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I proposed an approach where #FOSDEM can provide better support for #accessibility

github.com/FOSDEM/website/issu…

I will try to demo it in my session later today, but speech to text isn't that hard to add in these days. We should be encouraging text transcripts.

@fosdem


Start supporting (or encouraging) the Speech to Text for sessions

We should explore adopting or integrating the MidCamp Live Captioning project as part of FOSDEM’s accessibility efforts. https://github.com/MidCamp/live-captioning?tab=readme-ov-file#live-captionin...
mgifford (GitHub)
#Accessibility #fosdem @FOSDEM

mastodon - Link to source

From the Internet (not my words):

“The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that will be produced was promised to be paid with yet to exist money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been made, to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy AI demand that does not actually exist to obtain mathematically impossible profit.”

mastodon - Link to source

I would like the @fosdem community to embrace #accessibility

In effort of that goal I've started by recording some problems and possible solutions for the website:
github.com/FOSDEM/website/issu…

This is a lot of work that together, as a community, we need to address. #FOSDEM needs to be more inclusive for people with disabilities.

25% of the population has disabilities & the are part of our community.


We need to make FOSDEM more accessible

25% of the population has a disability. 100% of the population has temporary or situational barriers which needlessly stop them from accessing information on the web. The FOSDEM community isn't doi...
mgifford (GitHub)
#Accessibility #fosdem @FOSDEM

Peter Vágner reshared this.

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A silly finding with NVDA Composer by @FreakyFwoof is that the more notes you enter, the slower it gets to process each one. I have no idea if this is deliberate, and wouldn't be surprised if it is, as I'm sure on some toys from days gone by this is a real thing as it keeps having to move more and more notes around to make room in memory for new notes. When playing real music this probably hardly matters, but in this example I'm deliberately keysmashing while in QWERTY and chromatic mode so what I'm composing is pure nonsense. Anyway I ended up entering 542 notes, and as you can see, at first it's really fast but then it gets slower and slower, and if I'd kept doing it, it'd get even slower. Note that I was banging on the keyboard fast during the whole recording. Unfortunately I do not have a project file or exported MIDI as I cleared the whole thing out immediately.

@Andre Louis
in reply to Andre Louis

mastodon - Link to source

Jayson Smith

Okay. Seriously. I know this is beyond what this addon is supposed to do. But I would love, love, love a program that would take a MIDI and render all the notes, not just monophonic notes, as that type of square wave. Bonus points if I could change the ADSR parameters of that square wave. Also, did you figure out how to create that type of square wave? I know it's not *really* a square wave in the scientific sense, but it doesn't have that annoying raspy/scratchy sound which as I understand it comes from aliasing, since a true square wave has harmonics going to infinity, whereas a wav file has to stop somewhere.
in reply to Jayson Smith

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Andre Louis

It's fun that you can share projects with people just via pasting the clipboard as text. It gets rendered back into music at the other end. If you copy/paste the text below, you'll get a little Waltz thing I started.

NVDA_COMPOSER_CLIP v1
note 72 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 67 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 72 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 67 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 72 30
note 88 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
note 86 240
note 67 30
note 84 240
note 83 240
note 76 30
note 79 30
note 84 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 30
note 81 192
note 72 30
note 76 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 67 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240
note 76 30
note 79 240
rest 240

in reply to Andre Louis

mastodon - Link to source

Jayson Smith

Another thing I think it'd be cool to be able to generate from MIDI files are monotonic audio files, only one note is playing at a time, but where the real MIDI has multiple notes going, it rapidly switches between them. There was a DOS program from the mid to late 80's called Pianoman which actually did that, you could compose supposedly multi-voice music, but since almost no one had any kind of sound card at that time, all the program had to work with was the PC speaker which, unless complicated programming was used, could only play one note at a time. So it rapidly switched between the different notes, which had its own unique sound. I posted a few pieces from Pianoman sometime last Summer.

mastodon - Link to source

Here's everything coming to Perspective Intelligence in version 1.4

- Standard On-device AI - IOS Now, everyone can experience Perspective Intelligence even if you do not have an Apple Intelligence capable device.
- Web search for All Access subscribers - Perspective Intelligence can now search the web to get more up-to-date information
- RSS Feeds - You can now add RSS feeds to Perspective Intelligence to get the latest news. (1/2)

mastodon - Link to source

Looking for a record of #accessibility issues left on @fosdem website issue queue I wasn't too surprised to see @Edent had beat me to it github.com/FOSDEM/website/issu…

We can do better.


