may need to support locally relevant payment options alongside cards and other digital payment methods.

Location and map integration is equally important for pickup and delivery operations. Customers should be able to save addresses, select pickup locations, and track order progress.

Additional integrations with SMS, email, CRM, analytics, accounting, or delivery management systems can further affect the project budget.

Native vs Cross-Platform Development

The choice between native and cross-platform development can influence both initial cost and long-term maintenance.

Developing separate native Android and iOS applications generally requires more development resources. Cross-platform development can reduce duplicated development work when the application does not require highly platform-specific functionality.

However, businesses should select the technology based on performance requirements, expected user volume, integrations, scalability, and future product plans rather than cost alone.

An experienced mobile app development company in Kuwait can assess these requirements and recommend an appropriate technology strategy.

How Long Does It Take to Build a Laundry App?

A basic laundry booking MVP may take approximately 3–5 months to develop. A mid-level platform with customer, driver, and admin functionality can take around 5–7 months, while a complex multi-vendor laundry ecosystem may require 7–10 months or longer.

The timeline depends on the number of platforms, feature complexity, third-party integrations, UI/UX requirements, testing, and deployment requirements.

Launching an MVP first can help businesses validate their service model before investing in advanced features.

How to Reduce Laundry App Development Costs

Businesses can control development costs by defining their core requirements before development begins.

Instead of launching every possible feature, prioritize functions that directly support bookings, payments, pickups, deliveries, and customer communication. Advanced features such as loyalty programs, subscriptions, AI-based recommendations, or sophisticated analytics can be added later.

A scalable backend architecture also helps reduce the need for expensive redevelopment when the number of users and orders increases.

Why Choose Techugo for Laundry App Development?

The success of a laundry application depends on more than its interface. The development team must understand booking workflows, delivery operations, payment processing, location services, backend architecture, and data security.

Techugo can help businesses plan and develop customized laundry applications based on their operating model and target customers. The development process can cover business analysis, UI/UX design, app development, API integrations, testing, deployment, and ongoing improvements.

Before requesting a final quotation, businesses should prepare their feature list, preferred platforms, delivery model, payment requirements, integrations, and expected user volume. This allows the development team to provide a more accurate cost and timeline.

FAQs

How much does it cost to develop a laundry app in Kuwait?

Laundry app development can cost approximately KWD 7,500 to KWD 45,000+, depending on features, platforms, integrations, and overall complexity.

What features should a laundry delivery app include?

Core features include service selection, pickup scheduling, delivery tracking, order management, payments, notifications, customer profiles, and order history.

Do I need separate apps for customers and delivery drivers?

For businesses offering pickup and delivery, separate customer and driver interfaces can provide better functionality and operational control.

Can a laundry app support multiple laundry businesses?

Yes. A multi-vendor model can allow several laundry providers to manage their services, pricing, orders, and availability through a shared platform.

How long does laundry app development take?

A basic MVP may take around 3–5 months, while a feature-rich laundry platform can require 7–10 months or longer.

Conclusion

The cost of Laundry App Development in Kuwait depends primarily on the application's features, number of user interfaces, integrations, technology stack, and backend complexity. Businesses should focus first on the features that directly support their laundry and delivery operations.

A clearly defined MVP can help control the initial investment while creating a foundation for future expansion. With the right development partner, businesses can build a scalable laundry platform designed around Kuwait's customer expectations and operational requirements.

Book launch/signing for THE SOLAR GRID hardback tentatively lined up... in Denmark! Probably around early-summer next year.

Social media campaigning has been spreading me a little thin. You'd be surprised by the amount of time that goes into shooting and editing a 30 second reel. I'm gonna need to pull away and focus on finishing up writing, drawing, and designing TIMES NEW HUMAN, which—as per my agreement with EUNIC—will need to be launched, at least locally, before year's end.

Look at me excel-sheeting my journal to track progress for Christ's sake. Also got a couple of fantastic-looking advance-reader copies of things friends sent me that I need to read.

The thing with social media is you can't rely on having just the one “ad” and repost. You gotta vary your “content” for sustainable engagement. Traditional promotion has been flipped over its head. It's why film studios don't just give us the trailer anymore; no, they give us clips of Christopher Nolan talking about some of his latest filmmaking techniques and Tom Cruise joking about how much fun he had performing in a fat suit. Easier done of course when you're a juggernaut with immense resources, but it doesn't absolve everyone else from needing to use somewhat similar strategies to get noticed. And here's the thing; if a giant like Christopher Nolan—who is notoriously known for not even having a smartphone of his own—understands that being visible on social media is imperative to the success of his already-well-promoted film... what makes us little guys think we can get away with having no social media presence at all and still make a living?

It's hard though when you're doing everything yourself. The mental shift from creating to promoting and back again is, admittedly, a little too much for me to handle. So I'm gonna need to land on a system that won't fuck with my head too much. Maybe dedicate one single day a week to shooting and preparing material and scheduling it in advance, so the rest of the week is free to write and draw. Something like that.

I like systems. Systems are good.

#journal #work

Rimpelloos water Libelle’s dansen ritmisch In de najaarszon.

Je ne sais pas si vous connaissez cette tendance des réseaux : « En français on dit... en poésie on dit... »

Il y a quelque chose dans cette formule qui me dérange.

C’est l’idée, je crois, que la poésie serait une histoire à part. Quelque chose qui serait une manière de dire le monde autrement.

Il y a du vrai dans cela.

Mais j’aimerais que la poésie soit partout. Qu’elle soit le naturel de la langue et de l’expression. Alors bien sûr, je ne suis pas idiot. Ce n’est pas et ce ne sera jamais le cas.

Mais au fond, la poésie c’est regarder profondément le monde, nos sentiments, nos vies. Peu importe les belles formules que l’on utilise, si cette vision retranscrit ce que l’on a au fond de soi, c’est de la poésie. Non ?

