A small thing that turned out not to be small, and I would like to know whether it belongs in a browser at all.
Legato can now make a postcard. Option-Command-P opens the builder, or Accessibility menu, Make a postcard. What comes out is a file you can send to anyone who has Legato.
WHAT YOU FILL IN
A greeting. Then the lines. One line per line — each new line becomes a new stop for the reader, the same way you walk a page, so you decide where the pauses are rather than a paragraph engine deciding for you.
A sound. Sixteen of them, and they are not new: they are the sounds this browser already makes every day — page repaired, form sent, limit reached, your turn. Whoever gets the postcard knows them by heart, so a sound and a line together mean something before a single word is read.
Your callsign, if you have one switched on, sounds first, before any words. They know it is you before they know what it says.
THE PICTURE, AND THE RULE ABOUT IT
Three ways to get one. Twenty-one thousand pictures are drawn inside the browser — nothing is downloaded, nothing is uploaded, they are drawn as shapes on your own machine. You can search them by a word, or press one button and have one made for you.
Or you build it layer by layer: a background, then someone standing on it, then a magnet across the top — bunting, hearts, stars. Each layer names itself out loud as it lands, and one key reads you the whole picture as it stands. This is the part I am proudest of, because it is the first time I have built something visual that is assembled by ear rather than despite the ear.
Or your own file, which is shrunk to fit and travels inside the postcard itself. It is not uploaded anywhere.
And the rule: a picture never goes in without a description. Not a warning, not a nag — the picture simply does not go in. A postcard whose picture is silent is not a postcard, it is a thing one of the two people cannot see. So the description travels with it, in whole sentences, and the person who sent it and the person who received it end up with the same postcard.
There is a "Draft a description for me" button. It is the only part of a postcard that asks the cloud, and only when you press it. What comes back is a draft, and the browser says so — read it before you send it.
"Hear it as they will" plays the whole thing exactly as the receiver will hear it, before you send anything.
THE FILE
Plain text. Nothing in it runs — no script, no macro, nothing that executes on opening. It carries the language it was written in and is read in that language whatever your interface is set to: a Czech card under an English interface used to be spelled out letter by letter, and that is gone.
The path from opening the builder to the button that makes it is five keystrokes. Before the rebuild, a council of five blind testers measured forty-seven to reach the field you write in. That number is why this exists in the shape it does.
ONE TO TRY
I made one in English so you can hear the format rather than take my word for it. Download it and open it in Legato — File, Open, or drop it on the window:
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1GccDMjFQKYmiHlIp7Tx-UCDrh6oPpG7a
It is in 0.3.60, Mac and Windows: https://qiksy.app/legato/
WHAT I ACTUALLY WANT TO KNOW
Everything else Legato does is repair — fixing somebody else's page. This is the first thing in it that exists so you can send something to a person. I am not sure that belongs in a browser, and I would rather hear it now than after people have paid for it. If it reads as a toy bolted onto a tool, say so plainly and I will take the answer.
Dmytro
Comments
What a postcard is actually for — and the callsign
Reading my own post back, I explained how it is built and never said what it is FOR. So, plainly.
It is a greeting card. Happy birthday. Thank you. Get well. Good luck tomorrow. Just hello. The same thing people have been posting to each other for a hundred and fifty years, except this one is made to be heard.
WHAT YOU DO WITH IT
You make one, press Save as a file, and you get a file. Then you send it the way you already send any file — attach it to an email, put it in a message, drop it on a shared drive. The person who gets it opens it in Legato and hears the greeting, the sound, and the picture described in sentences. That is the whole loop. There is no server in the middle, no account, no address book, nothing of mine between you and them.
If they do not have Legato, it still works as a letter. The file is written words-first on purpose: the greeting, your lines, the name of the sound and the full description of the picture all come at the top, and the machine-readable part is quarantined at the bottom under a marker. Open it in any text editor, or let any screen reader read it, and you get everything that was said. What you lose is the sound itself and the drawn picture — not the message, and not the description.
IT IS NOT A TOOL, AND I WILL NOT PRETEND IT IS
It repairs nothing. It makes no page more accessible. Nothing in your day gets easier because this exists. It is entertainment — something to send a friend on their birthday, and something to get back.
I built it because greeting cards have been a sighted thing my whole life. Every postcard and every meme on the internet is text baked into pixels: you can neither read the one you were sent nor send one back. Birthdays, holidays, the running joke in a group chat — all of it goes past. This changes the unit from a pixel to a line you can walk with arrow keys.
THERE IS A PAGE ABOUT IT NOW
I updated the product page today and it explains all of this properly, with two finished postcards on it you can play without installing anything — the sheet as a sighted person sees it, and the same postcard out loud. One set of data, two renderings. It is under "Postcards you can hear":
https://qiksy.app/legato/
The Windows build has the same feature and the same version, with NVDA and JAWS as well as the browser's own voice. Not a Mac-only thing.
THE CALLSIGN
One more piece, and it is the part with the least justification. The callsign is four notes of your own: you type a name in Settings, the browser offers several ways it could sound, and you listen and pick one. It already plays before every result the browser gives you — finished, could not, form sent, your turn — and that part has a plain reason: where several people work in one room, four notes tell you it was YOUR machine that finished.
On a postcard it does no work at all. It plays first, before a single word, and all it says is who this is from. Four notes, and the person knows — before the greeting, before the picture, before anything. It carries nothing the file does not already carry. It is just yours.
If you would rather your name went on it in words rather than notes, the callsign switches off in Settings and the postcard opens straight into the greeting.
Dmytro