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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)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@IceWolf I strongly disagree with this. In the 90's, publishers insisted that all ebook platforms block text to speech, because blind people should be forced to purchase the more expensive audiobooks. This didn't stop until multiple court cases were filed against Amazon and others, and a UN treaty got signed. If we allow authors to say "You can't do X, Y, and Z with my otherwise freely available content", that will soon be abused to disallow using translation software on it, then turning it into Braille, then using screen readers on it, etc. Some directors still don't allow audio description of there films to be produced. Should an artist be allowed to say "no alt text for my photo can ever be produced by anyone"? And it's quite easy to not just rate limit, but tarpit abusive connections. So soon all the botnets resources are taken up by holding open worthless connections.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@IceWolf Yes, it does. The problem is that all of these are intended to destroy the open web, by blocking a particular type of use someone doesn't like. The only way to preserve accessibility is to instead focus on blocking whomever or whatever is using an unfair share of server resources. If that's AI, block it. If that's me hammering your server for some reason, block me, too. Setting up rate limitting is a well understood problem. Blocking AI because it's slamming the server is an excuse. And you already have no reliable way to tell the difference between an AI, a script, and a screen reader. Block based on resource use.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@VE3RWJ @NicksWorld He'll sign it. He's also ordered the justice department to open an investigation into all democrats named in the documents, but no republicans. Once an on-going investigation is underway, the documents can no longer be released because it would be prejudicing an active investigation. So Trump gets to have his cake and eat it to: he can vote for and sign the bill, and still not release the documents.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@gooba42 Yup. Though your post reminds me of the time a childhood friend of mine got banned from a game for being a bot, because she was Neurodivergent and played too regularly for too many hours. This sort of thing has been happening since the dawn of statistics. I think the game was runescape or neopets or one of those 90's browser games all the cool kids were playing back in the internet stone ages.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
So rblind.com didn't go down, and it isn't anymore broken today than it usually is. Cloudflare breaks . It always has, and it always will. Now the rest of you know how it feels to be locked out because you don't run JavaScript and can't solve a captcha. Will you stop using ? No, of course not! If it blocks , you're completely fine with denying that blind users might be human at all. As AI becomes more and more capable, the definition of "human" is going to become more and more restrictive, until everyone who isn't completely able bodied and doesn't have absolutely perfect vision, hearing, and cognition is completely excluded.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
TIL: when you use adguard or another privacy protecting DNS, spellcheck in all Microsoft apps gets significantly worse. Apparently the "good" spellchecker requires some service it was blocking, and the fallback is terrible.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@TheQuinbox Sorry, just walked out my door. Didn’t expect an instant response lol
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@TheQuinbox Uh, the new version identifies itself as 0.6 under about. And the update checker prompts to update on launch. Same for the dev build. :-)
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@matt @alpuzz So on Windows 11, Edge WebView is always loaded into ram, because a bunch of parts of the OS depend on it. So you get an entire free browser.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@mcourcel @alexchapman @quanin Sure! www.marmaladefoo.com/pages/geminaut
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@matt @alpuzz But what does compact mean today? You can write a z-machine interpreter in pure JavaScript. It's tiny! But only because you're using the browser for accessibility and the user interface and everything else.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@alexchapman @quanin You can solve it with modern OCR or AI.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@alexchapman @quanin The most accessible client is MicroPlanet gravity: github.com/taviso/mpgravity
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@alexchapman @quanin Nope. There are free text-only usenet servers available. The main one is eternal-september.org.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@PuercoPop Thanks! Not quite what I'm looking for, but looks neat!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
question: Has anyone written a Bridge between , , , , or other fediverse software and ? I have access, and would be happy to bridge some of the various blindness groups on Usenet onto the fediverse.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@alexchapman @matt I think other things support it. Just not accessibly.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
Some beta feedback: it should say translated before the post text with . That way we can set expectations appropriately before hearing the text and thinking it’s poorly written.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@FreakyFwoof @menelion I use edge. Am I going to mastodon jail?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@matt On windows adobe is still the only thing that supports fillable forms. So seeing as I’m forced to keep it installed for that I just use it for everything.