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
@SeveraSnape@pixelate You know you need to listen to "Harry Potter: What! infamous Voldemort was merely a minor boss Chapter 61-80". Or maybe "The System Made Me a Tyrant, Setting Up Shop at Hogwarts Chapter 81 - 100".
@SeveraSnape@pixelate Searching youtube for Harry Potter Fanfic or Harry Potter Chapter and sorting by recent really is a delight. Weird AI read fanfics. Weird machine translated Chinese webnovels with Harry Potter inserted into them for some reason, also read by AI. Weird badly pirated versions of the original audiobooks. Weird people making there own audiobooks. Gameplay footage. Real people reading real fanfics. Incomprehensible videos about Bella from Twilight dating Harry Potter. All just mashed together in a delightful pile of complete nonsense.
protip: If you're going to rip off someone's Harry Potter #fanfic, and have a bad AI voice read it, maybe check to make sure it's not an explicit drary slashfic before uploading it to your Harry Potter Playtime Fun channel, and marking the video "for children".
Maybe while you're at it, consider picking a British voice? And proofreading the titles so they have the correct chapter numbers? And not skipping chapter seven completely? It must take extra work to do crime this badly!
Just a few tips for the scammers out there. I know crediting the original author and doing an actual human reading just isn't possible; you've gotta upload a couple hundred videos a week, after all!
@neurrone@serrebi Will it work with local IP addresses? My biggest problem is that I can't get a browser to trust anything I run at a 192.168.1.* address. I have to make a public DNS entry, get it a lets encrypt cert, then access it by whatever.mydomain.com.
Reading the RSS 2.0 specification and found this: "The purpose of the <textInput> element is something of a mystery. You can use it to specify a search engine box. Or to allow a reader to provide feedback. Most aggregators ignore it."
This, right here, back in 2002, was when the web went wrong. We don't know what it's for or why it exists, and everybody ignores it, but it's part of the standard anyway!
Also, bonus fun: RSS 0.9 claims to be RDF but isn't, RSS 1.0 really is RDF but is incompatible with RSS 0.9, RSS 2.0 is incompatible with all of the above, and Atom is the modern W3C format that is incompatible with everything else and nobody uses. And everyone wonders why normal people don't use RSS.
I learned all this because I wondered why my static website generator wants to produce feed.rss, feed.rdf, and feed.atom.
@DavidRedmond thanks! There are some more offline examples in this article that I didn’t include because I was focused on the story of digital. I’m glad more blind folks are writing similar articles.
Accessibility, The Origin of Innovation: In this article, I will discuss the details of 10 innovations throughout history that were only possible through unlocking the power of accessibility and including the voices of people with disabilities. In the #disability community, it is a deeply believed and often repeated fact that improving #accessibility leads to innovations that improve the world for everyone. Necessity is the mother of invention is, after all, a proverb so frequently quoted that it has become a cliché. And yet, people with disabilities still find ourselves left out of research and design, and all too often we don’t get a seat at the product development table. This leaves our inventions overlooked, unrecognized, and sometimes unrealized. stuff.interfree.ca/2025/12/16/origins-of-accessibility.html #a11y#InclusiveDesign#pwd#blind
The new offline Ava HD voice available for Windows 11 insiders in the Narrator #screenreader is...wild. Who...what...why? She wants so badly to be my friend and I hate it! I just want her to read the things on the screen. Why is she so smiley and happy? To be fair, all of the other natural voices for Narrator are nearly perfect. If they were just a bit quicker, and had fewer weird pauses, and worked with NVDA, they could almost replace eloquence.
Apple Music on Windows is infuriating. This morning it decided that it just can't load my library. At all. Ever. No music for my workday today, I guess. Yes I know, self-hosted music libraries. But I have neither the time 'nor the money to find, sort, manage, and back-up all the music I'm interested in. And even if I did, they'd be music ripped from used CD's from the thrift store, so the artist wouldn't get any money anyway. Plus I do enjoy discovering new music. And none of the internet radio stations I know of quite meet my taste, and they don't offer a no repeat workday anyway. Plus the only one that comes close has ads and no way to pay to remove them.
So I finally got a working version of unspoken-ng that uses steamaudio for reverb instead of verblib. Unfortunately, this was a case of be careful what you wish for! Calculating occlusion and doing raytracing is slow, and also sounds significantly worse than just using verblib, and making it sound about equally good makes it take so much CPU time it's just not worth it.
@cordova5029 They're like...flat discs like on a gramophone, but instead of played from the outside, they're played from the inside. And instead of using a disposable needle, they use a shiny steel ball that bounces along the grooves and makes the sound that way. So no needle to replace. And the grooves are cut up and down, rather than side to side. Also, the ball places less wear on the record than a needle would. Unfortunately it didn't catch on outside of Europe. While it was a better system, before electronic amplification, the ball meant it was quieter than systems with a steel needle. So it just lost out because all anyone cared about was volume.
Wow. Tonight I discovered Pathé discs. This might be the only rare audio format that techmoan hasn't covered! Anyone got a good video or podcast on 'em? #audio#Pathé#history#youtube#peertube
Today is audio ducking day here at interfree! If you use the 64-bit #NVDA, there are a couple small releases for you: * eloquence: audio ducking now works thanks to akj: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/releases/tag/v5 * unspoken-ng: if you use this addon, you also need to update, or audio ducking will remain broken, because someone (glares at himself) didn't quite understand NVWavePlayer: github.com/fastfinge/unspoken-ng/releases/tag/v1.0.3
@brasil@rimu Yes, we're keeping an eye on it. Once it does become possible, we then have to rewrite our Theme, etc. Based on the roadmaps I've read, I don't think migration to piefed will happen any time soon.
@brasil@rimu So there are some big reasons we can't move to piefed. First, there's no migration path that I can find documented anywhere to move user accounts, local posts, etc. Second, a lot of our users depend on apps that they find more accessible, like Thunder. Piefed doesn't have a Lemmy compatible API. Third, last I checked, Piefed really assumes you're just using Cloudflare and AWS. The AWS Console isn't accessible, and cloudflare presents inaccessible captchas, so neither of those are options for us.
@brasil@rimu And far, far more of my traffic comes from federation than from any bots. If your traffic blocked that much, I suspect your filters are preventing other servers from federating correctly. Remember that every upvote or downvote on any post anywhere is a federation event that your server needs to receive, in order to keep the vote counts up to date. So if you have even tens of active users you should be getting sometimes a hundred of these per second. Then there's stuff like LiveThreadBot, that edits posts when socur games are going on, updating them with every single play.
