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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
blog https://stuff.interfree.ca/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof @pixelate At least from the outside, a lot of the changes actually make sense. The Internet means there’s no good reason for me as a foreigner to pay somebody else for BBC programming. They’re one of the few (only?) broadcasting organizations with a wide enough pool of content that I could be persuaded to sign up for a BBC subscription. But until recently, it was either free, completely unavailable, or only available through a service run by the Canadian cable companies. Similarly, I suspect most people listening to BBC podcasts every day aren’t British tax payers. So a move to ads and/or a subscription made sense. And once again, the BBC is one of the only organizations with enough content to pull it off.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof @pixelate I mean I’m sure a lot of companies would also be interested. Including the place where I work. But all the companies would insist the data be private and belong only to us, because capitalism.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof @pixelate Mostly they came to mind because the BBC and gov.uk are some of the few organizations publicly releasing any kind of accessibility data, outside of web focused organizations like webaim. If I want to know approximately how many PWD own a smart TV, or whatever, those are the only two places I would expect to have that sort of data. And the BBC cares about 4K and 8k streaming etc. So they were just the ones who jumped to mind as being interested in a project like that.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@FreakyFwoof @pixelate It would also probably be super helpful to people like NVDA. Is it safe to stop supporting Windows 10? How many people have enough resources to run an AI model if they included one? How many people still have 32 bit machines? Etc.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@FreakyFwoof @pixelate Thought I had this morning actually. You should make an opt in and totally optional thing, where people upload there system info to you, and then it builds like a website of the average machine configuration of your app users. I suspect most of us are screen reader folks, so it’d be interesting to compare with the stats from other places. Do blind people upgrade slower? Or faster? Do we all have 3 tb hard drives and no video card? Do we tend to have less available RAM and CPU because of screen readers? That kind of thing. I bet the folks at the BBC would be super interested. Maybe they’d even fund a bit of it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@FreakyFwoof @pixelate Now that you release your own app, isn’t it fun how angry you get to be at apps like YouTube that go out the door with bugs you wouldn’t let into an app release? Even though they’re a trillion dollar company?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
Today 16 app updates were “bug fixes and improvements.” But I really enjoyed the one app that said “Bug improvements”. I really hope they didn’t just forget the phrase “fixes and” and the update really does consist of improved bugs. The same bugs, just now they’re worse!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
TIL: I’m apparently a massive sucker for female voices doing acoustic covers of songs. I listen to music in the background all day, and just reflexively hit the favourite button in Apple Music when I hear something I vaguely like. Then every eight months or so I go through the list of songs I favourited. Anyway, I have 14 covers of different women singing Iris. I mean, it’s a good song and all. But 14 different covers by 14 different women? Really, me?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@amir @Tamasg The one on IOS gives the voice a horrible lisp. So it’s pretty much useless.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@amir @Tamasg Personally, I didn’t even start using it for that reason. I use Eloquence on IOS, Mac, Apple TV, Android, and my Apple Watch. Those platforms will never get this feature. So I’d rather not be spoiled by it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@amir @Tamasg While we both do use AI to generate code, one of us always reads all the code before we merge a PR. I have no issue with AI code. But I do believe the maintainers of a project have to be able to understand all of the code in a program, what it does, how it does it, and why it does it that way. If a programmer with more knowledge in audio processing (Tamas? LOL) wants to commit to loving, understanding, and maintaining that feature, our position could change.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@amir @Tamasg We opted not to do that because the code is quite complicated, and appears to have been fully AI generated. Neither myself nor AKJ feel we understand it well enough to fix any bug reports about it, or maintain it going forward. As you can tell, we have enough problems with the bugs we already have! :-)
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@Fragglemuppet Why not both? Mix them in a bowl!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@amir @Tamasg There’s also an issue on the GitHub about smart quotes that only seems to affect some people. In short, NVDA stops reading with eloquence when in say all and encountering an em-dash followed by a closing quotation mark. But it works for me LOL. I wonder if these have a common cause? github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/issues/111
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@Orinks @amir ETI 6
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@remixman No idea! Though after moderating a community full of toxic blind hackers I don’t blame him lol.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@jackf723 Perfect! Exactly what I was hunting for!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
Ummm. Does anyone know why randomly just decided to stop refreshing my timeline?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
Windows application developers who see relative folder paths in a config file, and save them back as exact paths whenever the application changes anything, are infuriating! I understand why this happens on Windows. But I still hate it so much. I move apps from machine to machine, you know.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@FreakyFwoof @MoonCat @pixelate @x0 I figured; would have been surprised if you missed out on those. They were all anyone could talk about for like a year.
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