"Die mutige Rebellin: Rosa Parks – Ihr unnachgiebiger Kampf gegen die Unterdrückung wurde zur weltverändernden Bewegung" (biografischer historischer Roman) von James A. Sullivan und Patricia Eckermann
#Reading Apparently, in the wider bookish community, there is this idea that listening to audiobooks doesn't count as reading. This idea is ableist af. I mean, what about blind people?
And besides, what about people who can focus better and longer when listening (audio), instead of reading (visual)?
What about people who can better focus on listening to stories while doing something, for instance going for a walk, doing sports, crocheting, knitting, or arts and crafts?
@catrinity There are people in the blind community who would agree with the statement that listening is not reading. Only reading Braille counts as reading. I do not agree with that personally.
@WestphalDenn I know that technically speaking listening is not reading. But that's not the point I was trying to make. My point was the consumption of books in general, no matter with which method this consumption happens. I mean, in the end, you know a story, and it doesn't matter that much imho if you have listened to it or if you have read it.
An interview with my friend, Erich Manser who is a blind runner. I think I was able to ask about aspects of his running career that he didn't discuss in other interviews or podcasts. evengrounds.com/erich-manser-o…
I would like to introduce you to my friend, and previous colleague from IBM, Erich Manser who is a competitive blind runner. Over the years I enjoyed hearing about his adventures, and when it comes to sports, I got much inspiration from him.
Hi. I am a subscriber and a big fan of Tuta. I know this is perhaps the wrong place to ask but I am looking for info on when Tuta Calendar will support multiple day agenda view? Or what calendar app you recommend while waiting for such a function.
Screenshot Tagesschauartikel "Ministerium will flexible Arbeitszeiten durchsetzen"
Darüber ausm HG überbelichtetes Bild mit Meer&Skiline hinter Fensterfront von der sich zentral perspektivisch eine lange Tafel mit Weingläsern in VG zieht; alles in harten Schatten unterbelichtet nur noch Konturen erkennbar; Person beugt sich beim Eindecken vornüber sodass Umriss (vermut. Zopf) und gerade Nase Batman ähneln.
A warm thank you to our sponsors Element and Famedly for enabling us to set up Hackathon tomorrow, in Brussels! Can't make it? We will livestream the results at 17:00 CET!
Element is sponsoring the video stream, and the dinner, while Famedly sponsors the lunch and drinks. Thanks to them both we can keep our community fed and refreshed to tackle the important challenges ahead of them!
@element provides secure, sovereign communication tools built on Matrix. Because of their commitment to open source and the commercial support Element provides, their solutions are widely deployed in the European public sector.
Element is a Matrix-based end-to-end encrypted messenger and secure collaboration app. It’s decentralised for digital sovereign self-hosting, or through a hosting service such as Element Matrix Services.
Famedly was the first approved TI Messenger. Built on Matrix, it enables faster and secure communication for healthcare professionals, with a delightful user experience.
And this. I asked it if it could put a heading above its responses: Output Yes, I've just set that up for you. I used the messages.responsePrefix configuration to automatically prepend ## Output\n\n to all of my future responses. The Gateway is restarting now to apply that change. From now on, every message I send should lead with that H2 header.
Save Social, Tuta, and lots of other organizations are building a better web – and you can be part of the journey! The next Digital Independence Day is Sunday, February 1st.
Being an unconference, every participant will raise agenda points and then those will be prioritized by interest. The first topic is "XMPP 2.0". xmpp.org/2025/11/xmpp-summit-2…
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is exited to announce the 28th XMPP Summit taking place in Brussels, Belgium next year - just before FOSDEM 2026. The XSF invites everyone interested in development of the XMPP protocol to attend, and discuss all …
Pommodoro est l’endroit idéal pour un lunch dans le centre de Bruxelles. Nous vous proposons de délicieuses spécialités italiennes: Pâtes, Pizza, Antipasti, Viandes, …
the Prize for Excellence in Open Source 2026 is handed out tonight in Brussels by the European Open Source Academy, and it is my honor as president to hand over this award to a truly worthy winner. I am sure you will agree with me once you learn who it is. Tonight.
