mastodon - Link to source
Admittedly, this feels like a small problem to have, given everything that's going on in the world, but why does life have to be this way? I'm trying to look at the menu for where I'm going tonight, and I'm having trouble finding the menu on the web page that's supposed to have the menu. So I save the page and start looking at the source, and I find an image called Untitled_design_53.webp, with an empty alt tag, so I think that Orca just wasn't reading anything for it. I OCR the image, and there we go; there's part of the menu (there's another image named Untitled_design_55.webp). I haven't tried in Windows, so I don't know if NVDA or JAWS would have worked any better (NVDA does have a handy OCR hotkey, assuming I can select the image that I want to OCR). But this kind of thing is annoying! I shouldn't need to know how to do all of this just to look at a menu.

mastodon - Link to source
Python programming. Long somewhat personal and motivational post

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in reply to Paweł Masarczyk

mastodon - Link to source

Paweł Masarczyk

Python programming. Long somewhat personal and motivational post

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in reply to Paweł Masarczyk

mastodon - Link to source

Paweł Masarczyk

Python programming. Long somewhat personal and motivational post

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reshared this

in reply to Paweł Masarczyk

mastodon - Link to source

Tara Owton

Python programming. Long somewhat personal and motivational post

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in reply to Tara Owton

mastodon - Link to source

Paweł Masarczyk

Python programming. Long somewhat personal and motivational post

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@Tara Owton
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk

mastodon - Link to source

Tara Owton

Python programming. Long somewhat personal and motivational post

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in reply to Tara Owton

mastodon - Link to source

Paweł Masarczyk

Python programming. Long somewhat personal and motivational post

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@Tara Owton

mastodon - Link to source
December 16 I bought a 512Gb SATAIII SSD thinking to myself: "Ok, I probably don't need it right now, but I know it will get only more expensive with all this AI hysteria. I don't know if I'll be able to buy it in the future". $43 is a bit much for a 512Gb if you ask me, but hey, it's manageable.
Today is January 8 and this same SSD now costs $125 in the same shop.
All this is sadly wrong.
Meanwhile I have to figure out which OS should I install on it.

mastodon - Link to source
Mutualaid, Please Boost

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#a11y #Accessibility #linux #gnome #MutualAid #GNOMEShell #linuxmobile #MutualAidRequest #transmutualaid #gnomecalendar #upscaler #cartridges
This entry was edited (6 days ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Finally, our new mail server is up and running, so we've established our new contact page:

izzyondroid.org/contact/

If you need to reach out to us, you should find the necessary details there. Other already staged changes went live right along, e.g. our updated schedules page at

izzyondroid.org/about/resource…

"One down, more to go" – so focusing on the next steps now…

#IzzyOnDroid


Schedules - IzzyOnDroid

What runs when at IzzyOnDroid?
izzyondroid.org
#izzyondroid

mastodon - Link to source
I enjoy seeing that many reactions to my thread from yesterday, thanks guys, I appreciate yall spreading awareness about this. And I enjoy this kind of stuff on Mastodon, as I said a while back. Mostly it's just silently reading the TL, but when it gets fun like this. Then it's fun, and that in a good and human like way. I still feel like I have a good overview and the discussion is mostly productive.

mastodon - Link to source
I'm saying this because I feel it needs to be said, especially after seeing a thread yesterday that really irritated me. You can be the richest person alive or living in a box. You could have a clean bill of health. Guess what? You can become disabled at any moment. Could be 50 years from now, could be as you're reading my post and getting geared up to reply and start the ablism agenda. Disability. Does. Not. Care. It doesn't give a damn who you are or what your circumstances are. The only "good" thing about disability and I say good with sarcasm, is that disability doesn't exclude, like this world does. So the next time you're thinking about posting something like "be grateful" or some other garbage when someone with a disability says something about access or some other basic thing that you as an able-bodied person don't have to think about or fight for? Pump your brakes and remember that that disabled person could be you someday. Edited to add: This isn't just about that thread yesterday, was this prompted by it? Absolutely. People with disabilities are told to be grateful a lot and it's not right. What people spouting this nonsense forget is that there's a good chance they can and most likely will be disabled at some point in their lives and then oh noooo. you're being rude to me because I have a disability when someone gives them a taste of their own medicine. Access isn't something to be grateful for, people fought to pass section 504 and the Americans with Disabilities Act if you live in the states so we wouldn't have these problems, it shouldn't be a fight every day. There shouldn't be this excuse of oh well I'm able-bodied, I didn't know. That excuse should have died when the internet became a tool to use to gather information and yet here we are still fighting because of dumb ass comments like I saw on that thread. No we shouldn't show grattitude for something we can't use, whether it be an app or not. I show grattitude when I'm even remotely considered. The world isn't meant for folks like me and I can work around that, mostly. I have accepted that, but I'll be damned if I'm going to watch someone rub my face in that pile of shit and make me feel bad or like a burden because I spoke up.
This entry was edited (2 days ago)