Can I update the HTML & CSS on the website?

I've notice that the HTML & CSS for https://fosdem.org/2025/ is a little out of date. Wrong doctype Use of obsolete elements like Metadata not compliant with modern standards Repeated use ...
edent (GitHub)
#Accessibility @FOSDEM @Terence Eden

mastodon - Link to source
Fedra is now open source, and there is no longer any time limit on it! Enjoy! github.com/trypsynth/fedra

GitHub - trypsynth/fedra: An open-source, accessible, blazing fast Mastodon client

An open-source, accessible, blazing fast Mastodon client - trypsynth/fedra
GitHub

reshared this

Unknown parent

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André Polykanine

@skobkin Алексей, специально пишу лично и по-русски. Это слепой народ, в смысле, разработчики. Ну или ооочень слабовидящий, но скорее всего слепой. Поэтому вполне вероятно, что на вид это будет эммм… сильно такое)
@Alexey Skobkin

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Democrat Taylor Rehmet is the victor in a special election for the Texas state Senate, flipping a reliably Republican district President Trump won by 17 points in 2024. texastribune.org/2026/01/30/te…

Democrat Taylor Rehmet wins solidly red Texas Senate seat in stunning special election upset

With ballots tallied from all but a handful of voting centers, Rehmet had 57% of the vote, besting the 43% for his GOP opponent, Leigh Wambsganss, who had a massive spending advantage.
Alejandro Serrano (The Texas Tribune)

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NV Speech Player 2.01 Release Notes
This release focuses on stability, correctness, and cross-language improvements. The primary goal was to address accumulated issues in the synthesis pipeline and bring several under-maintained language packs up to a proper standard.
Synthesis Engine Fixes
Phoneme Tuning:
M (Bilabial Nasal):
Adjusted formant values based on acoustic phonetics research. The antiformant (cfN0) is now set to 950 Hz to properly cancel F2 energy, eliminating the overly "stuffy" quality in words like "same" and "memory".
P (Voiceless Bilabial Stop):
Reduced frication amplitude and adjusted formant values for a flatter, more diffuse spectrum. The F2 locus is now at 850 Hz, appropriate for bilabial consonants. This addresses the excessive "puffiness" reported in words like "quote" and "paper".
K (Voiceless Velar Stop):
Reduced frication amplitude and parallel formant values to soften the release burst.
Language Pack Improvements:
Danish:
Resolved a significant intelligibility issue. eSpeak-ng outputs glottal stops for Danish stod, which were causing vowels to be interrupted and producing speech that was difficult to understand. Danish stod is currently stripped entirely rather than rendered as creaky voice. A proper implementation would require synthesizer-level support for laryngealization. We are exploring this for the future.
Spanish is improved!
github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…
github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…
github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…

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On Dec. 27, 2024, NASA’s Juno spacecraft witnessed the most intense eruption ever recorded on Io, Jupiter’s most volcanically active moon. The eruption spanned 65,000 sq km (larger than Earth’s Lake Superior) near the south pole and released 140-260 TW of energy, > 6x the total energy of all power plants on Earth.

