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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)
matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@jessamyn @Tooden Yup. There is a place for content consumption. I’m not on peertube for that reason. I turn on YouTube before bed and I just want a machine to insert content into my sleepy ear holes.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@rimu @brasil For now, I've gotten my Lymmy cleanup scripts doing things properly, and I've brought the server load down from 36.7 to around 5.4 on an 8 core box. And I thought AWS was required by piefed for images. Lemmy uses pict-rs and that can handle storage on the local filesystem, until I find a provider of object storage that's actually accessible and not evil (I'm not holding my breath).
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@brasil @rimu I run rblind.com. We started several years ago. And every federated post ever, even if nobody locally interacted with it in any way, stays in the database. I had to set up LPP, as Lemmy doesn't have it built in: nowsci.com/lemmy/lpp/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@brasil @rimu No, it’s a hundred percent Lemmy. A database that’s over 1 tb because old federated posts never get cleared won’t be fast no matter what you do. Lemmy has no built in tools to clear this. It’s also really bad at clearing the pict-rs thumbnail cache. I don’t block crawlers, I just rate limit anyone who hits the server too often, no matter who or what they are. The Internet shouldn’t become a walled garden; as long as you’re not consuming more than your fair share of resources, you don’t need to prove your identity for access.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@brasil @rimu I don’t use cloudfail. If I wanted to depend on inaccessible big tech I’d just use Reddit.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@quanin Nope. It has an api and you get to build it yourself.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@rimu I wouldn’t expect that any time soon, as there’s no migration path.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Am I finally done with these horrible, no good, verry bad performance issues? I think I might be. Lemmy federation requires a lot more...everything...than does Mastodon style microblogging. People vote constantly. Posts and comments are longer. Everything has multiple images. And by default lemmy wants to cache everything all the time forever.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@adam Yup, all the time. Sigh.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@adam Haha no. I’m on the rc and it’s not fixed.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@FreakyFwoof @amir Are there any errors in the NVDA log?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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
1mo
@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
1mo
@x0 @garo @jonathan859 @amir Eloquence64 does it the way jaws does it. Largely because that's the way I want it. We're based on Eloquence Threshold, as I never used the IBM TTS addon for various reasons, so I have no idea what the shorten pauses setting does or how it works. If you want to submit that yourself, though, I accept pull requests. You'll probably need to modify eloquence.py to add the setting, as well as host_eloquence32.py if it doesn't have the existing commands you need.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
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
1mo
@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
1mo
@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.