Si ce que je partage touche une corde chez la personne qui m’écoute, c’est de la poésie. Non ?

The instructions said “chew 4 tablets 2 times per day”. The product was a tube of topical medication.

That exchange sits in a 2026 research report from the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), in the words of a survey participant who had pointed an AI visual description tool at a medication label and asked how to use it. “Luckily this was an obvious error,” the participant wrote, “but for now I will NOT be using AI for these tasks [and] will always confirm with a human.” Another participant in the same study used an AI tool to read tax forms that were not screen reader accessible, and reported that it “provided some very incorrect information that would have caused serious tax filing mistakes if I had not checked the information with a human.”

Neither story is a fringe horror. Phones now describe rooms in fluent paragraphs, apps read menus aloud and websites promise to fix themselves with a line of JavaScript. Underneath all that capability, a quieter question keeps surfacing from the people who depend on these tools: what happens when the thing that helps you is also the thing that makes things up?

The complaint has been circulating online for some time. One 2025 discussion on Reddit's r/ArtificialIntelligence forum is reported to have called the trend an “insidious form of ableism”, although that thread's exact wording could not be independently located for this article. The substance of the argument can, however, be tested against the record. As generative AI is positioned as a universal accessibility fix, the predictable tools that disabled and older people rely on risk being sidelined or replaced by systems that are more impressive and less trustworthy. If so, AI-first accessibility could widen the very gap it claims to close.

The evidence suggests that the worry is well founded, though not in the simple way a slogan implies. AI tools are delivering real independence to many blind and low vision people. The problem is not the tools. It is the temptation, among companies, website owners and even governments, to treat them as a substitute for the slow, unglamorous work of building things that are accessible in the first place.

Why a Mangled Word Beats a Fluent Fiction

A traditional screen reader is, at its core, a deterministic machine. It takes text that already exists in a document, an interface or a web page, and converts it into synthetic speech or braille. It can absolutely get things wrong. It may mispronounce a surname, stumble over an acronym or announce an unlabelled control as nothing more than “button”. But its errors have a particular shape. They are consistent: the same text produces the same mistake every time. And the underlying text is still there. A user who hears a garbled word can move through it character by character, check the spelling and work out what was meant. The error sits on top of a reliable source.

Generative AI does not work like that. A vision language model asked to describe a photograph or read a label is not converting existing text; it is producing a statistically plausible account of what it thinks it sees. When it fails, it does not usually fail with noise. It fails with fluency. A wrong instruction arrives in a grammatically perfect sentence, delivered with the same confidence as a right one. There is no underlying string to inspect, because the model's output is the only version of reality the user has been given.

Alex Katsarakes, a digital accessibility resident at AFB and a PhD student in human factors psychology, set this out in an October 2025 essay on alt text in the age of AI. Generative models, she wrote, “are prone to 'hallucination,' confidently asserting details that aren't actually present.” When a blind user cannot independently check an image, she argued, an inaccurate caption is not a cosmetic flaw. In her words, “it's a breakdown in trust.”

AFB's own survey data makes the point empirically. In its report The AI Quagmire, based on a survey of 1,735 US adults conducted between 1 July and 15 October 2025, 91 disabled users of AI visual description tools reported mistakes that harmed them or made their lives harder. When the researchers compared how disabled and nondisabled people rated the accuracy of AI output, they found a revealing asymmetry. Disabled users of visual description tools were more likely than nondisabled users to rate descriptions as “mostly accurate” (56.3 per cent against 46.4 per cent). With AI captions, the pattern flipped: disabled caption users, including deaf and hard of hearing people, were more sceptical than nondisabled users. AFB's interpretation is blunt: “This pattern suggests that disabled people are better able to detect captioning errors than visual description errors.”

Read that slowly. The people who most need image descriptions are, by definition, the people least able to verify them. A deaf user watching a speaker's lips and body language has some independent signal to check a caption against. A blind user listening to a description of a photograph often has none. Reliability is not one desirable feature among many in this context. It is the whole product.

What the Tools Genuinely Do Well

None of this means AI accessibility tools are a con. Pretending otherwise would be its own kind of disrespect to the many disabled people who use them every day and say they are better off.

Be My Eyes is the clearest example. The Danish company built its reputation on connecting blind and low vision people with sighted volunteers over live video. In 2023 it added Be My AI, an image description feature built on OpenAI's GPT-4 model. On 12 March 2026, the company announced that it had passed one million blind and low vision users and ten million volunteers across more than 150 countries. Its chief executive, Mike Buckley, called the milestone “a powerful reminder that accessibility is not a niche issue” and framed it as a global movement. Crucially, the human route has not been switched off: users can still tap a button and reach a sighted volunteer by live video.

Microsoft's Seeing AI, which began as a research project and launched on iPhone in 2017, made the jump to Android in December 2023. Saqib Shaikh, the founder and lead of the project, described it in Microsoft's announcement as “a free app that narrates the world for blind and low vision people”. The Android release brought generative features first tested on iOS, including richer scene descriptions and the ability to ask questions about a scanned document, such as the items on a menu or the total on a receipt.

Academic research confirms that the appeal is real. In a study presented at the ACM SIGACCESS ASSETS conference in 2024, Rudaiba Adnin and Maitraye Das of Northeastern University interviewed 19 blind people about their use of generative AI tools. The paper's title borrows one participant's description of the technology: “I look at it as the king of knowledge”. Participants used chatbots for writing emails and CVs, researching products and asking health questions, and they valued Be My AI's descriptions as more thorough than what sighted helpers usually offered.