I'm indeed curious, I learnt about the event last week and was tempted to somehow attend, but unfortunately, I have no formal attire with me, only OSS formal (doc martens, plain clothes and laptop with silly colours and stickers).
@kayla I bring my suit to Brussels solely for this purpose! After all, I got this suit in the first place getting an award for my Open Source so I feel good getting to use it more to further shine the light on excellent Open Source people!
@miketheman in this case I am both the president of EOSA as well as last year's awardee, but I think the idea is that I do this in my role as president.
I presume that if I'm not messing things up too badly I might get to do it again next year... 😁
Go add a quick audio description to the post so I can boost it. I treat audio same as image. No description, no boost, but this is like a fan made of air raid sirens and I think it would be fun for other people to hear.
@FreakyFwoof a fan made of air raid sirens is honestly the best description of thjat I've ever heard. I am so fucking lucky that (A) I managed to get all this kit and (B) that I have free power in here. It does mean, interestingly, that I most certainly never have to run my heating in winter. ever. not once
@FreakyFwoof used to need that here. then I built a server stack that puts out more BTUs than a big box of BTUs with a big sign out front saying "free BTUs, come take some". I measured a minimum 10 degrees C difference between my bedroom and my living room, the latter being where all the servers are and is at least 10 degrees warmer than the bedroom at all times, even in the middle of the night
@FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com also your nickname caused my espeak to read hexadecimal, could you remove the characters "𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩" it really makes it hard to read the posts
@patricus @FreakyFwoof use voice dictionaries. copy the name, including the cuneiform, settings, speech dictionaries, default dictionary, add, pattern, full name with the cuneiform, preplacement, name without, done and done
@FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com you know what? if I have to do such tricks just to be able to read your stuff it's not worth it. I already have a dict that is quite big because of espeak quirks.
@patricus AT some point you'd have 31, and 32, so just... Add it and if you notice a slowdown, remove. The time taken to fuss about it could have been done already. Sigh...
Einige haben seit dem 39c3 nach unserem Schildergenerator für die taktilen Beschriftungen gefragt. Wir haben den unter editor.c3tactile.org/ weiterhin zur beliebigen Nutzung online. Er ist nicht ganz fehlerfrei, aber für grundlegende Beschilderung ausreichend. Wir arbeiten daran auch den Code zu veröffentlichen, das wird aber noch ein bisschen dauern. Eine ausgezeichnete, verfügbare Open Source Lösung ist der OpenSCAD Generator von @oskar_mbr unter codeberg.org/oskars/define-bes… #accessibility #a11y
Twice Google Gemini tried to tell me that I was wrong regarding a tennis result from 2004 but I kept telling it it wasn’t correct and eventually, it got it right.
In the 2004 Australian Open men's doubles semi-finals, Bob and Mike Bryan did indeed defeat Todd Woodbridge and Jonas Björkman with a score of 6–1, 6–2. Sometimes you just have to keep guiding the AI models particularly if you know that something is incorrect. It's almost like you're teaching something. This is where I can see a problem with these AI models because if you don't know that something is incorrect, you can go away with the wrong information. I'm seeing this a lot with supposed history posts about events from the Second World War.
Except that it isn't teaching, because it doesn't learn. It's more like a child who just responds the way you like so that you give it more snacks. And that is also why it isn't to be trusted.
When I was 18 I took a medicine called Theraflu because I was sick, it caused me to hallucinate. I actually thought my coat rack in my room was alive and trying to kill me.
Never again will I touch that stuff. Absolutely nasty.
That's definitely worse than when, after surgery, I took Percocet, and was convinced that one particular work colleague kept breaking into my house just to tell me to "plug it in" and then leave again.
a raíz de lo que acabo de rt sobre Pérez-Reverte solo digo una cosa: desde Trafalgar, ésta inclusive, lo único que sale de los dedos de este escritor es pura basura. Y miedo me da releer, de hecho no pienso hacerlo, nada de lo anterior.
