@fastfinge

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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)

matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca

keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

So I’ve been sharing my Weird Dreams with the fediverse lately. Because I’m a bit of a nut, I figured: why not share my normal dreams as well? I’ll be doing that with the #fedidreams hashtag every morning. If you, too, find dreams interesting, feel free to join in! Some ground rules and background: as a teenager, I was extremely interested in #lucid dreaming. I practiced #dream recall and put a lot of work into it, as the first step to lucid dreaming. While I never achieved it, to this day I can generally remember 1 or 2 dreams a night. I don’t believe dreams are supernatural, or have any deeper meaning.I just believe they’re fun, and sometimes an interesting way to get a glimpse of your own subconscious. Also, thanks to some medication I take, my dreams have become even more vivid over the last couple years. If I’m lucky enough to have any explicit dreams, I’ll be keeping those to myself! Will sharing my dreams with the world every morning get me any closer to my long abandoned goal of lucid dreaming? Will my subconscious get performance anxiety and stop dreaming entirely? Will the focus on writing up my dreams in something more than point-form for my dream diary make them even weirder? It’s a social experiment, bro! And you get to follow along on this journey of entirely unscientific and meaningless science! Yay! Yeah…feel free to filter out the #fedidreams hashtag entirely.

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@TheQuinbox @NVAccess @alexhall I suspect, based on what I've read, the issue is that nobody is sure what's causing the problem. So it could take hours or days of developer time just tracking down the actual cause before it can be fixed. The terminal works fine in jaws, sure. But Freedom Scientific isn't exactly going to tell anyone what they had to do to make that happen.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@TheQuinbox @NVAccess At least they fixed the issue where explorer crashes every time NVDA restarts. But yes, the terminal is also a huge issue for me. I already donate monthly, but I'd be happy to throw in $500 if NVDA had some kind of bug bounty program. If this issue was solved the money would be paid back within three months or so thanks to increased productivity. I had hopes that the 64-bit alphas would fix this. But I'm sad to say they do not.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@RakowskiBartosz I read the first few volumes of Wandering Inn and enjoyed it. But it started to feel like...it was getting long and vast just for the sake of it? And didn't have any focus.

Agreed about Cradle! Good fun for the first while, though.

Added the others to my TBR pile, thanks!

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@RakowskiBartosz Yeah, it's not so much that I want to read on Kindle, as that I want authors to get money, but can't afford to individually pay every single author I read.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jaybird110127 Yup. That and the fact that the sourcecode isn't getting updated; just getting it to keep compiling is a huge effort. There is a 64-bit build, but it doesn't actually work. I consider dectalk pretty much dead, even though the source is available.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@cachondo I always regretted not bringing the big_pervert in for an interview, just to see what would happen LOL

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@cachondo Not as bad as the Resume I got from an email address that started out "big_pervert".

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

I hate reading someone else's username, and desperately wishing I was cool enough to have thought of that username.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@polx Maybe, but probably not. Doing that would result in a lot of wasted resources generating text I'm never going to listen to. Think about the average user interface: dozens of menus, and toolbars, and ads, and comments, and so on. Plus, the text changes constantly, on even simple websites. That's not even taking into account websites that just scroll constantly. It might be possible to create some kind of algorithm to predict the most likely text I'll want next, but now we've just added another AI on top of the first AI.

I think a better solution might be to make the text to speech system run on different hardware from the computer itself. This is, in fact, how text to speech was done in the past, before computers had multi-channel soundcards. This has a few advantages. First, even if the computer itself is busy, the speech never crashes or falls behind. Second, if the computer crashes, it could be possible to actually read out the last error encountered. Third, specialized devices could be perhaps more power and CPU efficient.

The reason text to speech systems became software, instead of hardware, is largely because of cost. It's much cheaper to just download and install a program than it is to purchase another device. Also, it means you don't have to carry around another dongle and plug it into the computer.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@ZBennoui Yup. I just wish he wasn’t also trying to train his own phonemizer, because I really believe that has to be reproducible and modifiable for users. I’ve swapped multiple emails with him about an NVDA addon. But he’s pretty set on sapi for now until things stabilize both on the NVDA side and on his side.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@ZBennoui We need a good formant system. Machine learning is useful for setting the model parameters. But I think the word to phoneme rules can’t be a neural network, because they have to be reproducible and modifiable. Even here though, machine learning could help though. I’d love a system where a user could submit a recording of a word, and the system could create the phonetic representation.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@ZBennoui Agreed. I think blast bay is close to the right track. If only it was open and the issues pronouncing words were fixed. The speed and sound of the voices are top notch.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@amberhinds To be fair to your step dad, Karen and Lee, the popular Australian voices found on most GPS devices, as well as on IOS, originally developed by Scansoft, later purchased by Nuance, then transferred to Cerence Automotive, before finally getting owned by Microsoft, are some of the nicest text to speech voices ever made for casual listening. Largely this is due to whomever was in charge of recording and curating the data back in 2002. They did an excellent job editing and aligning the recordings for use with the concatenative synthesis technology that was available at the time, resulting in the Australian voices sounding noticeably better than all of the other English options, even though they all used the same underlying methods. The fact the data capture was so high quality has meant that as technology and training methods improve, those voices have continued to remain a step ahead. The female version of the voice your father is almost certainly using is based on this woman: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Jacobsen

If all of my favourite, fast and efficient voices were ripped away from me, those Australian voices are probably what I'd revert to. They're not as fast as I would like, but at least they're clear and accurate. Your step dad has good taste.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@phillycodehound I played briefly with this and it seemed okay on the surface, though I'm not looking for work so didn't go deep: github.com/rendercv/rendercv

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@luiscarlosgonzalez @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir It has the same problem with speed.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@luiscarlosgonzalez @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir I didn't try Kokoro, because it cannot achieve a real time factor of 1 on CPU. By that I mean, to be fit for consideration with a screen reader, a text to speech voice must be able to generate one second of speech in one second or faster. In general, Kokoro takes two seconds to generate one second of speech. So it's not suitable.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@chikim @FreakyFwoof That's one of the problems, yes.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@clv1 @jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir The issue is that both of these are effectively concatenative or parametric, rather than formant, systems. So they will never be as intelligible as eloquence.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@VE3RWJ Shrug. Nobody else has reported that issue. Probably a false positive from malwarebites.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir That's my assumption because the only things that really need a 32-bit compatibility layer are speech synthesizers and braille devices.

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