AFB itself is not anti-AI. When it released its expert consensus report Empowering or Excluding in February 2025, Stephanie Enyart, the organisation's chief public policy and research officer, said the experts consulted had “shined a light on how AI can be a catalyst for access and inclusion.” Katsarakes, in the same essay that warns about hallucination, acknowledges that using tools such as Be My Eyes or Seeing AI “demonstrates clear potential for enhancing user autonomy.”

So the question is not whether these tools help. They do. The question is what happens when their help is treated as finished accessibility rather than as one layer within it.

The Verification Burden Falls on the User

What the research shows most consistently is that blind people who use AI description tools have become their own quality assurance department.

In a 2024 ASSETS paper titled Misfitting With AI, University of Michigan researchers Rahaf Alharbi, Pa Lor, Jaylin Herskovitz, Sarita Schoenebeck and Robin N. Brewer conducted a qualitative study with 26 blind people about how they verify and contest errors from AI visual assistance apps. They documented failures with complex document layouts, with languages other than English and with cultural artefacts. Participants had developed a repertoire of checks: testing the apps on familiar objects in low-stakes settings, drawing on non-visual knowledge, strategically involving sighted people and cross-referencing results between different apps and devices. The authors drew on the disability studies concept of “misfitting” to argue that these tools often carry assumptions that fail disabled users, and that disabled ways of knowing deserve recognition rather than replacement.

A diary study presented at CHI 2024 by Ricardo Gonzalez Penuela, Jazmin Collins, Shiri Azenkot and Cynthia Bennett tracked 16 blind and low vision participants using an AI scene description prototype for two weeks. The ratings were sobering. Average satisfaction came in at 2.76 out of 5. Average trust in the descriptions was 2.43 out of 4. The authors concluded that AI descriptions still needed significant improvement before they could deliver experiences that were both satisfying and trustworthy.

A 2025 CHI paper by Jingyi Xie, John M. Carroll and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, which interviewed 14 visually impaired Be My AI users, adds texture. Four of its participants reported that Be My AI had described objects that were not there; one was told about an object behind her that did not exist. Eight reported inaccurate labels for gender or age. Several disliked the tool's habit of interpreting emotions and offering opinions. “Maybe I don't want it to editorialize, you know, maybe I just literally only want the facts of it,” one participant told the researchers. For live navigation, participants preferred human help over static photo descriptions, and they stressed that orientation and mobility skills remained essential. The tool, in their view, should augment those skills rather than replace them.

Chancey Fleet, the assistive technology coordinator at the New York Public Library's Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, has described a subtler cost. Speaking on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's How to Fix the Internet podcast in May 2024, she catalogued the house style of machine descriptions: “Any scene that contains a child or a dog is heartwarming.” “Any sunset or sunrise is vibrant.” “Anything with a couch and a lamp is calm or cozy.” The flattening matters, she argued, because adequacy discourages improvement: “if you are presented with what seems on a quick read, like good enough alt text, you're unlikely to do much labor to make it better, more nuanced, or more complete.” She also put the stakes plainly. When she asks an AI a question about her own world, “I'm going to have to live with the consequences of trusting that answer”.

Put these studies together and a pattern emerges. The capability is shared with everyone; the risk is carried by the individual. Each time a developer, publisher or institution decides that AI description is good enough, the job of verification is quietly transferred from the organisation that produced the content to the disabled person consuming it.

Overlays and the Business of Automated Compliance

Accessibility overlays are third-party scripts that sit on top of a website and attempt to detect and repair barriers automatically, often marketed with the language of artificial intelligence. They promise compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international technical standard, without anyone having to rebuild the site. Disabled users and accessibility professionals have been sceptical for years. In a January 2021 survey of 758 web accessibility practitioners by WebAIM, a non-profit based at Utah State University, 67 per cent rated overlays, plugins and widgets as “not at all or not very effective”. Among respondents with disabilities, the figure rose to 72 per cent, with only 2.4 per cent rating them very effective.

In January 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission turned that scepticism into enforcement. On 3 January it announced a proposed order requiring accessiBe, a company selling an AI-powered accessibility plug-in called accessWidget, to pay $1 million. The FTC alleged that accessiBe had misrepresented the tool's ability to make any website WCAG-compliant, and that it had formatted third-party articles and reviews to look like independent opinions without disclosing its material connections to them. The Commission voted 5-0 to accept the proposed consent order. Samuel Levine, then director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said: “Overstating a product's AI or other capabilities without adequate evidence is deceptive, and the FTC will act to stop it.” TechCrunch, reporting the action, noted that customers had also brought class action suits claiming the products did not work. The order was approved as final in April 2025.

AFB's Alexis Hubbard, writing in May 2025 under the title Missing a Human Touch, summed up the problem with automated fixes: “AI-powered accessibility overlays are just a band-aid solution for a bigger problem.” Because they do not change the source code of a site, she argued, they leave the underlying barriers intact. Her conclusion is worth quoting in full: “The only way to achieve an accessible and usable experience for all people is through people.”

Overlays show what AI-first accessibility looks like when it is driven by procurement rather than by users. A website owner buys the promise of compliance; a disabled visitor inherits the consequences, handed an interpretation instead of the thing itself.

When Governments Lean on the Promise of AI

The most striking recent example of AI's shortcomings being cited as a reason to delay accessibility comes not from a start-up but from the US Department of Justice.

In April 2024, the DOJ finalised a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring state and local governments to make their websites and mobile apps conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Larger public entities, those serving populations of 50,000 or more, were originally due to comply in April 2026. Four days before that deadline, on 20 April 2026, the department published an interim final rule pushing compliance back by a year, to 26 April 2027 for larger entities and to 26 April 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. It took effect immediately, with public comments accepted until 22 June 2026. The technical standard itself was left unchanged.