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source
The new web-based WhatsApp Desktop app for Windows presents a significant accessibility issue for blind and visually impaired users. Currently, this version is incompatible with widely-used screen readers such as NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) and JAWS (Job Access With Speech). As a result, this essential communication tool becomes practically unusable for millions of individuals who rely on these assistive technologies for daily communication and interaction.


TFW you're so incompetent someone makes a change.org petition to get you to do your job.

mastodon - Link to source

What really happened at MTV on New Year's Eve, why the demise of MTV started in 1992, what we gained and lost -- and how to get switch on 33,000 videos worth of MTV right now.

cdm.link/forget-channel-closur…

MTV ident with horizontal colored bands and pink background. "MTV : MUSIC TELEVISION"

Forget channel closures: watch every decade of MTV music videos online - CDM Create Digital Music

No, MTV is not shutting down, though Paramount Skydance did shutter some all-music video channels in various markets. But never mind: the internet can best even vintage MTV. Tune into MTV REWIND and hit shuffle by decade.
Peter Kirn (CDM Create Digital Music)

mastodon - Link to source

Abdanan, January 7th 2026. A 40K people city in Iranian mountains where people took over all police and government buildings, as far as we gather. Internet blockades are happening intermittently in various forms. There is a massive sense of uncertainty and panic, also from the government side.

We hear of many people succeeding in using #deltachat and #chatmail relays, and are trying, to the best of our abilities, to help people set up communications so families and friends can stay safe.

A picture of a person in Hijab who holds a surveillance camera in her right hand letting the camera point at them. But the camera is disconnected and fully in the person hands, blinding whoever might try to surveill. The person is in the near a street crossing and there are people everywhere on the street, in a protest/uprising it appears. The picture was, as far as we could verify, taken in Abadnan on January 7th. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdanan
#deltachat #chatmail
This entry was edited (4 days ago)

mastodon - Link to source

because I keep biting off more than I can chew. I wanted to release a small utility first to get familiar again with #GNOME / #GTK / #Flatpak development.

also something that I need myself. a week worth of hacking.

introducing Bobby: a SQLite file viewer.

github.com/hbons/Bobby

#rust

GNOME application window showing a database table with 4 columns and many rows. The toolbar has a table switcher widget and the opened file name.

GitHub - hbons/Bobby

Contribute to hbons/Bobby development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub
#gnome #gtk #Flatpak #rust
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source
Leider sind mir jetzt die Ideen ausgegangen die Instanz wieder flotter zu bekommen. Ich hab zwar die ein oder andere Sache gefunden, aber den Durchbruch hat es bisher nicht gebracht. Ich hab jetzt schon etwas über 3 Tage meines Urlaubs da rein investiert und möchte jetzt den Rest des Urlaubs gerne genießen. chaos.social wird also mindesten ein paar Tage weiter hin und wieder slow.social sein. Genießt die Zeit der Entschleunigung und macht am Besten was schönes ohne Social Media.

mastodon - Link to source

A few days ago, a client’s data center (well, actually a server room) "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.

I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.

The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.

To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.

The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.

That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.

The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.

The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.

Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.

Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.

#IT #SysAdmin #HorrorStories #ITHorrorStories #Monitoring

#IT #monitoring #sysadmin #horrorstories #ithorrorstories
This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to Uriel Fanelli

pleroma - Link to source

feld

@uriel ✋ worked for years for an ISP/datacenter whose primary datacenter space was in the first level of our office building. We had only one service for the building. It's technically possible to get two, but it would be from the same power company... so when the drunk driver crashed into the transformer and took out our power in winter it would have taken out both anyway. That actually caused a power surge that destroyed our transfer switch which is another problem that having two services wouldn't have solved. We did have diesel backup generators though

We didn't even have diverse entrances into the building for our fiber for a long long time either. But we were definitely a datacenter. (my brother still works there; nothing has really changed except increased bandwidth)

I have never heard of any rules or regulations that require a "datacenter" to have two buildings and independent power. Sounds like something someone made up...

