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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
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
4mo
@adam Yup, all the time. Sigh.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@adam Haha no. I’m on the rc and it’s not fixed.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@FreakyFwoof @amir Are there any errors in the NVDA log?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@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
4mo
@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
4mo
@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
4mo
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
4mo
@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
4mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes It is not. I'll push the code changes soon. I assume doing that won't break anything if no translations or translation infrastructure exists? Like, what happens if you set your NVDA to Spanish, but no Spanish translation is available? Does the addon just refuse to load?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@garo @jonathan859 @amir Correct, it will never be in the store. However, if you were using eci.dll version 6.1 with IBM TTS, it will sound identical. We don't currently have an update system because we're currently telling NVDA lies about the current addon version and what NVDA versions it's compatible with. This is both to force the addon to keep loading on newer NVDA versions without an update, and so that the "allow NVDA to gather usage statistics" setting does not allow NVAccess to gather accurate info on the addon.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes Yes, this is the way. Unfortunately I only speak one language, so I can't generate a translation, and I can't switch my NVDA to another language to test the translation. So this work is going to have to fall on someone else, I think. I'm not confident enough in myself to release code I can't really test. I make enough silly mistakes as it is, because I'm not actually good at this and just do it anyway.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes We also aren't technically supposed to host the eloquence dll files on github. That's why the build process is...the way it is. So that when the repo that contains them gets pulled down, we can get them elsewhere with a quick change.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes No, they will not. They also won't allow it in the addon store. So to localize the addon, I need to recreate that or a similar workflow.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes So where do the localization files come from and where do they go? Do translators make them somehow?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes We are not using scons. We are not using the NVDA addon template. We are not using anything even vaguely resembling a sane build system. See build.cmd and build.py and cry. In other words, if it needs to happen, I need to do it myself.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes Thanks! Don't I have to do...something to build pots and poes and then put them...somewhere?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jonathan859 @garo @amir Yes, they do.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@garo @jonathan859 @amir 64 bit eloquence comes with eloquence 6.1 included. So another addon isn't needed. If you want a different version of eloquence, you're out of luck. This is because every single eloquence dll version requires slightly different code to interface with it. I don't have all the different versions, so even if I wanted to, I couldn't test them all. Also, 6.1 is the only version that will work in portable NVDA installations, and has no major bugs. While it doesn't support different sample rates, the extra complexity to bridge every possible eloquence version to 64-bit just isn't worth it for that feature. We did, however, add in support for Korean, Japanese, and Chinese languages.