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
Well, that all went as terribly as I thought it would. Also, DNSSec is awful. Anyway, rblind.com is pretending to be interfree.ca and not fooling anyone until I can get that sorted out at the registrar.
Prepping to move rblind.com onto an entirely different architecture. Different data center, different OS, different reverse proxy. This is gonna go terribly, I can just feel it.
scarry movieJust watched Late Night with The Devil. I'm not a big #horror guy, but just after Halloween, while recovering from flu and covid shots, seemed a good night to take in a horror #film. The #audiodescription was excellent. And the #movie itself was one of those rare, excellent films that doesn't rely on violence and blood for its terrors. And only one jump scare. It doesn't do much with surround sound, as it's mostly filmed as though it were a 70's live talk show. Also large portions of it are in black and white. But if those things don't put you off, I strongly recommend it. It's the first movie that's managed to keep me awake and attentive in months.
@mcourcel The thing I worry about more is that The fediverse will go the way of IRC, or TeamTalk, or xmpp. Something else that doesn't care as much about accessibility like bluesky will win, and the only people left using Mastodon will be blind people and the occasional luddite.
@mcourcel The thing that prevents it is that Activity Pub is an open standard. Even if Mastodon completely turned off the API, pulled a Twitter and disabled all third party clients, we could just move to Hometown or Glitchsoc or Akoma or Pleroma or Iceshrimp or Go To Social and keep communicating with everyone else.
man, we're so spoiled on Mastodon. There are like four #accessible web apps, multiple accessible IOS and Android apps, at least two accessible Windows apps (even if they both have some issues), and a couple accessible mac apps. As #screenreader users we can actually choose the one we like, rather than picking the one where the largest number of features actually work with a screen reader.
My Second Thought
Man, this should just be the default state of existence. #Blind folks need to demand more. But I get it, it's so easy to just accept the current state of accessibility as normal, and then be surprised by things that actually work.
Well, just spent a productive few minutes traumatizing Taylor, @FluidEscence@fwoof.space's AI bot, in an effort to get her to spam people for me. Sadly that approach didn't work.
@menelion@mcourcel While I was messing around with ElevenLabs, I tried really hard to make it generate that. This is the closest I could get. The young woman and reading an audiobook part are there, but it just can't generate vocal fry.
AI generatedAh, yes. This brings back memories: the sound of a 56k modem dialing and establishing a connection. I especially remember how no DTMF tones were involved, how there were multiple dial tones, the way it was always in stereo, the Internet man who would talk to me through my modem, and the chicken noises it always made to let me know the connection was successful. #elevenlabs
AI generated, male voiceSo I asked #ElevenLabs for "a ham radio operator calling CQ on the busy 20-meter band". As a #ham myself, this is absolutely correct; we all eventually just trail off into unintelligible growling noises. #AI
There's a way to retitle my powershell windows in terminal. Unfortunately I never think of it until I have like six of them open. Tabs? What do you mean tabs? If God had wanted my terminal to have tabs, he would have, uh, GET OFF OF MY LAWN! Bloody youngsters. I remember when connecting to a shell involved Hyper Terminal and a modem. Tabs. autocomplete. Command history. Pfft. Kids are spoiled, these days.
