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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
7mo
@pixelate @PepperTheVixen If you give chatterbox-tts an ASMR recording to clone, you can absolutely get it to make lip smacking noises.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@PepperTheVixen The reason it's grating is because unlike Eloquence and dectalk, Espeak only uses formant synthesis for the vowel sounds. For consonants and plosives, it instead uses concatenative recordings based on human speech. That's why even when you switch to a voice that sounds less sharp, the "t", "b", "p", and other sounds are still too sharp. This seems to be the primary cause of the fatigue most people experience while using ESpeak.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@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
7mo
@svenja Was it this? gist.github.com/Molitvan/50e3b5060ab9465b1da895155d5c0480
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
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
7mo
@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
7mo
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
7mo
@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
7mo
@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
7mo
@TomGrant91 @mckensie @amir I use enafore.social myself.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@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
7mo
@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
7mo
@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
7mo
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
7mo
@mckensie @amir This is now fixed: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/releases/tag/v6
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@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
7mo
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
7mo
@atherjammoa They do. The plugins have moved to mushclient and everything.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
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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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@fribbledom Nah. You'll find them as soon as you purchase replacements. They'll be in whatever spot you decide to put the replacements. Happens to me constantly.
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