Well, Prism has gotten some great new functionality! I think the biggest is that Prism can now act in place for the NVDA controller client! It does not need the DLL present to communicate with NVDA since it performs the internal RPC binding automatically. The current downside to this is that there may only be one NVDA backend active at any given time, which is abnormal and inconsistent with all the other backends. If you currently try to do this, it will (safely) overwrite the existing one.
in reply to Bri🥰

@Bri No, it doesn't. The controller client is (L)GPL license, and I have done everything I can to comply with it. Even if the (L)GPL code is combined into the larger prism.dll library, I don't see how I could possibly be violating it given that the project is entirely open source and so complying with the "allow people to modify/relink" thing is from what I know automatically satisfied. I'm not sure how else to comply other than what I've already done.
in reply to x0

@x0 @Bri I honestly don't know. Right now I force dynamic linking unless yoru building for Emscripten. For the problems that might create, I keep finding conflicting interpretations about those problems all over the place. Which for something like the LGPL is never a good sign. Some people say it's a problem, others say that that's just a widely misunderstood clause. I really don't like the ambiguity
in reply to Ethin Probst

@x0 @Bri And to make this even more confusing, you're not really using executable code from NVDA, you're just implementing their interface. And the copyright situation of interfaces is even more unclear, especially with all the different countries involved.

The easiest thing to do would probably be to do a git blame on the ACF file and get an explicit okay from everybody involved in its implementation. There can't be that many of these people.

Tomorrow's my big development talk y'all, I'm gonna stay real quiet and hunker down. Nervous as hell, I hate dev talks. So. No speech player updates, let's give language packs time to change a bit.
I already see a few improvements coming, can't say what, but yeah, this will keep evolving the more folks try it and are honest.
We now restored the UK English sound in this pack very close to the sound it had in the original IPA rules, which were much smaller and sparce in comparison, but I understand how we were contaminating phonemes with each other, which was the huge huge downside before I moved things into the frontend.
Honestly, building that frontend was the best decision I made early. AI would have kept on piling in Python code, specific language variables, and stich me a 300 kilobyte Python file by the end. No no. We are not doing that.
It's funny how real work changes you. I used to be a spaghetti-code type guy, all day I'd just throw my code in a single file. Today I shutter at the idea of zero abstraction. If it's not modularized well, it's not worth reading as code, period, unless it's clean small code. Yes I'm that much of a snob. Gosh. AI will happily spaghetti all day, unless you're Google Gemini, which can (sometimes) do better at helping you abstract it, but you are still the architect, if you don't know coding fundementals, it's hard to use AI to code something not considered "AI slop."

lewd, kink, d+s, denial, interaction bait

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momento terrivel da Catarina

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“Europe is a regulatory morass that is built on bureaucracy, and the layering and layering of rules that constrain economic activity.”

Scott Bessant, US Treasury Secretary

To which Europeans say:

Flint, Michigan
East Palestine, Ohio
Uniontown, Alabama

These places are global bywords for the poisoning of people and nature when you have no regulatory oversight of business and you prioritise ‘economic activity’ at all costs over health and safety.

#Davos

Everyone is going to Threads. My professional community - iOS developers, AI researchers, accessibility advocates - they're all there. I'm completely locked out, missing networking opportunities and professional conversations.
This is disability discrimination. I cannot access Threads without assistive technology, and their systems automatically suspend me for using it.
ADA compliance issue.

Remember "don't print this email" in signatures that was a bit cringe? It doesn't feel that cringe anymore in retrospect. I'm doing an experiment now with this new email signature :D Anyone doing something similar? Could it catch on?

edit: BTW please absolutely steal/modify this idea if you want!

This entry was edited (1 day ago)

This is a test of using Fast-SM with our J-Say technology. This application is quite timely, because I would like to demonstrate to somebody how we can use the programme with bluesky. He has always wanted to use Bluesky and now he has an ideal opportunity of doing so. Dragon is working exceptionally well in this application, and I can easily correct errors such as the name of the social media network that I have just described. It treated the name of the social network as two separate words with no capital letter, so I had to put that right. There was absolutely no problem in doing so and there is no deterioration in terms of responsiveness on the computer while we are using Fast-SM with Dragon and JAWS. I am even able to proof read the post that I have just dictated with no difficulty. All good stuff!

