@fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

3mo

@TomGrant91 @mckensie @amir Your client is broken. There are urls in every client other than tweesecake.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

3mo

If you use #eloquence in #NVDA, an extremely uninteresting bugfix is now available. Previously, automatic language switching in NVDA didn't work for any language with a dialect specified, like English United States. This is now fixed. It literally just changes from calling languages en-gb and en-us to calling them en_gb and en_us to make NVDA happy. But if you need that, you can get the bugfix here: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/releases/tag/v6

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

3mo

@mckensie @amir This is now fixed: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/releases/tag/v6

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

3mo

@atherjammoa Nah, AI is always right. Admins need to add something called "acephalon farfing" into sector 30.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

3mo

Sigh. Apparently this instance doesn't convert wav to anything. Here's an audio file that should work for cranky clients.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

3mo

@atherjammoa They do. The plugins have moved to mushclient and everything.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

3mo

Hmmm, I don't think my "Real ATC" plugin for Miriani-next is quite ready yet. For the uninitiated, #Miriani is a space related #mud (Well, actually, #moo). It generates flight control messages as ships take off and land. And I thought: what if I could have them voiced by AI, generating a random voice each time? There's a model called voxcpm that, if you don't feed it with any voice data, will just generate a voice of its own for your text. But...it's maybe not quite there. The original text I gave it was "This is Outreach to sector 30 flight control, a Hale starship is about to land." This is what it returned.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@fribbledom Nah. You'll find them as soon as you purchase replacements. They'll be in whatever spot you decide to put the replacements. Happens to me constantly.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

Lying here with a Godawful flu on new years eve, realizing this will be the first year in my adult life where I won't be staying up until midnight, and having that thing. You know, the grumpy #reader thing. Where you go "I want a good book to #read! Right now! That will make me happy and not sick!" But you're grumpy and sick and cranky, so every book on your TBR pile isn't good enough and you throw them out of the pram in a tantrum. Then you go through your Goodreads recommendations for a while, sniffling snot and muttering "Does nobody write any good books anymore? I just want a good book! I must have read all the good books already. All of these books are stupid. Why do they let stupid people write stupid books." So you look through your list of comfort books for a re-read, but it turns out all of those books are also either bad or boring and you hate them, and this must, somehow, be somebody else's fault. I guess I'll just put on some stupid YouTube videos if I can get the stupid app on my stupid phone to work and probably fall asleep between coughing and shivering with a fever. All because nobody writes any good books, anymore. I'd like you all to know that this is your fault. #bookstodon

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@esoteric_programmer The issues happen an update fails for whatever reason.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@ander_dapo Ah got you.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@esoteric_programmer They do in theory. But theory and practice often do not align.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@ander_dapo Why is that sad? Assuming they get the same compensation as a sighted developer, I would prefer that the person working on the accessibility tools I use every day was also blind. Not only is it a good job for a fellow person with a disability, but they also know and understand the needs of other blind people better than anyone else ever could.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@ander_dapo Also, I think that Microsoft’s famous “Developers, developers, developers!” Focus is another reason Windows is so accessible. Microsoft works hard to make VSCode work with screen readers. So a lot of accessibility solutions on Windows are developed by users, for users. The developer experience on Linux isn’t quite as nice, from what I understand. So you have fewer disabled Linux developers, so fewer Linux accessibility tools that really work.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@ander_dapo It depends on my settings. I can have it skip all emoji, read them, skip if there are more than three, etc. The problem with government right now is that the closed source big tech products generally include enough absolute minimum accessibility to comply with the law, and the open source products do not. So if you’re a sales person for big tech, you have a huge advantage. You can bully government into buying your product, because it’s the only way they can avoid a lawsuit. So it’s a chicken and egg problem: governments don’t use open source tech because it’s not accessible, and it’s not accessible because governments don’t use it. I think the only way out of this is to get government to adopt open formats, open API’s, and open data. Then one employee could use the accessible solution, and the other could use the inaccessible open source solution. And everything would be compatible. And of course, governments won’t want to buy two software packages that do the same thing, so they’ll then start funding open source accessibility. Europe is slowly making progress in this way with Office products. First, they required Microsoft to fully support the ODF, Open Document FOrmat. Then, they started moving to LibreOffice, but employees who couldn’t work with it could stick with Microsoft Offfice and just save as ODF. Then LibreOffice started having more and more accessibility features. Now, slowly, blind folks are starting to begin dipping our toes into LibreOffice. Right now, complex features like track changes are still more accessible in Microsoft Word, so blind users can still go back to Word for complicated requirements. But for simpler documents, LibreOffice is fine these days. And we can test it out without giving up word entirely, so we’ll know when it becomes good enough.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@esoteric_programmer Exactly. Compiling your own kernel isn’t something everyone should have to do every update.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@clv1 Lenovo and Toshiba used to. I don’t know if they still do.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@esoteric_programmer Also, unified kernel images cause a bunch of other annoying problems. Remember the days of speakup?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@esoteric_programmer Okay, you're assuming some special brand of OS that nobody else runs. I was assuming standard Debian/Ubuntu/the thing the rest of the world uses. It's just not possible to do accessible disc encryption there.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

4mo

@esoteric_programmer Right, but these days, OS updates are rolling. What happens when the kernel updates? The kernel isn't in /usr...but I think the dkms modules are? So then you get kernel/driver mismatch and ugly things happen.