3 other hotspots also lit up. Scientists interpret this as a single event affecting an underground network of massive, interconnected magma chambers.

jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-juno-mi…
1/n

1. A massive hotspot — larger the Earth’s Lake Superior — can be seen just to the right of Io’s south pole in this annotated image taken by the JIRAM infrared imager aboard NASA’s Juno on Dec. 27, 2024, during the spacecraft’s flyby of the Jovian moon. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM 2. Map of IO from angle that is close to that of the images below, with the South Pole in view. And my guess for the scarred area of the eruption near Nemea Planum. 3D-map source: http://terkeptar.elte.hu/vgm/2/?show=globe&id=111&descid=219 3. Images of Io captured in 2024 by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno show significant and visible surface changes (indicated by the arrows) near the Jovian moon’s south pole. These changes occurred between the 66th and 68th perijove, or the point during Juno’s orbit when it is closest to Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Jason Perry

NASA Juno Mission Spots Most Powerful Volcanic Activity on Io to Date

Even by the standards of Io, the most volcanic celestial body in the solar system, recent events observed on the Jovian moon are extreme.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

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My wife and I are looking to add some exercise equipment at home and want to make sure what we get is actually accessible and easy to use.
We’re especially interested in things like a stationary bike, treadmill, or elliptical, but we’re open to other ideas too. If you have personal experience with equipment that works well for blind or sight-impaired users, or that has simple controls, good audio feedback, or an easy layout, we would really appreciate your recommendations.

Specific models are super helpful. Thanks in advance for sharing what’s worked for you!

in reply to Michael Babcock

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Jakob Rosin

I'm using the Sole F 60 treadmill, as recommended by @ricky_enger Nothing too fancy, I track my stats with my Apple watch indoor walk workout. The control panel has flush buttons, but they can be found by touch and are not touch sensitive. It does come with an app, which is inaccessible. My goal was to find a treadmill to walk on, and it does the job perfectly.
@Ricky Enger

hometown - Link to source
canpoli, conservatives

Sensitive content

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People keep citing water/energy use to me and I remain unconvinced. The single best thing you can do for the planet is to have one less kid. A distant #2 and #3 are avoiding cars and flights: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.…

A recent estimate says using Claude Code is similar to running a dishwasher: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/20/…

If you are a vegan monk who never drives and also hates LLMs, good for you: you have my respect and admiration. But I don't think this is what's motivating most people's arguments.

Electricity use of AI coding agents

Previous work estimating the energy and water cost of LLMs has generally focused on the cost per prompt using a consumer-level system such as ChatGPT. Simon P. Couch notes that …
Simon Willison’s Weblog
#3 #2
in reply to Nolan Lawson

mastodon - Link to source

Nolan Lawson

BTW I am a childless vegetarian who drives a hybrid but mostly bikes and buses (ask my coworkers – they think I'm very eccentric), but that doesn't matter because that's not what this is about. People just want a rhetorical slam-dunk and they think they've found it.

@simon had a great comment on Lobsters where he pointed out that nobody seemed to care much about these things until LLMs came along, and they still only seem interested insofar as it applies to LLMs: lobste.rs/s/cw6f2s/ai_tribalis…


AI tribalism

133 comments
Lobsters
@Simon Willison
in reply to Nolan Lawson

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Nolan Lawson

There was actually a really interesting TPAC session a few years ago that explored how the W3C could help sustainability efforts. There's a lot to consider here: hardware production (e.g. e-waste), server vs client energy usage, network costs, etc. youtube.com/watch?v=o8avSFOuT8…

There's now also a Sustainable Web Design Community Group that's put out a set of guidelines, which mostly read to me as sensible best practices around UX design, performance, and accessibility: w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-g…


WebPerfWG TPAC meetings 2022 09 16 - Sustainability and WebPerf

Užívejte si videa a hudbu, kterou máte rádi, nahrávejte originální obsah a sdílejte vše s přáteli, rodinou i celým světem na YouTube.
YouTube
in reply to Nolan Lawson

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Nolan Lawson

And no, this is not "whataboutism" – I'm trying to put things into _context_, because context matters. If you read the article at the top of this thread, you'll see that recycling basically does nothing for climate, even though it "feels good" to do it. How much time did we waste, and how much further along could we be in our climate commitments, if we hadn't been so distracted?
in reply to Nolan Lawson