Among the department's stated reasons was a striking admission about technology. “Advanced technology, such as generative AI, does not yet reliably automate the remediation of inaccessible content at scale,” the interim final rule says, “and staff resources and availability continue to pose significant challenges.” The rule also summarised correspondence from a member of Congress who argued that current technology, “including generative AI,” cannot reliably automate the remediation of complex science, technology, engineering and mathematics material at scale, and that human oversight is required.

It is an honest admission that AI cannot do the job alone. It also shows how the promise of automation can reshape policy. When the expected technological help did not arrive, the cost of the shortfall fell on disabled residents, who now wait at least another year for accessible public services.

Disability organisations were furious. Maria Town, president and chief executive of the American Association of People with Disabilities, called the delay “a profound disappointment and a serious setback for the disability community”, adding that “Years of notice have not been enough” and that the department was “rewarding inaction with more time.”

AFB's formal comments, submitted on 22 June 2026 and signed by Enyart, tackled the AI argument directly. “The absence of a fully automated accessibility solution does not justify extending the rule,” AFB wrote. It pointed out that generative AI can itself produce inaccessible content “because it is based on training data that contains accessibility barriers,” and that “Entities should not over rely on AI to produce content.” It also argued, drawing on its own research, that “AI adoption and effective use of AI is dependent on the accessibility of the platform.” In plain terms: “It doesn't matter how useful an AI-enabled service or tool is if the platform is inaccessible to blind users.”

That last line is the hinge of the entire debate. An AI tool is not a ramp into an inaccessible building. It is another door, and it only works if the corridor behind it has been built properly. AFB's comments also offered a constructive model: AI “can generate a passable first attempt at creating captions that a human can then edit.” Used that way, AI speeds up accessible design rather than replacing it.

AFB's research quantifies what is at stake. In a 2024 study cited in those comments, participants spent 55 per cent of their total task time dealing with digital barriers, and only 45 per cent on the task itself.

Across the Atlantic, the direction of travel is different. The European Accessibility Act, Directive (EU) 2019/882, began applying on 28 June 2025 to products and services including computers, smartphones, ATMs, e-books, e-commerce and banking. As Fredericka Argent of the law firm Covington & Burling noted that month, it reaches companies trading in the EU wherever they are based. The EAA is not an AI law, but it reinforces a principle that AI-first thinking tends to erode: the obligation sits with whoever builds and sells the product, not with the disabled person left to find a workaround.

Older Adults and the Gap Between Awareness and Use

The same dynamics extend to older adults, a group that overlaps heavily with disabled people and is often presented as a natural market for AI-powered help.

The latest AARP research, Tech Use and Adoption Keeps Surging Among Older Adults, written by Brittne Kakulla and published in December 2025, surveyed 3,838 US adults aged 50 and over between 9 September and 6 October 2025. It found that AI use in that age group had risen from 18 per cent in 2024 to 30 per cent in 2025. About half used or were interested in voice assistants such as Siri or Alexa. Two-thirds agreed that technology enriches life and makes ageing easier. Among adults aged 80 and over, agreement that technology enables a healthy life rose from 39 per cent to 46 per cent.

The same report records friction. For AI platforms such as ChatGPT or Copilot, 19 per cent used them, 21 per cent were interested and 59 per cent had no interest. Data privacy was the top barrier to adoption. Trust, privacy and data security were the top concerns for roughly half of the older adults who hesitated to adopt new technology, especially AI. And, in a line that could serve as the epigraph for this entire debate: “Three in 5 adults 50-plus say technology is not designed with their age in mind.”

Work from the MIT AgeLab sharpens the picture. A national survey of 1,008 American adults by Lauren Cerino, Joseph Coughlin and colleagues, published as a preliminary abstract in Innovation in Aging in December 2025, found that 73.7 per cent of respondents aged 60 and over were at least “a little” familiar with AI-enabled technologies. Only 28.3 per cent had used them. Some 34.7 per cent said they did not trust AI tools at all to give good advice, and trust scores declined with age.

Awareness, then, is not the main problem. Older people have heard of AI. The gap lies between hearing about a tool and being able, willing and confident enough to rely on it.

Research at Carnegie Mellon University points to why. In work presented at the ACM CHI 2026 conference in Barcelona and reported by the university in May 2026, Jodi Forlizzi, the Herbert A. Simon Professor in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction, and her colleagues found that older adults who use AI want it to recognise when they need plain information and when they need reassurance. A separate study based on 22 interviews identified shared values among older adults, including independence, curiosity, connection and continuity, expressed differently depending on where people lived. Older adults were open to AI when its purpose was clearly explained, especially for reminders, alerts and support at home. “There's always a mismatch between people's perceived abilities and what they can actually do,” Forlizzi said. “AI technology can be used to close this gap.”

That is the optimistic reading, and it deserves to be taken seriously. But it has a mirror image. If AI tools must be carefully explained and set up to earn trust, the people most likely to benefit, including those living alone or without technically confident relatives, are also the least likely to receive that support. AFB found that almost all its participants had learned to use AI on their own; only 9 per cent learned through an employer or online course. More disabled than nondisabled participants reported barriers in learning, most commonly inaccessible videos, hard-to-understand material and training that required a mouse.

The Northeastern study found similar problems in the AI products themselves. Blind participants encountered unlabelled buttons, missing headings and landmarks, no notification when a chatbot had finished responding, and clutter from adverts and sample prompts. The tools being promoted as accessibility solutions were not consistently accessible.

The Quiet Retirement of Predictable Tools

The sharpest version of the complaint concerns replacement: established, predictable tools being retired in favour of generative ones. In 2026, the most visible example is the end of Google Assistant on Android.

Google had originally planned to replace Assistant with Gemini, its generative AI assistant, during 2025. According to reporting by Matthias Bastian at The Decoder in August 2026, Google told users it would begin shutting Assistant down on Android and Wear OS from 4 September 2026, covering phones, tablets, watches, headphones and Android Auto. Once the rollout reaches a device, there is no way to switch back. Bastian raised exactly the concern at the centre of this article: that a probability-based language model may not match the reliability of a deterministic assistant for simple tasks such as smart home control and basic phone commands.

