BlindRSS: a New, Intuitive and Accessible RSS Reader for Windows
Introduction
I absolutely love using RSS readers. For years, I’ve been using Lire, which is a fabulous, powerful and accessible RSS reader for iOS and Mac. (I use the iOS version.) It’s one of the tools that I use to send out many posts to the Tech-VI list. Lire is not free; it costs a few dollars but it is well worth the investment. In the Windows space, there’s a new RSS reader in town and I’ve fallen in love with it, so much so that I want to tell all of my readers about it.
What on Earth is RSS?
For those who may be unfamiliar with the concept of what an RSS reader does and why you might want to use one, please allow me to provide what I hope will be a helpful explanation.
First, RSS is an acronym which stands for Really Simple Syndication. That might sound a bit complex, so I’ll explain how it works in simple terms. Suppose that you have ten favorite Web sites which frequently get updated with new content. Some of these Web sites might be for reading the latest news. Others might be blogs, written by an individual or published by a company or organization. Company-sponsored blogs might publish articles on a regular basis regarding new product updates and new services from the company. In this example, let’s say that you want to visit these Web sites on a daily basis to get caught up on the day’s news and to see if anything is new with your favorite company or organization.
Normally, you would have to visit each Web site, one at a time, and go to the link containing new information. You would need to find links for new articles, read those links, and then open the next Web site that you want to visit. This is fine but if you’re like me and you have hundreds of Web sites that you regularly visit, this can become a rather time-consuming operation. In fact, between my professional work, my other responsibilities and my down time just wanting to read or watch a TV show, I simply don’t have the time to circle back to all of those Web sites in a day.
This is where an RSS reader comes to the rescue.
With an RSS reader, you have a list of what are called feeds, each feed being the name of one of those favorite Web sites. When you move to each feed in the list, you will be told how many new articles are available to read since the last time you last opened articles from that feed. As an example, if you follow my blog in an RSS reader, your screen reader might say something like “Thoughts From David Goldfield, 2”
or
“Thoughts From David Goldfield, 2 unread articles”,
depending on which RSS reader you’re using and how it conveys this information. In the previous example, this means that there are 2 new, unread articles from that particular source. If you don’t want to read those articles, you would just move to the next feed in the list. If you did want to read them, you would press enter or, if you’re using a mobile device, double-tap. From there, you would then be taken to a list of the unread articles. If you find an article that sounds interesting to you, you would press enter or double-tap again and the article would appear. Some RSS readers even attempt to remove the extraneous links that are contained in the article, improving the reading flow and making it a bit more natural.
When you begin using an RSS reader, you must first tell it which sources you want it to check. How you do this depends on which RSS reader you are using and the methods for doing this are a bit beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that many Web sites offer what is called an RSS feed. This is a separate URL or Web site address that sends the relevant information to an RSS reader. As an example, the full Web address or URL of my blog is https://davidgoldfield.wordpress.com/ However, the RSS feed for my blog is https://davidgoldfield.wordpress.com/feed/
While you can open and read an RSS feed from the feed’s URL in your browser, it contains a lot of code and it honestly isn’t easy to read. However, an RSS reader knows how to deal with all of that code and presents things in a nice, intuitive style for easy reading.
Some RSS readers allow you to enter the actual Web site you’re interested in and they will try to search for an RSS feed, if one exists. However, if you’d like to see if your favorite site has an RSS feed, you can visit an RSS Lookup site, where you enter the full address of the Web site you’re interested in and it will try to find the address for that Web site’s RSS feed.
Moving On to BlindRSS
Now that we have that out of the way, I’ll now talk about a brand new RSS reader for Windows called BlindRSS. This is an RSS reader that’s incredibly intuitive and easy to use. You can download the program from this link. It currently does not contain an installer. Instead, it’s a compressed file with a .zip extension. Unzip the file to a folder so that the necessary files can be extracted and then accessed. I also created a desktop shortcut to the blindrss.exe file. This makes the program easy to find. For good measure, I also assigned a shortcut key to run the program, making it so that I don’t even have to go to the desktop when I want to run it.