Yo tengo que reconocer que me gustaron mucho dos libros suyos de hace ya mucho tiempo: la piel del tambor y la carta esférica. De lo nuevo no he leído nada.
Finally a functional NVDA add-on for the new WhatsApp Desktop. WhatsApp Desktop Enhancer is a specialized accessibility bridge for the modern WhatsApp Desktop application (available from the Microsoft Store). It enhances navigation efficiency and fixes interaction issues caused by the application's underlying technology. github.com/starkrush123/WhatsA…
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is exited to announce the 28th XMPP Summit taking place in Brussels, Belgium next year - just before FOSDEM 2026. The XSF invites everyone interested in development of the XMPP protocol to attend, and discuss all …
If Windows was a puppy, and go: I'll start. If Windows was a puppy, it would constantly poop all over the floor and you'd need to buy specialized products to clean up the mess.
Ok does anyoneknow if the #Braille Extender add-on for #NVDA is still being maintained? I checked the GitHub and cannot determine this, but the amount of open issues makes me wonder. @main @mastoblind @NVAccess@fosstodon.orge
I don't know offhand, but it's probably worth an email to the author? (I haven't actually checked, but hopefully their contact details are in there somewhere - they are supposed to be)
Want to know more about where @mozilla is headed? The 2025/26 State of Mozilla is live, sharing our product strategy, vision for the future and a look at some of Thunderbird’s favorite “rebel” developers, builders and engineers. Read here: stateof.mozilla.org
Listen to your users: no AI in Thunderbird and Firefox. But yeah, I know. Mozilla desperately what's to feed the AI hype. So please, make it possible to disable all these pointless AI features...
And what's that image for? It just clutteres the toot.
Is the AI version of Thunderbird the pro version talked about in the vision guide or in all editions? Because I'd hate to have to look for a new email client...
I printed four n=7th iterate dragon curves. You can fit two together to get n=8 dragon curve, and four together to get n=9 dragon curve. You can also fit them together in a way that tiles the plane.
Within a week or so, Artemis II will launch and send people to the moon for the first time in 54 years.
And all I can think of is how instead of being excited as hell to watch this - I think I've wanted to see since I was a kid - I'm terrified that Trump will somehow fuck this up, either by ruining the moment or... worse, if his horrid gutting of funding has had some impact in the engineering or logistics work.
For iOS users. You know when you copy something from one app and want to paste it into another, an alert pops up asking if you want to allow it? This usually happens for me when I copy the last phrase spoken by Voiceover. You can go to the apps sestion of the settings app, find the app that keeps asking (VLC in my case) and there's a section about allowing paste, which you can set to Never, Ask, or Always.
@MewProjects FastPlay: Even if speak track changes is unchecked, NVDA still speaks new track names as they appear in the title bar. Winamp doesn't. Does this mean there's some magical code in NVDA that can figure out that it's not supposed to speak title bar changes in Winamp because the user would find that annoying? Or is there an NVDA setting I'm missing? I like having the track name in the title bar, as I'm used to things working that way, but I don't want NVDA to speak it whenever it changes. Any thoughts? Thanks.
Okay. In that case, any chance of a hotkey, possibly not global, to speak what would be in the title bar if show track names was checked? I'd love to use this and get my dad using this, but we really need easy access to track names, have a ton of stuff that isn't tagged at all, and yet don't want NVDA speking every time a track changes.
Also unrelated question: If I allow volume above 100%, why does it actually clip rather than Windows's typical compression kicking in and keeping it manageable?
BTW with that last one, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There've been times when my dad in Foobar I think it was had some eq settings that were what he wanted, but Windows compressed the hell out of the resulting audio.
I don't know. To get that "smoothness" the Bobby voice had, or "shelly", we would actually need to add Spectral Tilt as a frame parameter. This means a new frame setting that controls that. Without it, "male" and "female" will always have the same sharpness.
