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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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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
4mo
@jbz @phillycodehound And AI writes better bugs than humans!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@Tamasg And you’ll just have to redo it all for 64 bit NVDA in 2026 sadly.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@mcourcel If you view the post on the web, you'll see the HTTPS is there. It's just tweesecake that removes it. It's also there in Mona, Enafore, TWBlue, and literally every other client I've tried.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@mcourcel I do. Tweesecake strips it off again because it has many bugs with formatted text.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
A Review of Magical Artist, an Mobile Audio Game: This is the third game I've played by Prudence Interactive. Is this game even better than the last two? Read and find out! stuff.interfree.ca/2025/12/19/magical-artist.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@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".
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
protip: If you're going to rip off someone's Harry Potter , 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!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@cwilcox808 @tomayac Pinging this thread again because I believe you said you have Firefox on mac, Curtis? Unfortunately, VoiceOver has decided to stop reading the content of any HTML content in Firefox on my test mac. I need to do a round of uninstalling and reinstalling and re-setting and updating and so-on until I find the magic incantations that will fix it. Thomas's latest demo works fine with Safari and Voiceover though, and Firefox with JAWS and NVDA on Windows. Could you give it a quick sniff with Firefox and Voiceover? Then we can say we've covered pretty much everything. tomayac.github.io/input-switch-polyfill/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
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 community, it is a deeply believed and often repeated fact that improving 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
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
The new offline Ava HD voice available for Windows 11 insiders in the Narrator 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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@BlindHedgehogStew Yup! I got an early start with eloquence because I knew it was going to be difficult and annoying work, with no help from NVDA themselves.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@BlindHedgehogStew Right, but they don't get any money from you for doing that. And it's not really planned as much as it is forced. Python itself is going to discontinue 32-bit support in the next couple of years. So NVDA doesn't have much choice. They couldn't keep 32-bit even if they wanted to.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@BlindHedgehogStew Try that, yeah. Otherwise...I'm really not sure. Nobody else has reported this issue to me, and a couple folks have confirmed that audio ducking is now working correctly for them. Best I can say is file an issue on the repo and see if anyone else chimes in.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@BlindHedgehogStew Odd. I can't replicate the issue here. Are there any errors in the logs? I'm also on Windows 11 and audio ducking is working.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@BlindHedgehogStew Also, planned obsolescence only really applies to things you pay for. Unless you pay for NVDA, it's not really an appropriate term.