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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
5mo
@svenja I vaguely remember writing something like that a while ago. The list I linked has all of the games I remember putting in that comment, though.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@Landon205 There's already addons that do that.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@svenja Was it this? gist.github.com/Molitvan/50e3b5060ab9465b1da895155d5c0480
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users: The past year has seen an explosion in new text to speech engines based on neural networks, large language models, and machine learning. But has any of this advancement offered anything to those using screen readers? stuff.interfree.ca/2026/01/05/ai-tts-for-screenreaders.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@pitermach Even Mona only indicates it after reading the text. IMHO, it should be before! I can see myself replying to a toot in a language the author doesn't speak.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
So one of the problems with automated based on is that it's in this weird, awkward place now where it's not good enough to seem native, but it is good enough not to be immediately obvious. I had forgotten I set my browser to automatically translate pages in several languages to English for me. Then I clicked on a , read the first couple chapters, and was getting really annoyed why one character kept changing Gender's, and the name of a location wasn't consistent from chapter to chapter. Turns out the author was writing in , I hadn't noticed the language tag, and when I clicked the browser just automatically translated without clearly telling me. Thank goodness I realized, just in time, before I posted a comment on her work pointing out the issues with writing quality and offering editing help! Yikes! That doesn't mean that I'm against Machine Translation or even think it's a bad thing. But as it gets better and better, and starts living in this awkward uncanny valley, we really need to carefully rethink user interfaces. Maybe disable all form inputs until the user clicks "I'm aware this was translated" somewhere? I had the comment all written, folks; I was that close to posting. Maybe put "translated from" in some obvious place like the title bar? I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that we need to be putting way more thought into it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@jscholes If you long press on the lock screen, you can customize what shows up on there. I believe there's a way to turn off Siri suggestions. I use my watch for the time and date, so I left them on. But if I didn't have a watch that would be infuriating.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@silvermoon82 Also, if it's not a western, colonial European, or east-Asian language, screen reader support for it will be terrible. As far as I'm aware, there is zero support for any indigenous languages spoken by the people living in what are now Canada and the United States, in any screen reader or text to speech voice, anywhere. Same goes for many middle-eastern and African languages, as well as stuff like Irish Gaelic. If you speak those languages and are blind, your only real choice is...learn a different language and never use your phone or computer to read anything in your native language. Somehow, I doubt anyone on the fediverse is surprised by this.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@silvermoon82 It depends. If the user speaks both languages, and the lang attribute on the HTML has been set correctly, then the screen reader will read the correct text in the correct language. If the HTML lang attribute is not set, the user can change the language manually using a screen reader hotkey. However, these things assume the user has installed and configured voices that speak both languages. For example, I currently do not have a Russian voice installed (because I don't understand Russian anyway), so my screen reader will just read out unicode character codes, because it has no way of pronouncing the Russian alphabet. There are also addons that can recognize the language text is written in, and change the screen reader language automatically even if the language attribute isn't set, but most folks don't bother with these. As for translation: there are third party addons that can take all the text spoken by a screen reader, translate it into another language, and then speak it. However, this introduces lag, and sends everything the screen reader says off to a third party translation service. I would only use something like this if I was, for example, playing a Japanese game where I knew all text would be in Japanese, so my screen reader would just translate to English before speaking. I wouldn't just leave it on all the time.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@cachondo LOL it's the next dubstep hit! I think the blastbay voices might be our best bet. However, he's got to do something about the phonimizer. The voice quality is good, but it's based on the CMU dictionaries, so there are just way too many pronunciation issues.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@TomGrant91 @mckensie @amir I use enafore.social myself.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@TomGrant91 @mckensie @amir Right, but it's not missing. Tweesecake is stripping it out. It shows on every other client.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@TomGrant91 @mckensie @amir I can tell. Because only people using tweesecake have this issue. Even TWBlue doesn't.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@TomGrant91 @mckensie @amir Your client is broken. There are urls in every client other than tweesecake.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
If you use in , 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
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@mckensie @amir This is now fixed: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/releases/tag/v6
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@atherjammoa Nah, AI is always right. Admins need to add something called "acephalon farfing" into sector 30.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
Sigh. Apparently this instance doesn't convert wav to anything. Here's an audio file that should work for cranky clients.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@atherjammoa They do. The plugins have moved to mushclient and everything.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
Hmmm, I don't think my "Real ATC" plugin for Miriani-next is quite ready yet. For the uninitiated, is a space related (Well, actually, ). 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.
audio (2).wav
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