By late September, Mark Jansen at Android Police reported that the option to switch from Gemini back to Assistant had disappeared on the devices he checked, including a Pixel 10 Pro, and that smart home control was an area where Assistant still beat its replacement.

For most users, that is an inconvenience. For someone who cannot easily use a touchscreen, whether because of sight loss, limited dexterity or tremor, a voice assistant is not a convenience feature. It is how they turn on the lights, set a medication reminder or call for help. AFB's survey speaks to the stakes. Among users of voice-activated AI, 121 disabled participants described harms from mistakes, including texts sent with the wrong words and calls placed to unintended contacts, among them emergency services. “For many users, particularly disabled users, features such as voice dictation for text messaging are essential accessibility supports,” the report observes. “Failures or changes in these systems can result in concrete, disruptive, and sometimes harmful consequences.”

There is no evidence that Google set out to disadvantage disabled users, and Gemini brings generative capabilities that Assistant never had. The issue is structural. When a company replaces a predictable tool with a more capable but less predictable one, and removes the option to go back, the people with the fewest alternatives absorb the most risk. Capability is a fair trade for those who can fall back on other methods. Reliability is the whole point for those who cannot.

Is AI-First Accessibility Widening the Gap?

So, to the central question: if the people who would benefit most cannot find, set up or trust these tools, is AI-first accessibility widening the gap it claims to close?

The honest answer is that it depends on what “AI-first” means in practice.

Where AI is added on top of accessible foundations, the gap narrows. A blind person on a properly coded website who also has Be My AI or Seeing AI in their pocket has more independence than ever before. A deaf student who receives AI-generated captions that a human has corrected gets faster access than one who waits for manual transcription. These are genuine gains, and the AFB data confirms that most AI users say AI makes their lives easier.

Where AI replaces accessible foundations, the gap widens, and it widens along a predictable gradient. The confident, well-supported, technically fluent disabled user can verify outputs, switch between apps, ask a sighted friend and route around errors, exactly as the participants in the Michigan study described. The isolated, older, less confident or cognitively disabled user often cannot. The more a system depends on verification skills, the more it rewards people who already have them.

The evidence points to four ways in which substitution widens the divide. It shifts responsibility, transferring the work of accessibility from organisations to users who must detect errors they may have no way of seeing. It erodes incentives: as Fleet observed, good-enough descriptions discourage better ones, and the DOJ's interim rule shows the institutional version. It removes fallbacks, as predictable tools are retired. And it presupposes access to the tools themselves, when AFB and the Northeastern researchers both found that AI interfaces and training are often inaccessible.

None of this makes AI the villain. It makes the substitution the problem.

What Reliable Accessibility Would Require

If AI is going to close the accessibility gap rather than reshape it, the evidence points towards a set of concrete commitments.

Treat AI as a layer, never a foundation. Accessible design, meaning semantic code, human-authored alt text for meaningful images, accessible documents and keyboard-operable interfaces, must remain the baseline. AI description and remediation should sit on top of it. Katsarakes put it in a single sentence: “Let AI suggest or assist, but don't let it replace human intent.”

Keep the deterministic path available. When companies introduce generative assistants, they should keep predictable modes for core tasks such as timers, calls, reminders and device control, and they should not remove the option to revert until the replacement has been shown to match the original's reliability for disabled users specifically. A one-way migration is a design choice, not a technical necessity.

Build verification into the product. The Michigan and Penn State studies show users building their own verification systems from scratch. Products should do it for them: signalling uncertainty, separating what the model read from what it inferred, offering a factual mode without editorial colour, and making escalation to a human easy. Be My Eyes shows that a live human route can sit alongside AI.

Draw hard lines around high-stakes tasks. Medication instructions, financial documents, legal forms and navigation are not areas where a probabilistic description should ever be the only source. AFB's recommendations call for developers to “Improve the accuracy of AI outputs and tell users how accurate those outputs are.” Where accuracy cannot be assured, the interface should say so plainly.

Hold vendors to their claims. The FTC's accessiBe order established that overstating AI accessibility capabilities without evidence is deceptive. Regulators elsewhere should apply the same standard, and procurement teams should demand evidence of real-world performance with disabled users, not marketing claims of automated compliance.

Do not let automation set the deadline. Legal accessibility obligations should be pegged to what disabled people need, not to the pace of AI development. The European Accessibility Act's focus on the duties of manufacturers and service providers is a better model than one that treats immature automation as grounds for delay.

Fund support, not just software. Older adults are aware of AI but hesitant to use it, and CMU's research suggests they engage when the purpose is clearly explained. That explanation has to come from libraries, disability organisations and accessible community training. AFB's finding that only 9 per cent of AI users learned through formal routes suggests a large and fixable gap.

Include disabled people in testing and design. AFB's expert consensus report called for AI to focus “on expanding access and inclusion, not just on avoiding harm.” That requires disabled people in the room when products are designed, tested and retired, not consulted after launch.

What Is Lost When Reliability Goes

So what is lost when reliability is sacrificed for capability?

Part of the answer is practical: time, money, safety, and the occasional tube of medication with the wrong instructions. Participants in AFB's 2024 study already spent more than half their task time fighting digital barriers.

But the deeper loss is harder to measure. Independence is not just the ability to do something without help. It is the ability to rely on what you are told. A screen reader that occasionally mispronounces a name still gives its user a stable relationship with the text. A description tool that sometimes invents an object behind you, or turns a cream into tablets, asks its user to hold every answer at a slight distance. That is a different kind of life: one in which assistance is always provisional and confidence always has to be earned again.

