What would make me happy? A 32-bit DLL of TrippleTalk / Double Talk / the same voice DR Sbaitso used. that one. I suppose Monolog97 would be the right path to look at for it.
And what could make more happy? A multi lingual version of Keynote gold? the revival of Rhetorical Speech TTS or RVoice I don't know...
Lately I've been thinking about how many things for blind people can unintentionally be a barrier in relationships/getting to know people. I find that a lot of friendships tend to begin from a shared interest. A game, a show, a movie, what have you. And so many of those things are off limits to a lot of blind people. Someone likes a popular game? Oh sorry, I can't play that with you, there are no accessibility mods or built in screen reader accommodations. Someone likes a given show? Sorry, that show has no audio description, you'll likely have to tell me half the visual/on screen stuff that's happening if you want me to get the same context you get. I swear this is not a pity seeking post. This is literally just some thoughts I've been having, I wish their weren't so many barriers to enjoying the same activities as sighted people, I'm sure a rift has been put into many potential relationships because so many common interests were stunted or outright impossible because of inaccessibility or barriers like this. Not to say that is the case in every relationship, I’m sure some great relationships have happened, but it is something I personally do experience very regularly and it gets really, really old
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I'm honestly so happy I'm not the only one who feels this way. I also find as I get older, I get more and more tired of having to come up with workarounds just to use the same stuff everyone else can use with no problem. It's exhausting. You would think of field like music production would be extremely accessible, right? Like it's audio, surely blind people would be great at that. But no, much of the software simply is not usable or has enough accessibility issues so as to not make it worth it for me. That's definitely changing, more and more plug-ins and DAWs are becoming accessible, but even so there's always the risk of set accessibility going away or having problems that can't easily be fixed by the user.
Somebody told me today that it was tea, shirt weather in #Milwaukee. It was forty two degrees outside.
I'm so sad I'm making C++ wrappers for everything. Brailab, SoftVoice, all of it. Let's make C++ wrappers for every janky little speech synth that cannot output its audio to NVWave Player. Let's just use the Minhooking method @samtupy used for his amazing BestSpeech wrapper. I've been looking for projects to do while off work. Ther's the projects. Eloquence 2.0? MinHook the fuck out of it. Spend hours, days, weeks debugging each synth. Why the fuck not. Sadness fills my soul deeply, and this helps numb it. I scratched my Cadence displays today because my keys were in my pocket and it left a gouge across the plastic. So yes, sadness fills my soul, deeply, I cannot believe I scratched up my new Braille display.
Multiple times this year I've seen people trying to crowdfund their open source work but won't tell me how much they need to continue working on it
What if I could have paid you the full amount you need? I'll never know, because you won't tell me. And I'm not interested in guessing, giving you money, and then you not doing it because you didn't get "enough".
Look y'all, since a few of you have asked about NVDA 2026.1 and my speech synths, I'm not going to start work on this until at least betas are out. @fastfinge has done a phenominal work starting around this, and his code helps me understand how such a thing would be done, but for one, I don't want an inter-process thing to be written in C++ but rather Python, sort of how he has it. Until #NVDASR develops their own adapter that developers can reuse for any DLL and just adapt function names or signatures to the workings of that speech synth, that process would become much, much easier. If that host process defined an API shape existing speech synths just hook into, I'm all for it. Then I'll begin that work, but not until then. Thanks for getting it, or not.
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@luiscarlosgonzalez LOL between Brailab, 3 versions of Eloquence, SoftVoice, SMPSoft, Flexvoice, I just will have my hands busy redoing all of it. Not going to look forward to that work, if there's a reason I get GPT 5 pro again, that'll be it because by hand to recode so many synths... Hopefully those other devs come out to do the work too, but it's never a 100% guarantee and NVDA can't commit devs to that work nor are they obligated to continue it after the initial release if they cannot. That's just the nature of open-source stuff, I myself won't have time to pick it up but I know @mush42 has been looking for new maintainers for his work. @fastfinge @ZBennoui
@mush42 @ZBennoui Yeah maybe someone will take ownership of Sonata not only the NVDA addon, but also the framework. Piper is another thing because the collabs are very outdated, many dependencies changed, and even Piper's repository has changed due to license conflicts. I don't know if the Piper creator is here in Mastodon, but maybe I'll...
I've been getting ready for HKC @radio's Christmas eve programming, but I'm taking a break at 8 PM to stream Miracle on 34th street, which is one of my Favorite Christmas Movies. Tune in about 20 minutes earlier to hear the Hollywood backstory. www.hkcradio.com
(Something about film archive organisation)
"Let's use a date to number the film
For example today it would be '122325'....."
NNNOOOOOO 😱
We are not in 2012, in month 23. (or 2013 in November)
It should be 251223. or better 20251223
YEAR MONTH DAY.
So things sort automatically.
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Breaking News: A devastating setback in recent DOE notice that essentially eliminates the Randolph-Sheppard priority for Army dining facility contracts. We will fight to protect these jobs and opportunities. Read our press release at buff.ly/7CgdwnP
#BlindRights #RandolphSheppard
reshared this
Holy crap. So I'm sitting at a restaurant, and a cover started playing that I wanted to identify. I could hear it fairly well, like I could hear the song and tell that it was country, but there was a decent amount of background noise and people were trying to talk to me. I pulled up Shazam to identify it, and I was like, wondering if I'd have to yell at people to shut up and walk like an idiot to the speaker for it to pick it up, but I decided what the heck, I'll just try it at the table with all of the background. And it friggin got it. I'd have a tough time describing what I heard in sufficient detail to another person, but it caught it. I'm still trying to process this. Lol
it's the holidays, and deep sadness still fills my soul.
Hubert Figuière
in reply to somecanuckchick • • •