@Uriel Fanelli
in reply to feld

pleroma - Link to source

feld

@uriel there are different "Tiers" of datacenters though, which is probably what people get confused about:

copy/pasted definitions from the first search hit:

Tier 1: A data center with a single path for power and cooling, and no backup components. This tier has an expected uptime of 99.671% per year.

Tier 2: A data center with a single path for power and cooling, and some redundant and backup components. This tier offers an expected uptime of 99.741% per year.

Tier 3: A data center with multiple paths for power and cooling, and redundant systems that allow the staff to work on the setup without taking it offline. This tier has an expected uptime of 99.982% per year.

Tier 4: A completely fault-tolerant data center with redundancy for every component. This tier comes with an expected uptime of 99.995% per year.

We would have been a Tier 2

@Uriel Fanelli

mastodon - Link to source
Alright, so. I am done having my ability to do my job inhibited by my screen reader not being able to handle the fact that I have a lot of text coming into my terminal at once very frequently. So, @NVAccess what's it going to take to get this prioritized on the roadmap? Personally speaking I would up my donation to $50 a month at least to fix this, it genuinely takes so much away from my daily productivity as a professional software engineer. Others feel free to join in, maybe money talks where lots of your users don't.
@NV Access

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in reply to Quin

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

Hi, I just experienced with Codex. It's genuinely prohibiting my work with NVDA and Windows because by the time Codex reaches 30% context window left at the status line, NVDA freezes for 2 or 3 minutes at a time with how it redraws the terminal screen. I need to control+C my work and restart the session with the unique Codex ID again to get it to behave. Then It'll work for say, 5 or 6 more commands, but then the Codex output, which includes thinking and commands run, really janks NVDA performance. Quite frankly this is unacceptable and a huge daily irritation that needs a prioritized fix. @NVAccess
@NV Access
This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to Brandon

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@serrebi Think there was a reason I stopped using it. Maybe because of no paste command? Not sure. Maybe it does it have it, will definitely give it a go. I think Window titles too, with the console host it didn't write the title of my SSH host into the window's title bar? I know there was a reason I switched away from it to terminal though. @TheQuinbox @NVAccess
@Quin @NV Access @Brandon
in reply to Jage

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@Jage Yeah, old terminal does work a lot better but you lose the ability of scrolling. That's what it was, that's right. Now I know. So if I want to copy more than the last page of text to the clipboard with NVDA +F9 to NVDA and F10 (markers), I cannot with the older console host. It only will show you the page up / page down scrollbar whereas the newer terminal lets NVDA read the entire text buffer. Sigh. What a trade-off. @TheQuinbox @NVAccess
@Quin @NV Access @Jage
in reply to Brandon

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@serrebi Ahahaha try to do a dir/b in your \window\system32 directory with that addon and watch NVDA horribly, horribly lag, can't even alt+tab away until like 10 seconds later. Wow. So it essentially reintroduces much of the same lag but maybe not as bad. The problem for me is that a lot of build commands in dev environments generate noisy output like that. Codex for sure can, not to mention it having a countdown timer that updates along with the output. Toolchains like cmake, various linters, Node, all of it can really generate output similar to a dir/b on your system32. I know it's a lot of fast scrolling output, but I do think in those cases NVDA should know that a bunch of text is coming in and only refresh buffer on a timed interval you can set, say, every 3 seconds it reads the last line but ignores any incoming text from refreshing it until no new pieces are scrolling into the terminal. I know that's a lot of refactor but ultimately it will need to happen. @Jage @TheQuinbox @NVAccess
@Quin @NV Access @Brandon @Jage
in reply to Brandon

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

Hey, I appreciate you trying and giving ideas for this, it helps still :) The add-on at least makes the older console host better and I didn't even know of it until now, so that's somethin'. There's just more work @NVAccess will need to put into making this better because as much as there were tried UIA improvements to the terminal experience it's clear that this needs to be a bigger refactor. Not one mention of "terminal" or "console" on nvaccess.org/post/nvda-roadmap… - why? @Jage @TheQuinbox

NV Access | NVDA Roadmap

www.nvaccess.org
@Quin @NV Access @Jage
This entry was edited (4 days ago)

mastodon - Link to source
For anyone interested in more C++ code, tgeczy/Brailab-wrapper is now up, just before work I pushed it to my GitHub.
github.com/tgeczy/Brailab-wrap…
Hey @erion, do you know if it's safe to share the tts.dll (compiled of course) with a release of the driver in the wrapper repo, or licensing prevents this?