Generative AI has given many disabled people extraordinary new reach, and nobody should want to take that away. The challenge for the companies building these tools, and the governments regulating them, is to add that reach without removing the floor. AI can help the people who build accessible things work faster and reach further. It cannot be allowed to replace the obligation they carry.

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References and Sources

1. American Foundation for the Blind. “The AI Quagmire: Benefits, Risks, and User Aspirations Through a Disability Lens.” AFB Artificial Intelligence Series, 2026. Sections “Executive Summary” and “Harms of AI in Various Contexts.” https://afb.org/research-and-initiatives/ai-series/ai-quagmire/executive-summary and https://afb.org/research-and-initiatives/ai-series/ai-quagmire/harms-ai-various-contexts
2. Katsarakes, Alex. “Beyond Alt Text: Rethinking Visual Description in the Age of AI.” American Foundation for the Blind blog, 16 October 2025. https://afb.org/blog/entry/alt-text-age-ai
3. Hubbard, Alexis. “Missing a Human Touch: Why Automated Testing and AI Don't 'Solve' Digital Accessibility… Yet.” American Foundation for the Blind blog, 13 May 2025. https://afb.org/blog/entry/missing-human-touch-1
4. Enyart, Stephanie, American Foundation for the Blind. “June 2026 Comments on DOJ Extension of Web Accessibility Compliance Dates” (RIN 1190-AA82, Docket CRT150). 22 June 2026. https://afb.org/research-and-initiatives/public-policy/advocacy-letters-comments-statements/comments/june-2026-doj-extension-web-compliance
5. American Foundation for the Blind. “AFB Report Spotlights Impact of AI for Disabled People” (press release on Empowering or Excluding: Expert Insights on Inclusive Artificial Intelligence for People with Disabilities). 6 February 2025. https://afb.org/news-publications/press-room/press-release-archive/press-release-2025/afb-report-spotlights-impact-AI-disabled-people
6. US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. “Extension of Compliance Dates for Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities.” Interim final rule, Federal Register Vol. 91, No. 75, 20 April 2026. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/20/2026-07663/extension-of-compliance-dates-for-nondiscrimination-on-the-basis-of-disability-accessibility-of-web (PDF: https://www.ada.gov/assets/pdfs/2026-ifr.pdf)
7. Duane Morris LLP. “DOJ Extends ADA Title II Digital Accessibility Deadlines by One Year.” Client alert, 23 April 2026. https://www.duanemorris.com/alerts/doj_extends_ada_title_ii_digital_accessibility_deadlines_one_year_0426.html
8. American Association of People with Disabilities. “AAPD Statement on DOJ Title II Web Rule Interim Final Rule.” 20 April 2026. https://www.aapd.com/aapd-statement-title-ii-doj-web-rule-ifr/
9. Kakulla, Brittne. “Tech Use and Adoption Keeps Surging Among Older Adults” (2026 Tech Trends). AARP Research, December 2025. https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/technology/internet-media-devices/2026-technology-trends-older-adults/
10. Cerino, Lauren; Felts, Adam; Balmuth, Alexa; Brennan, Taylor; Lee, Chaiwoo; Coughlin, Joseph. “Older Adults' Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence as a Source of Advice.” Innovation in Aging, 9 (Suppl 2), igaf122.1371, 31 December 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12761853/
11. Sapio, Amanda. “How Do Boomers Really Feel About AI?” Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science News, 28 May 2026. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2026/older-adults-ai
12. US Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Order Requires Online Marketer to Pay $1 Million for Deceptive Claims that its AI Product Could Make Websites Compliant with Accessibility Guidelines.” Press release, 3 January 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-order-requires-online-marketer-pay-1-million-deceptive-claims-its-ai-product-could-make-websites-compliant
13. Wiggers, Kyle. “FTC orders AI accessibility startup accessiBe to pay $1M for misleading advertising.” TechCrunch, 3 January 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/03/ftc-orders-ai-accessibility-startup-accessibe-to-pay-1m-for-misleading-advertising/
14. WebAIM. “Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners #3 Results.” January 2021. https://webaim.org/projects/practitionersurvey3/
15. Alharbi, Rahaf; Lor, Pa; Herskovitz, Jaylin; Schoenebeck, Sarita; Brewer, Robin N. “Misfitting With AI: How Blind People Verify and Contest AI Errors.” Proceedings of ASSETS '24, ACM, 2024. DOI: 10.1145/3663548.3675659. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06546
16. Gonzalez Penuela, Ricardo E.; Collins, Jazmin; Azenkot, Shiri; Bennett, Cynthia. “Investigating Use Cases of AI-Powered Scene Description Applications for Blind and Low Vision People.” Proceedings of CHI '24, ACM, 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15604
17. Adnin, Rudaiba; Das, Maitraye. “'I look at it as the king of knowledge': How Blind People Use and Understand Generative AI Tools.” Proceedings of ASSETS '24, ACM, 2024. DOI: 10.1145/3663548.3675631. https://maitraye.github.io/files/papers/BLV_GenAI_ASSETS24.pdf
18. Xie, Jingyi; Yu, Rui; Zhang, He; Billah, Syed Masum; Lee, Sooyeon; Carroll, John M. “Beyond Visual Perception: Insights from Smartphone Interaction of Visually Impaired Users with Large Multimodal Models.” Proceedings of CHI '25, ACM, 25 April 2025. DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3714210. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12338113/
19. Cohn, Cindy; Kelley, Jason (hosts), with Chancey Fleet. “Podcast Episode: Building a Tactile Internet.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, How to Fix the Internet, 7 May 2024. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/podcast-episode-building-tactile-internet
20. Be My Eyes. “Be My Eyes Reaches 1 Million Blind and Low-Vision Users and 10 Million Volunteers.” 12 March 2026. https://www.bemyeyes.com/news/be-my-eyes-reaches-1-million-blind-and-low-vision-users-and-10-million-volunteers/
21. Shaikh, Saqib. “Seeing AI App Launches on Android, Including New and Updated Features and New Languages.” Microsoft Accessibility Blog, 4 December 2023. https://blogs.microsoft.com/accessibility/seeing-ai-app-launches-on-android-including-new-and-updated-features-and-new-languages/
22. Bastian, Matthias. “Google will shut down Google Assistant starting September 2026 as Gemini takes over on Android and Wear OS.” The Decoder, 5 August 2026. https://the-decoder.com/google-will-shut-down-google-assistant-starting-september-2026-as-gemini-takes-over-on-android-and-wear-os/
23. Jansen, Mark. “Google Assistant is officially gone, and people aren't happy about it.” Android Police, 29 September 2026. https://www.androidpolice.com/the-google-assistant-kill-off-has-arrived/
24. Argent, Fredericka. “European Accessibility Act: June 2025 Deadline Has Arrived.” Covington & Burling, Inside Global Tech, 10 June 2025. https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2025/06/10/european-accessibility-act-june-2025-deadline-has-arrived/ (see also European Commission, “European Accessibility Act,” https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/disability/union-equality-strategy-rights-persons-disabilities-2021-2030/european-accessibility-act_en)

