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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
Admin
completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those.
keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
Location Ottawa
Birthday 1987-12-20
Pronouns he/him (EN)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@FreakyFwoof @amir Try restarting NVDA maybe? You should have a section for eloquence dictionary. All other settings are just in speech.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@FreakyFwoof @amir Yup. We lie about the addon version to NVDA. You only see the settings panel when eloquence is in use.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
Thought: if , , and solutions were the most solutions, people with disabilities would be some of the biggest allies in pushing adoption. I already constantly have to get my friends, co-workers, etc, to switch tools for me. If we're working or playing together, the tool needs to be accessible if I'm involved. But unfortunately, that's almost never the case, and I find myself having to force my friends to switch away from open tools and into closed ones:
* Jitsi meet doesn't offer captions or transcripts, and still had an unlabeled button or two last I checked. So I usually have to force people working with me to switch to Zoom.
* github is still more accessible than Forgejo and codeberg, even with the recent regressions. So I won't contribute to projects that aren't on github.
* None of the existing Matrix clients offer good accessibility; they either lag, have unlabeled controls, the message list won't scroll, messages won't read as they come in, etc. So I have to force people onto Slack or Discord.
* Neither Only Office or Next Cloud offer a web interface that works for collaboration with screen readers, so I have to force people to use Google Docs.
* Linux accessibility remains a joke compared to Windows or mac.

And on and on it goes.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@jscholes The trouble is, if you make it harder for developers, people like me will never do it at all. Not because we don't care, just because we're stupid and this is a hobby. In an ideal world, translators could somehow translate the text without requiring the developer to do anything but accept a pull request. Again, not because I don't think it's worth the effort, but just because I don't want to write code I can't test.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@jscholes Thanks! This has been helpful. :-) I feel like a sighted developer trying to make something accessible LOL. I have no idea what I'm doing and no way to test it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@jscholes It is not. I'll push the code changes soon. I assume doing that won't break anything if no translations or translation infrastructure exists? Like, what happens if you set your NVDA to Spanish, but no Spanish translation is available? Does the addon just refuse to load?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@jscholes Yes, this is the way. Unfortunately I only speak one language, so I can't generate a translation, and I can't switch my NVDA to another language to test the translation. So this work is going to have to fall on someone else, I think. I'm not confident enough in myself to release code I can't really test. I make enough silly mistakes as it is, because I'm not actually good at this and just do it anyway.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@jscholes We also aren't technically supposed to host the eloquence dll files on github. That's why the build process is...the way it is. So that when the repo that contains them gets pulled down, we can get them elsewhere with a quick change.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@jscholes No, they will not. They also won't allow it in the addon store. So to localize the addon, I need to recreate that or a similar workflow.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@jscholes So where do the localization files come from and where do they go? Do translators make them somehow?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@jscholes We are not using scons. We are not using the NVDA addon template. We are not using anything even vaguely resembling a sane build system. See build.cmd and build.py and cry. In other words, if it needs to happen, I need to do it myself.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@jscholes Thanks! Don't I have to do...something to build pots and poes and then put them...somewhere?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@jonathan859 @amir The reason I pull from master is because the filename is always the same. It looks like your dictionaries have a different file name for each release, because the .zip file includes the version number, so I can't detect the latest version in an automated way easily. The job for the next release is to schedule the update checks and have an update automatically checkbox. But that requires me learning how NVDA's update checker works, and I wanted to at least get initial support out, plus the indexing fixes.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
Do you use on the 64-bit ? If so, a new release is available, and we could use your help! You can find out more info on the release page: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/releases/tag/v4
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@silver_huskey I think even that's going to become less clear as more and more big corporate websites start requiring age verification. Just because your account needs some sort of manual approval is already not really triggering people to think "There's a human in charge somewhere". They're just thinking "Probably some exploited and underpaid contractor in another country has to verify my identity somehow."
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@treehugger They were brought over by political activism and a fandom space. This is the sort of person who doesn't even own a computer and just uses their phone; they would've just glazed over one, if an explanation was even offered, so they could get on with the things they actually came for.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@Fragglemuppet They talk more about politics than technical stuff. And yeah, it sort of is, but it's much less visible on mobile. Also: remember Myspace Tom? Just because some username and profile photo is shown to you, that doesn't mean they're someone you can interact with. At least not on the big corporate social media.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
Huh. Just chatted in person with someone who's been on for a while, now, who honestly thought that all the Mastodon domains were run by Mastodon. And having a different domain was, like, just a vanity thing to look cool. It only came up because they were complaining about an issue they were having, and they were on a smaller server (not naming it for anonymity), so I suggested contacting their server admin about the problem. I was surprised when they answered "Dude nobody at big companies reads those reports. It just all goes to AI or whatever." It took some actual convincing to get them to believe that the server they're on does, in fact, have a living breathing human admin who can be talked to.

Anyway, folks, support your server admins and moderators. With money, where you can. They're almost certainly getting messages from users who think that reporting things to an admin here is exactly like reporting stuff to Facebook or Google. IE: screaming at a giant faceless entity who's never going to care or do anything about whatever your problem is.
:black_sparkling_heart@cooltrans.men:1:black_sparkling_heart@fire.asta.lgbt:1:celeste_hearts_non_binary@mk.absturztau.be:1:mastodon_oops@cryptid.house:1❤️8
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@quanin @Rosalyn We were always the other way. If we got a tape that was already rewound it was a half-hour celebration, because it meant that tape was completely new and had never been played by anybody before, so it would actually look and sound decent.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@quanin @Rosalyn Oh, true! Well, children: back in the day, whenever we wanted to watch a movie, we had to walk up hill, both ways, in six feet of snow, to go to a place called Blockbuster, so we could pay for a large rectangular object that sometimes contained a movie that we could only keep for two nights. Usually, though, it was broken. Anyway, when we finally arrived, a minimum wage employee would be rude to us while charging us $500 in late fees for the last movie we forgot to return, and then telling us they didn't have a copy of the movie we actually wanted to watch, so we'd have to watch American Chainsaw Ninja Robots XXVI instead. When we finally got the movie home, we'd have to engage in a ritual called "rewinding" in order to appease the Gods, so that they might allow us to actually watch it.
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