GitHub - tgeczy/Brailab-wrapper: A DLL wrapper for the Hungarian Brailab Speech synthesizer.

A DLL wrapper for the Hungarian Brailab Speech synthesizer. - tgeczy/Brailab-wrapper
GitHub
@Erion
This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to Erion

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

wow, I can't believe they would prioritize the trashy Vocalizer synthesizer over something home-grown like Brailab. That to me is shameful. Vocalizer, made by non-Hungarian speakers who have zero knowledge as to the nuances of our language. I even got Multivox 4 working on Windows 11, now I'm so, so tempted to publish instructions and a recompiled setup binary for Multivox just to throw it in their face, you have no idea.
in reply to Tamas G

gotosocial - Link to source

Erion

You should, if you ask me. I totally agree.

This is kind of a grey area, because the addon would have been free, so it's up to you.

BMEITT is actually working on AI versions of Profivox, but of course they don't make it available to those who would really need it and when they do, they make exclusive deals, see Jaws. Trust me, we have tried far beyond what was possible to implement a good Hungarian synth for NVDA, even going as far as doing our own, partnering with Cereproc and Meridian One, constant refusals from BMEITT, and of course a lot of business dinners, etc. The state of Hungarian TTS is quite bad right now.

in reply to Erion

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

so I might not remove it from Eurpod, but I won't upload it into the Wrapper repo just quite yet to distribute it together. That may be going a bit too far. And I totally feel that with Hungarian TTS. I'm still using the cracked version of Profivox 5 here with my NVDA, even though it has horrible pauses during say-all. I remember you all looked into the cost of making our own and it was well over 100000EUR which is insane, not even I could pay that if I saved my income for 15 years. Ha.
I installed Hungarian JAWS the other day. I didn't see Profivox listed, but I could manually add it. Looks like they default it to Vocalizer Mariska, which is horrible. Am I wrong in this? I don't understand how Hungarian blind people are putting up with this day to day if that's true, even old problems with things like double-S are still in it.
in reply to Tamas G

gotosocial - Link to source

Erion

You tell me, at least on Windows there are choices, Apple makes you suffer lol. I can't even list what's wrong with it honestly, there are just countless issues popping up every day.

I think the price of making a good synth wouldn't be as huge today, at least if you create a model. Training costs and around 40 hours of data should produce reasonably good results with Piper for example. Maybe around 10K or less would cover it.

in reply to Erion

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

Hírmondó was built by Axelero (the [origo] / Matáv-era ISP brand) together with a Hungarian company called Speech Technology Kft.. Hungarian company registry / business-info listings show “SPEECH TECHNOLOGY Kft.” marked as “v.a.” (végelszámolás alatt = under voluntary liquidation). So what happened to them? Is that engine even purchasable today? Or is all hope for any SDK gone for it.
in reply to Erion

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

I found the demo yes! Sadly it's a demo though for sure, the SAPI voice is non-functional. Hmm. It's odd because LowLevel.dll and the other engine files have the same version but are clearly different in size, so the DLL behaviors and compiling changed. Having a working SAPI5 voice of that Miklos would be the easiest, but I'm somehow doubtful it's easy to have the engine expose the proper path for voice utterance.
in reply to Tamas G

gotosocial - Link to source

Winter blue tardis

Tbf, vocalizer sucks. Our situation here isn't any better, we have neural engine stuff, but there are starting to be NVDA issues with it, and only the union of old retired blindies can redistribute the stuff. The project is no longer paid, so imagine what will happen in two or three years, and the neural voices suck. Goodbye, old speechlab too. Now if someone cracked that for me on android, I'd be happy. I never said that. But trying to stare for five minutes into the screen while it screams licence retrieval failed in different rates while I try to change the synth ain't fun. I like old stuff. The only good thing about the Hungarian vocalizer voice at least on apple is its name. :D It sucks, short letter a long letter a, is very fun to hear while you type. We need better synths for everything, for every language etc.
in reply to Winter blue tardis