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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If they truly cared about player safety, they would ban people for repeatedly leading with their head. It's truly that simple. How many times did I see a certain player do that last night with no penalties... and the one flag they did throw inexplicably got picked up? Please. It's dangerous, it's unsafe, and it's unprofessional. Things like this going on without being addressed is why it is time for a Brand New Shield.

This is another player safety rant. On top of the nonsense I saw last night, another genius team decided to let their starting quarterback play with blood clots. Blood clots can potentially be a fatal issue and are nothing to play around with and worst of all, let the guy fly back on the team plane! So, if they care so much about player safety, why did they play around with a blood clot issue and why is the league refusing to punish the team? If you're going to talk about player safety being a priority, act like it! Sheesh! Again, this is why it is time for a Brand New Shield.

If you don't have players, you don't have a game. If you don't have a game, you don't have fans. If you don't have fans, what do you actually have? Nothing! Player safety for any sports organization should be a primary concern, especially for a sport like football. If you have a group of people with competing interests chasing the almighty dollar, the last thing that group of people is going to care about is player safety. This is where a single ownership model comes in.

What does a single ownership model have to do with player safety? Well, everything. If you have one entity with a common goal that has a positive relationship with the players, there is no limit to what can be accomplished. The players should be treated well to the point that a player's union isn't even necessary. Unfortunately, as it pertains to the player safety crisis that exists in a certain league, the players are responsible for some of it as well.

The practice and training camp rules the players are responsible for putting in place have contributed to more serious injuries during games. The issue now is that the practices are easy which makes the games hard. If the games are hard and the body is not properly ramped up for that degree of physical activity, the body will get injured and injured severely. We are seeing that happen more and more with all these major injuries taking place.

So there is a balance to be had... Practice enough so the body gets ramped up for the game but also not overdo it to prevent other situations. One of the reasons I have long suggested the indoor game for this kind of venture is to eliminate the elements from the equation. Even if you did an entire 11 on 11 league in domed stadiums, you'd take the elements out of the equation and prevent injuries related to heat and/or cold. You also have 2 bye weeks per season instead of one during the season per team. The bye weeks could be staggered or universal depending on the situation.

I could go on and on about player safety and how it is a whole league thing from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top. However, I will stop this entry here. If we protect the players, we will protect the game.

Peace, Peace Ukraine! Journey from the depths of war This is out of the eye What tidings front to call Your history to unfold Making after Misery the hold God hereafter

Paying for the bill Your children will grow old The Virgin to your call In sweet reunion tiding Wear of Earth and time undone The simple seeds have fallen The lattice as we spoke To vines atremble high In time to disafall The quite and union deep All the folds are closing The query that we keep Dust after your day In highs renew to ever

Go the crosses high The stars upon your train For Virgin’s Victory hold All the lands will call Ukraine in early peace The synthesis of night To beckon be Your call of light St. Michael and his call The journey isn’t grand To city made alight A chasm Fight amend To heights ahead Fading into rest Your cross and benediction The veil and the river Currents into battle What flotsam keep- but sui generis To growing old Alight St. Peter’s night Here and to half-skip In gold alone Yours the only pay To you we show our hold- The distant right Too much to say too little Additions to your now This Holy might

Redemptorists will know Your tears in fight Taking to the path The evidence we are- your best friend and your ear Each tiding roam Abundant near The distance European

In us the distance abandon Untying new History headwater Sights between to temper In tithing rain- to your Heaven As we grow old Your together-know In final heal Places by and well

Two crosses appear Making day in night The process of amends In life appeal Hurry work and wonder

Yours to keep The blossoms fighting Winter In every breath The willows keep On paths behold The very holds of war Founded to your call We are witness To make anew Assign renew Dnieper The sight, your rose The Virgin’s call In us your care Abiding keep The promise of our star The Victory hold

To many, they World work in wonder The babes anew- to time adore In History taking then The time that beckons now Your Holy place Consoled to enter In your command- the moss of day And carousel And rights of power Sending urgent call The price of peace Within an angel

Victory in peace The fable known The truth of Man’s repentance Those away to take the call Sending then- your favour Your peace is new If going home- alone in suffer Beseech our call- The European Union.

In Summary: * A challenging Tuesday, this. On the updside, now I know that not only Amazon delivery, but also Walmart delivery can locate our trailer without any trouble. On the downside, we're still waiting for maintenance folks here to get our a/c unit running, and we're now waiting for them to fix the venetian blinds in a bedroom here.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 212.86 lbs. * bp= 124/77 (62)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:00 – 1 banana, pizza * 09:45 – 5 hot dogs * 12:30 – beef chop suey, fried rice

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:40 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:10 -read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize * 07:00 – rearrange furniture * 15:00 – have spent hours working with the wife trying to fix windows in her room.

