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Amir @amir@dragonscave.space
2d
With so many old and new speech engines available for NVDA these days, from speech engines dating back to the 1990s to Apple’s Mac voices, all available for free, and even NVDA going 64-bit without slowing this whole adventure down, I honestly have no idea how JAWS users survive being deprived of all this fun. And I also wonder whether anyone still actually pays for Eloquence for NVDA, especially when there are free Eloquence NVDA add-ons that are arguably better than the paid Eloquence option. NVDA users: collecting speech engines like Pokémon since forever - LOL!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@amir I'm not entirely certain that being known as "The TTS piracy screen reader" will be good for NVDA in the long run. All it would take is for one company to get really, really mad and DMCA the entire NVDA codebase as "a tool that enables (or tends to enable) piracy". Because NVDA doesn't have to break any laws itself to get pulled off github sadly; the corporations rule the world.
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Amir @amir@dragonscave.space
2d
@fastfinge I'm not sure why this necessarily has to be connected to piracy. Most of these speech engines are either no longer commercially supported, have unclear ownership, or we're dealing with old versions that have long since been discontinued. And this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with NVAccess either, since they aren't the ones distributing or promoting these speech engines. Windows and Android are probably far bigger platforms for piracy, but nobody goes after Microsoft or Google simply because their platforms can be used for it. They're not the ones promoting or enabling piracy as a business. Also, we're not talking about cracking paid versions of a speech engine here. There's a pretty big difference between making old or freely available speech engines usable with NVDA and cracking commercial software.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@amir I mean, we kind of are. Eloquence is still something for sale that you need to pay for. The mac addons use code that belongs to Apple. Same for the Samsung and Google TTS addons. I doubt any of these folks care. But it only takes one company to get upset. And Android and Windows both do code signing and a bunch of other stuff; those companies can, and do, argue they help with piracy prevention. To be in a similar position, NVDA would have to start authorizing every addon, and only allowing addons in the NVDA Store to run. I suspect that's where NVAccess is headed anyway, but I worry all the tts addons are pushing them there faster.
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Amir @amir@dragonscave.space
2d
@fastfinge Well, I'm not as pessimistic as you are. I don't see the situation as grim or as serious as you do, though your points are valid. NVAccess might also do that for corporate environments, but extending it to all users would be tantamount to shooting themselves in the foot.
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