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@tardis Speaklab? Interesting. I wonder what the Bulgarian equivalent to our Profivox would be Honestly they're the best, but of course it's comercial, very much tied to only getting distributed by the organization that sells JAWS in Hungary, not to mention their DEX program that's a learning tool. So, Profivox is very locked down even though it's a great voice. We had WinTalker, I still have it working, ha. That one did kind of suck.
@Winter blue tardis
in reply to Tamas G

gotosocial - Link to source

Winter blue tardis

Yeah, I tried profivox on a version of jaws and the assholes never updated it, so imagine little me was frustrated... All the me were frustrated collectively, and I glared at the screen, for a long while. I have the one you did by uh, was it braillelab? I don't remember, it's cool, but my hearing sucks so I can't understand him, poor old guy. Giggles. Yeah, speechlab was, still is a sapi voice, the last nvda changes made it rate boost, but the android version was nastily plugged off the playstore, and there's a licence checker I wish someone would remove, Tyler did disassemble the DLL to increase speed, but we no longer need that because it works. Tehnically, I can't even download the neural voices because the link is broken, and they want my identification number, plus names, plus disability documents, and only then can they actually send that. Lots of crap. And last time when we tried to become members of the union after moving, they said we have to pay, and there were two months, so mom politely told them to fuck off, and then they wonder why they have no young members. LOL.
in reply to Tamas G

gotosocial - Link to source

Winter blue tardis

I have speechlab, if you want to make it speak broken English to you. I can send. It's old, so I am not sure if they even have copyrights, because CD distribution. Funny is they used the same crap of building for the neural engines, so that makes me think it's the same company or people who build the new ones. I mean, they are not bad, just, not for daily use. They are good if I sit down on a sofa, bother with an android phone, and read a book with a cup of tea, or hot chocolate, or something like that. You'll just have to give something that says "message me here!" because I am not sending files on here I don't think there's a way to. Haha. I also don't have dropbox and I am not a cool person. ;`

mastodon - Link to source

If you work somewhere that still communicates via X, this week is a good one to petition comms folks to stop using it

(generates thousands of sexually abusive images per hour while its owner laughs, FT calls it a “deepfake porn site” ft.com/content/ad94db4c-95a0-4…).


Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter

A look inside Elon Musk’s big tent
Bryce Elder (Financial Times)
This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

mastodon - Link to source

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Fedi meta

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mastodon - Link to source
We're an AI first company. Our mission is to streamline your experience and let you turn ideas into execution at the speed of thought. To join our team make PDFs out of your cv and cover letter, upload the PDFs, then retype all the text in the PDFs into more textboxes. Copy/paste is disabled. A question that is illegal to ask is mandatory. <>[]{},%#$ characters forbidden. Accents forbidden. The back button breaks everything. You have been logged out for inactivity. Click here to restart.

mastodon - Link to source

In my opinion, lack of accessibility is the main *real* argument against the widespread adoption of Free and Open Source Software.

I reckon, if, especially European, governments and institutions really are serious about digital sovereignty, they should invest serious money (I'm talking billions with "B") into that area.

#a11y #FOSS #DigitalSovereignty #EU

#a11y #foss #EU #digitalsovereignty
This entry was edited (4 days ago)

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mastodon - Link to source

Clippy is back! The movement of 2025 to protest against AI, Big Tech, and data abuse continues. 🎉

While the original Clippy was skinny and normal, the new “Clippy” shared by Microsoft on X is bloated - just like Microsoft's bloated AI tools.

Check out why people use Clippy as their profile pics: tuta.com/blog/clippy-movement-…

Tweet by Microsoft on X titled, 'How it started vs how it went' with a picture of a cookie in the shape of Clippy before and after being baked.

Clippy – the movement of 2025 to protest against AI, Big Tech, and data abuse. | Tuta

Clippy profile pics started spreading mid of 2025, kicked off by YouTuber Louis Rossmann. The iconic Microsoft Office helper stands for not invading user rights to help out.
Tuta
in reply to Tuta

mastodon - Link to source

Vick

Thought the sentiment about Clippy is understandable, doesn't it actually represent exactly what Microsoft is doing now? Though no data collection was involved twenty years ago, people (at least in my surroundings) remember it to be not useful and its inevitable presence - non-consensual, what is exactly what they are recreating now, just on a whole another scale of invasion into private space and workflows
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