Chess: * 17:05 – moved in all pending CC games

يمكن البعض منكم كيعرف نظام الدفع PIX، اللي تم انشائه من طرف البنك المركزي البرازيلي.

هاد النظام قلق ميريكان گاع! علاش؟ لحقاش مسح فضربة وحدة ارباح بالملايير ديال عمالقة الدفع : VISA و Mastercard

هاد النظام كيتيح تحويل الأموال مجانا بين الناس فالبرازيل 24/7، فقط العمليات التجارية اللي خاضعة للاقتطاع، اما بين الأفراد مجاني.

النظام ملك للدولة، و ارباحه كتبقى فالدولة، داكشي علاش غضبانين منو الوحوش الأمريكية.

و الأجمل : مفتوح المصدر، هاهي الrepo:

https://github.com/bacen/pix-api

المغرب محتاج و بشدة نظام مشابه، او حتى بناء نظام انطلاقا من PIX نيت، اللي يدفع بالبلاد لقدام و تولي عندنا سهولة اكبر فالدفع عوض الأنظمة التقليدية.

زعما زعما؟

Rebellion Against the Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Dr. Raymond Thoss is a peculiar book in a narrow niche of its own. I finished reading it this weekend. Its title references Thomas Ligotti’s treatise The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, the volume of essays in which the horror maestro expounds his profoundly pessimistic worldview. Ligotti maintains that consciousness is a unique burden borne by mankind. His argument, briefly summarized in the Wikipedia article about the book runs thus:

The more conscious one is of the meaningless and often horrifying nature of the world [...], the more one wishes not to be aware of this fact, and so overly conscious beings must constantly engage in exercises which limit their awareness of the negative aspects of existence, either intentionally or instinctively.

Dr. Raymond Thoss is a pseudonym drawn from a character in Ligotti’s fiction. It’s used here by “a clinical psychologist who works primarily with trauma patients”, a vocation he says he was drawn to having suffered major trauma of his own from abuse throughout his childhood. Thoss credits an encounter with Ligotti’s book The Nightmare Factory with saving his life when he read it as a deeply disturbed and suicidal youth. Internalising Ligotti’s nihilistic outlook proved paradoxically therapeutic for him, and has informed his own thought ever since, providing foundations on which he has built a decidedly idiosyncratic view of trauma and of therapy.

Thoss forcefully stresses the irony of treating abuse survivors as sick in a society where child abuse is distressingly commonplace yet still seldom openly discussed. To those cognizant of the sickness of society & the uncaring nature of the world, Thoss says “You are not insane. The world is. You are simply awake.” One hopes he can judge when such thinking will be useful for his patients and when it might be more appropriate to gloss things over a little.

The writing style is often hyperbolic and becomes all the more so in the final chapter when we spend more time in the writer’s troubled mind. This is not a comfortable place to be. Thoss declares himself insane, and his text gives the reader little with which to push back against this assessment. The phrase ‘physician, heal thyself’ comes to mind: but perhaps too much damage was done to him from too early an age for that to be a realistic prospect. One is impressed all the more with his ability to function at a high level — and moreover to provide comfort to others — in the light of the bewildering turmoil of his inner life.

Have you ever, as a fan of a artist or a creative work, been disconcerted to hear from a ‘superfan’ whose attachment to the object of your affection is that much deeper & more intense than your own? I’ve admired Ligotti’s work for decades, and some part of his pessimism has undoubtedly chimed with my own, further tinting my own outlook. Here though is someone for whom Ligotti’s thinking has been profoundly life-changing. It’s good, I’m thinking, but is it really that good: evidently the answer for Dr. Thoss, is yes; while for me, maybe not. That faintly discordant feeling was just one of several overlapping responses this book provoked in me. I’d never read anything quite like it. Fascinating though it often is, it’s a text I would hesitate to recommend. Prospective readers must decide for themselves whether they think it worth picking up.

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I was delighted when a recent visit to one of my customary record-buying haunts yielded a copy of Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley, the 1962 album by the singer and the saxophonist (plus the other four members of the latter’s quintet). Wilson sings on six of the record’s eleven tracks, with the remainder instrumentals. I’ve owned a CD copy for some years, but this is one of those records better savoured on vinyl (or it will be once I’ve cleaned this one up). It’s a bright-toned record beautifully-performed by all concerned. The song-choice isn’t entirely to my taste — ‘Happy Talk’, for example, has never been a favourite of mine — but I can readily forgive that. A good example track: the opening number, ‘Save Your Love for Me’, which kicks things off in style. My copy is a later-’60s issue pressed for the World Record Club (who erroneously printed the title as The Swingin’s Mutual on its labels, this being the name of the similar record Wilson had made with the George Shearing Quintet).

Meanwhile, recent arrivals in the post have included a second copy of Dakota Staton’s ‘Round Midnight, as mentioned in the entry before last, this one in much better condition than the first; and, in a similar vein, an album by the singer Ethel Ennis called God Bless The Child, which is an early-’70s compilation bringing together four tracks from albums first issued in ‘64. It's a fantastic-sounding record, very well re-mastered. While a few of the tunes on it (such as the title-track) are familiar old standards, Ennis’s interpretations of them are well worth hearing.

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Cheese of the week: Carreg Las, yet another Welsh-made blue cheese. This one is made from ewesmilk by those experts at Caws Cenarth. It’s well-blued with a strong suite of flavours reminiscent of Roquefort: if anything perhaps a little bolder still. Its texture on the other hand is a little firmer and drier than the French classic. It has been an immediate hit with me & I hope this is a first taste of many.