Setup
Once the program has been extracted and you’re all ready to run it, here’s a little of what you can expect. First, if you are using Windows Security as your antimalware program, WS will come up and will let you know that it doesn’t know anything about this program. Activate the More Info button and in the resulting screen, activate the Run Anyway button.
Next, I recommend exploring the program’s menus to get a sense of the options that are available to you. BlindRSS has a typical, old school menu bar. Just press the alt key and you’ll find pull-down menus for File, View, Player, Tools and Help. Again, explore these menus, including the Settings dialog, which you’ll find in the Tools menu.
Next, you’ll want to add some RSS feeds. If you’re able to obtain the exact feed URL of the feed you want to add, press ctrl+N, which is the keyboard shortcut to add a new feed. Type or paste the feed URL, followed by enter. If you’re not sure of the feed URL, you can search for feeds, either by using the RSS Lookup Web site or you can open the Tools menu and open the Find a Podcast or RSS Feed dialog. The latter is convenient because you don’t even have to enter the URL of a Web site. You can just enter keywords based on your interest and the search results will give you a list of relevant RSS feeds as well as podcasts.
Another way to retrieve RSS feeds is through a third party. As an example, I subscribe to a service called Bazqux Reader. I use this with the Lire RSS reader on iOS. Lire accesses Bazqux Reader using my Bazqux credentials and downloads articles from the feeds from that service which I’ve added. BlindRSS allows me to do the same thing. This means that I don’t need to manually add any feeds to start out with since they’ve already been added in my Bazqux Reader account.
If you have exported your feeds to an .opml file, you can import the feeds from that file using BlindRSS’s Import feature. Some of these options may sound a bit daunting to new users but you can always manually add feeds one at a time and just use BlindRSS as a local RSS reader.
Reading Articles From Your Feeds
Once BlindRSS has finished downloading articles from the feeds that you’ve added, reading them couldn’t be simpler or more accessible. First, you’ll find a tree view consisting of each feed that you’ve added. In other words, this is the list of the different Web sites that you’ve added containing articles. Press down arrow to move through the list of your feeds. If a feed contains new articles that you haven’t read yet, your screen reader will speak the number of new articles. When you get to a feed or site that interests you, press the tab key.
You will then be placed in a list of all of the articles for that feed. Press down arrow to move down through the list of available articles. When you find an article that interests you, press the tab key again. You will be placed in an edit field which contains the text of the article. You can use standard navigation keys to read through the text of the article. You can even use standard text selection commands to copy part or all of the article to the clipboard. If you press the tab key at this point, you will wrap back to your list of feeds. Of course, you can also press shift+tab to move in a reverse direction.
Honestly, that’s all there is to reading your RSS feeds in BlindRSS. Of course, there are many more options that I haven’t written about and there are some that I haven’t used but this information should be enough to get you started.
Reporting Bugs and Submitting Feature Requests
If you want to report a bug or submit a request for a new feature, there are two ways to do this. If you’re on Mastodon, you can reach out to Brandon, the app’s developer. Brandon’s handle is @serrebi@....
The second way to report bugs or submit feature requests is to file an issue on Github. I realize that firing off a quick message may seem like the easier method but messages can get buried on top of other messages. It’s also easy for any of us to read a message and then forget about what was requested. Filing an issue on Github makes it easy for a developer to keep track of that issue, making it far less likely that it will get lost. It also allows anyone to review and even add comments to the issue you’ve filed, opening it up to the community. Also, before creating an issue, you can perform a search to see if someone else has already submitted what it is you’re about to report. Take my advice and go with the Github route, as it’s really the best option for reporting a bug or asking for a new feature.
Final Thoughts
It’s worth mentioning that BlindRSS is a vibe-coded app, meaning that the developer used AI to do the actual coding. Of course, the ideas, layout and execution are all Brandon’s vision. However, Brandon was able to convey that vision to AI, resulting in this amazing app. You can hear more about how he did this by listening to his interview on Double Tap.
In closing, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Brandon for the time and work that he has put into making BlindRSS not only a reality but an incredibly useful app.
David Goldfield,
Blindness Assistive Technology Specialist
Director of Marketing,
Blazie Technologies
Am Yisrael Chai
The Nation of Israel Lives!
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