Hey, we’re back, and I didn’t have to do anything, because it wasn’t me who broke anything. I’ll take the win!

Different but kind of related: try to avoid finding the “best setup” and over specializing in it. I started using the eloquence speech synthesizer in 1997. It hasn’t had any updates since 2002. But I got so good at listening to it at extreme rates of speed, that it’s now nearly impossible for me to switch to something else. I have to go through all kinds of silly nonsense to keep this ancient 32-bit synth running on modern platforms. If I had only forced myself to use multiple different synthesizers, even if I was slightly slower with each individual one, I now wouldn’t have this horrible lock-in. When I am finally forced to switch to something else, it’s going to slow me down for months or possibly years, because of how much I’ve over-specialized in understanding eloquence at over 800 words per minute, and how much of my workflow I’ve built around my ability to listen that quickly.

For those of us using screen readers, this is a way bigger deal. Honestly I probably shouldn’t use a bluetooth headset and a bluetooth keyboard for my banking. We focus so much on SSL/HTTPS and wifi security, but I wonder how much effort goes into wireless keyboard security? Not nearly as much, I’d bet.

Prophecy approved companion is excellent! It gave me all the feels. It’s both extremely funny, and extremely poignant as the main character learns who she is, what’s really going on, and her intended roll in it all. It’s one of the few series where the reader knows exactly what’s happening from the start, but the fact the main character being slow to catch on isn’t frustrating.

Also, if you don’t feel comfortable building bookworm from source yourself, and you feel like you can trust me, Here’s a build of the latest bookworm code from github for 64-bit Windows: https://www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/rd388d

If you use Bookworm and use the built-in support for espeak, you can get up to 600 words per minute or so. Dectalk can go well over 900 words per minute. As far as I know, cocoa tops out at around 500 words per minute. So all of the options accept piper should be fine for you.

It really depends on your use case. If you want something that sounds pretty okay, and is decently fast, Piper fits the bill. However, this is just a command line TTS system; you’ll need to build all the supporting infrastructure if you want it to read audiobooks. https://github.com/rhasspy/piper

An extension for the free and open source NVDA screen reader to use piper lives here: https://github.com/mush42/piper-nvda

If you want something that can run in realtime, though sounds somewhat robotic, you want dectalk. This repo comes with libraries and dlls, as well as several sample applications. Note, however, that the licensing status of this code is…uh…dubious to say the least. Dectalk was abandonware for years, and the developer leaked the sourcecode on a mailing list in the 2000’s. However, ownership of the code was recently re-established, and Dectalk is now a commercial product once again. But the new owners haven’t come after the repo yet: https://github.com/dectalk/dectalk

If you want a robotic but realtime voice that’s fully FOSS with known licensing status, you want espeak-ng: https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng

If you want a fully fledged software application to read things to you, but don’t need a screen reader and don’t want to build scripts yourself, you want bookworm: https://github.com/blindpandas/bookworm

Note, however, that you should build bookworm from source. While the author accepts pull requests, because of his circumstances, he’s no longer able to build new releases: https://github.com/blindpandas/bookworm/discussions/224

If you are okay with using closed-source freeware, Balabolka is another way to go to get a full text to speech reader: https://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

But that code you write at home is probably not accessible. You don’t need a screen reader personally, and no laws are forcing you to do it. That means the majority of open source developers don’t bother. Even if you, personally, want to bother, if your writing for Linux, the api you need to use to work with screen readers quite frankly sucks, because the people writing the open source tech stack didn’t give a damn. Linux won’t be viable for blind people unless major distros have full time accessibility folks, and refuse to accept inaccessible packages and patches.

Apparently! I don’t hide my data in any way, and constantly get ads in languages I don’t speak. Usually French, but sometimes Hindi or Chinese. And as a blind person myself, I’m not sure that my well paid full time job working in large enterprise and big tech accessibility is altruism deserving of thanks haha.

I assume it’s because I live in Canada, and big American data just assumes all Canadians speak French. I regularly get French ads on English websites.

I don’t block anything. I work in accessibility, so it’s important to me to know what the experiences are like for my fellow users with disabilities. I also don’t want to recommend sites or apps that are riddled with inaccessible ads. I’d rather not give them traffic at all. Though even though I let them track me, I still get ads in a language I don’t speak for cars I can’t drive. What’re they doing with all that data?

Good to know; thanks! I’ll keep an eye on it.

I was having issues with outgoing federation to Mastodon on 0.19.0. I just did the update five minutes ago, so we’ll see if that fixes it. If you’re seeing this comment I guess it’s working at the moment.

A couple reasons, I think:

1. AI dubbing: this makes it way easier for YouTube to add secondary dubbed tracks to videos in multiple languages. Based on the Google push to add AI into everything, including creating AI related OKR’s, that’s probably a primary driver. Multiple audio tracks is just needed infrastructure to add AI dubbing.

2. Audio description: Google is fighting enough antitrust related legal battles right now. The fact that YouTube doesn’t support audio description for those of us who are blind has been an issue for a long time, and now that basically every other video streaming service supports it, I suspect they’re starting to feel increased pressure to get on board. Once again, multiple audio tracks is needed infrastructure for offering audio description.

Surprised nobody has mentioned my two favourites:

• Behind The Bastards: Robert Evans (formerly of Cracked fame) talks about the worst people in history for hours.
• Oh No Ross and Carrie: “When they make the claims we show up so you don’t have to.” Maybe start with the series on scientology, it’s some of the best work they’ve done.

Most of the other stuff I listen to is either industry specific or fandom/hobby specific.

I run the RBlind.com Lemmy instance at Accuris Hosting. Decent Virtual Machines, easy IPV6 support, and everything works fine. Prices are a bit on the high end, but it’s worth it to me to use a provider located in my country, where I understand all of the associated laws and can pay in my own currency via my local bank. Also, I’d rather not give money to big tech if I can help it, and support local business instead. This isn’t sponsored or anything, I’m just a mostly contented customer.

Also, of course, the fact that the control panel is screen-reader accessible is super important to me, though I doubt anyone else cares. But unfortunately that’s not yet the case with most of the larger cloud providers like AWS. And if they do deploy an inaccessible update, the company is small enough that I can send an email and get an answer from a human who has actually read what I wrote, rather than a corporate AI.

It’s just as long and incomprehensible as Google’s and Microsoft’s. So I have no idea.

I like lire. It works with any of the popular feed syncing services, self-hosted, cloud-hosted, or it can just run locally on your phone. Also, when full text extraction works, it’s a gamechanger. Unfortunately some websites (like bleeping computer) block it.

That’s what worries me. When companies get desperate for cash, they tend to do pretty terrible things.

So who are they sending our product browsing data to in order to provide this service? At least I know what Microsoft and Google are doing with my data (nothing good). But Pocket and cloudflare and there VPN provider and whatever other random companies Firefox partners with? Who knows! How do I opt out? Who knows! How secure are these companies? Who knows! At least using Edge or Chrome I only have to hand over my data to one evil corporation, instead of several. Plus I actually get things I want in return (for me: automatic image descriptions, reader mode, read aloud, and AI based page summaries). Nothing I get from the companies Firefox works with are things I even want.