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Nolan Lawson

I also won't hide that I'm somewhat pessimistic about all these efforts: at that TPAC session, I mentioned the Jevons Paradox and basically argued that if YouTube were 5% faster, then people would consume 5% more YouTube. Nothing about human behavior that I've seen in my lifetime has convinced me otherwise, although I'm sure there are still improvements we can make at the margins.
in reply to Nolan Lawson

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Nolan Lawson

At heart I'm basically a degrowther who thinks the only reasonable solution to the climate crisis, species collapse, pollution, and all the rest is to dramatically reduce our consumption of the Earth's resources. But I'm also enough of a realist that I don't think we'll go there willingly – I think degrowth will be forced on us.

This is a very emotional topic for a lot of people, so I don't really want to get into it. And I'm hardly an expert; these are just my opinions based on what I've read.

in reply to Nolan Lawson

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miki

The only reasonable solution is to do whatever we can to invent better tech to solve these problems. Society will not accept degrowth (not until it's far, far too late), and a solution a society won't accept may as well be worthless from a Realpolitik perspective, even if it would solve the problem in theory.

I think we're doing extremely good work on that front. Solar is on an exponential growth curve right now (and we need more people talking about it), so are batteries, and batteries+solar will, sans environmental regulation, solve the energy problem in most places. In places where there's lots of sunlight and no demand for it, think deserts, solar can be used to capture carbon dioxide. That's extremely inefficient energy-wise, but it's not like people will use that sunlight for anything else, so it doesn't even matter. You can even capture it into biofuels afaik, which is another way to produce free energy that can easily be transported to places where solar won't work. There's also some very interesting work being done in making geothermal more economical and available in many, many more places, and that's basically infinite free energy again. Worst case scenario, we'll just let the Chinese build us nuclear reactors, they're doing a lot of that and know how to do it safely, quickly and cheaply, which the western world definitely does not.

The real problems we need to solve are a lot more prosaic. Making sure misguided environmental regulation doesn't slow down the switch from coal to solar (and accelerate the collapse of human civilization) just to save a rare species of frogs is one of them. Incidentally, this is the reason why Texas is building out far more solar than California for example, but this is far from just a US problem. We need to make sure there are no tariffs on Chinese solar, Chinese rare metals, Chinese batteries and Chinese EVs. In parallel, we need to make sure we're building all of those ourselves in the western world, and that there are no misguided regulations solving a small problem but causing a bigger one that prohibit us from doing this. We need to start building out nuclear now, because nuclear takes a long time to build. We might regret this in the future, but better to waste money building something we don't need than to not build it and have to use non-renewables. We have to figure out what to do with existing coal mines (in places where they still exist) and how to close them down as quickly as we can, despite the miners and their labor unions. We need to make sure that the government-associated, monopolist power companies aren't doing anything stupid to slow down the deployment of consumer solar. And when we've done all of that, we should do a carbon tax, to make it more economical for companies to invest in renewables than to stay where they are.

in reply to miki

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miki

And re: LLMs specifically. Unlike basically any other technology, LMs have very light bandwidth and latency requirements, so you can plop an AI data center in the middle of Saudi Arabia and serve the world from there. If we're so concerned about LLM energy use, we should encourage companies to set AI datacenters up where energy is free and abundant, instead of in places where the regulatory environment is the friendliest.
in reply to Luke

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Matt Campbell

I personally don't care if people who write code using LLMs get the benefit of any and all of my published code having been included in the training data, even without attribution. Let that code be used by any means to create more accessible user interfaces. And yes, I should have been explicit about that by dual-licensing AccessKit (my main open-source project) under Apache and Creative Commons CC0 rather than Apache and MIT. Just wasn't thinking about that in 2021.
in reply to Matt Campbell

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Matt Campbell

At the same time, I worry that code that I write with the help of LLMs may be tainted because of the uncertain legal status of the training data. I especially don't want AccessKit's adoption, and hence its effectiveness in making more user interfaces accessible, to be hampered in any way by such concerns. So I may just not use LLMs at all when working on AccessKit.