I wonder if there's any correlation between a blind person using gdb (the GNU debugger) and using a guide dog trained at GDB (Guide Dogs for the Blind), or using a guide dog in general. Probably not.
Here's another song in support of the people of Minneapolis and in honor of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, this time from British singer Billy Bragg. Listen on YouTube here.
The murder of Alex Pretti was horrifically shocking, all the more so as we are still reeling from the images of the murder of Renee Good. That these crimes c...
NVSpeech Player with phoneme editor and NVDA Addon version 1.8. Those on the NVDA driver from yesterday can update it from the last button in the Speech Player settings panel, too. This release adds a new Voice Profiles system to NV Speech Player packs. Voices are now defined in phonemes.yaml and can be selected at runtime, letting you ship multiple voice characters without maintaining multiple full phoneme tables. • New YAML voice profiles ◦ Voices are defined in phonemes.yaml under voiceProfiles. ◦ Profiles are overlays: one base phoneme table, plus per-voice adjustments. • New bundled voices ◦ Beth (female) ◦ bobby (child-esk) • Voice selection everywhere ◦ The NVDA driver and phoneme editor can select a YAML-defined voice. • Better debugging for pack authors How voice profiles work (short version) A voice profile can apply: • class-based scaling (e.g., vowels vs. fricatives) for formants, bandwidths, gain/noise, and voice quality • per-phoneme overrides for targeted fixes (absolute values that win for those specific fields) • Existing packs remain compatible: voiceProfiles is optional. • For low sample rates, keep an eye on harsh sibilants and overall gain — profiles include tools to roll off the top end and preserve headroom. github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay… github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…
Great news! Speech Player for Linux works! I've set it up using install.sh, then set up speech-dispatcher as explained in the respective readme, and Orca found and loaded it. the process was even easier than setting up voxin, which isn't updated since years to reflect current path structures.
@clv1 ahaha but does it actually Speak through Orca properly? That's the big question I guess. I like this renderer though because it leaves the door open to integrate other phonemizers on Linux first the easiest, since it calls Espeak in IPA mode 1 to get the IPA. You can adjust it to IPA mode 3, that's what the editor uses, but I believe it also adds the ZWJ (zero-Width-join) markers. So experimenting with what each IPA mode does can actually change how things sound.
Yes it speaks, inside and outside Orca's preferences window, though I haven't tested it much so far. I haven't understood this IPA mode thing, but you may explain later. I'm gonna sleep soon. I believe I'm 4 hours ahead you. Here it's 10:22 pm now.
I think I'm using default settings, and is it just me, or can the synth not say the letter `R' correctly? Almost like kids who replace their `R's with `W's.
Now that @mcourcel says what he heard, I slowed it all the way down to zero, and heard aroo. And now that I put it out there, so will you, simply because of how our brain works.
Okay apparently this isn't self-contained as Espeak fails to run. When I run Espeak-ng.exe manually from the command line I get: espeak-ng.exe - System Error dialog The code execution cannot proceed because libespeak-ng.dll was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem. OK button
@jaybird110127 ah yeah, fixed, I re-uploaded the release with the dll in it now :D I think yeah, if you have Espeak installed, you'd never see the error but Espeak-ng.exe still calls into it. Which is fine, as long as it's not us doing that xD
What is the currently recommended set of circumstances to get this thing sounding ...more distinct, I guess? Both Eloquence and eSpeak appear to currently be a lot more 'crisp', therefore easier to understand, than what I am hearing currently. Is that just the nature of the thing currently or can this be improved?
@zersiax I'm glad I'm not the only one asking for this. I thought it was my broken ears. Also, anything I can do to soften the s, especially at the begining of words? It might be my sound card, but it sounds like really bad static.
Dennis
in reply to Amalia Zeichnerin • • •Amalia Zeichnerin
in reply to Dennis • • •I know that technically speaking listening is not reading. But that's not the point I was trying to make. My point was the consumption of books in general, no matter with which method this consumption happens. I mean, in the end, you know a story, and it doesn't matter that much imho if you have listened to it or if you have read it.