So I guess my copyright concern ends up being more practical than ethical.

mastodon - Link to source

A very nice first day at FOSDEM. I spent time at the @matrix booth and met overwhelmingly enthusiastic people, then left it to our fabulous team of volunteers.

I’ve met Allan and @jsparber at the @gnome booth, got one of those fabulous systemd T-shirts, said hi to the @postmarketOS gang, got a T-shirt and brainstormed with @pabloyoyoista, got to thank Proxmox and OpenTofu for the great tools they provide.

#FOSDEM is where internet friends materialize.

A picture of three T-shirts. One systemd/libadwaita, one postmarketOS and one Proxmox.
#fosdem @The Matrix.org Foundation @Julian Sparber @GNOME @pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS

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Me to Alexa: "What's the score in the Kentucky mens' college basketball game?"
Alexa's response: "Kentucky is leading Arkansas 85 to 77 with zero milliseconds remaining in the second half at the end of the second half."
Uh, somehow I seriously doubt anyone's gonna get anything done with what, by her definition, must be at most 0.00099999999999999999999999999999… seconds left on the clock.

mastodon - Link to source
Not only does the public not support ICE’s current brutal tactics, there is no public support for mass deportation beyond criminal migrants. In this poll, and it is consistent with public opinion going back 20 years, Americans oppose deporting long settled undocumented immigrants by 65%-22%
open.substack.com/pub/roberthu…

It is time for the mainstream media to join the resistance. Better late than never.

January 31, 2026
Robert B. Hubbell (Today's Edition Newsletter)

mastodon - Link to source

RE: mastodon.social/@blogdiva/1110…

now that we know #JeffreyEpstein was paying m00t to keep #4Chan open and available for pedos like him and that he specifically requested to keep /pol/ going no matter what, let me bring this oldie but goodie:

❝ QAnon was created by Trump’s fascists to take attention away from the Anons working on Opeation Death Eaters and the Jeffrey Epstetn case.

QAnon is a new form of COINTELPRO" ❞

#fascism #pedophilia #QAnon


your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 (@blogdiva@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 image QAnon #Xitterdiving
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 (Mastodon)
#fascism #4chan #jeffreyepstein #pedophilia #qanon
This entry was edited (20 hours ago)

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Send a message right now to the Department of Homeland Security’s #Tribal Affairs Director demanding that Tribal citizens #stop being terrorized by #ICE’s #racial profiling and that ICE release any Tribal citizens in ICE detention now. click.actionnetwork.org/ss/c/u…

A Message to DHS Tribal Affairs Director

Minnesota has 11 federally recognized Tribes and due to ICE and CPB’s racial profiling, Tribal citizens are increasingly reporting being stopped, questioned, assaulted, and detained by federal agents.
click.actionnetwork.org
#ice #stop #racial #tribal

mastodon - Link to source
I did something goofy at work today: we found a tactile drawing set, which includes a tactile protractor with a movable pointer in the middle of it. I was talking and moving the pointer in the middle of the protractor, according to the loudness of my voice, as though it were a VU meter!! People around me must’ve thought I was nuts ha ha ha. #proAudio #homerecording #WomenInSound
#HomeRecording #proaudio #womeninsound
in reply to Jessica the VI Artist🎚️🎹🌈

mastodon - Link to source

Zach Bennoui

Lol this is how you know you're a true audio nerd. I don't think I'd ever come up with an idea like that on my own, but I've done stuff like pretend whatever surface was in front of me is a piano and try playing it. Not entirely sure what the point of doing this was, there was no sound obviously, but I could just hear it in my head so that part didn't bother me. No idea if anyone could see me, but if they could I'm sure they thought I was a little weird
⇧