#blind #accessibility

I'm writing a technical blog post and want to use a UML sequence diagram to explain something.

Only trouble is, I have no idea how to make such a diagram accessible to a screen reader.

I know I could just write up alt-text to describe it, but at that point I feel like I should just use the text _instead_ of the diagram.

Maybe that's the answer, but I'm hoping there's a way to get a screen reader to communicate the diagram in some way?

Any ideas appreciated!

in reply to André Polykanine

@menelion PlantUML looks neat!

I'm currently using js-sequence-diagrams[1], which looks like it has similar syntax as PlantUML.

Putting the code/text representation of the diagram feels like it'd be helpful for a small diagram, but maybe too much to keep in ones head for a larger one?

Better than nothing I reckon though!

1) bramp.github.io/js-sequence-di…

in reply to ragman

First of all, let me tell you something: we appreciate every move like this. You know, every blind person struggles. They may tell you it's fine, we're good, someone will even say "I'm proud to be blind" (sic!), but… we struggle. And if a person comes and tells like: "I'm posting a diagram, I want it to be seen by my blind readers" — woosh, like a wave of warm air in a cold winter street.
Why am I saying this? Because it's not even better than nothing, it's quite enough for a technically or scientifically inclined person to decipher what you're saying. I'm not proficient in this at all (JS-Sequence-Diagrams looks also good, also there's Mermaid supported by GitHub, I think) but if I need or want it, I'll read the docs and cope with it. Or… drop you a message and ask for help 😊
Anyway, thank you so much. It's really heartwarming.
in reply to André Polykanine

@menelion Aww thank you André. ❤️ I'm touched, and not really sure how to respond!

I guess I'll just say that I want to live in the world where we all look out for each other's needs, and where we can ask each other for accommodations or help when we need to. Where we all get those warm breezes when we're cold :)

Anyway, thank you again for the kind words!

in reply to André Polykanine

@menelion On the PlantUML front, I found this paper describing how it was used in a computer science class to help a blind student learn the content:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/354…

Some points I found interesting:

* the textual representation of the diagram was enough for, at least this one person, to be able to follow along in the course

(1/2)

I updated my "How to survive FOSDEM" article.

@fosdem organizers updated map so I updated it as well. The change was simple: there is no ATM at ULB (for quite a while).

So I added an info about it. And some minor edit.

marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2019…

#FOSDEM #FOSDEM26

reshared this

SpeechPlayer update: Huge one.
This update removes all the "frame:" settings from the voice dialog. If you liked them, toggle " exposeExtraParams = False
" to true in the driver's file. These are fun settings to play with and make it squeak in weird ways, but also, it's 47 sliders, and this way we only add the 16 for language settings.
- new: settings no longer say "langpack:" but have human understandable names. This should make it easier to know what does what.
- New: Croatian language. If Croatian sounds off, please suggest fixes to HR.YAML
- new: Engine setting, segmentBoundarySkipVowelToLiquid That new setting only affects the boundary gap we insert when stitching two separate chunks (two separate “say” calls / queue items).
- new setting: semivowelOffglideScale. Useful where you want the glide to join better with the vowel in your language, test with different values (default is 1.) Added in language editor only.
- Fixed: The driver works on NVDA 2026.1 again, fixed to set argtypes and restype right after initialization for Espeak phonemizer.
- Language updates to Portuguese (thanks @clv1), Polish (thank you @patricus). English glides should be less noticeable and more smooth.
eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlay…
in reply to Spacedog

@spacepup lol I always tell people to experiment, if you can send me your packs folder so I can also hear it and judge how it sounds better, well, even nicer. LOL. That's why I made this pack system, it makes it very easy to zip up the packs folder and just send it as a small file, or just like some people here have, tell me what value they changed to what and how it made it sound for them, then I usually will fold it into the main pack if it's really a nicer sound. That's what I'd really like from this, a community-driven sound. But it'll take time, which is why I built the phoneme editor. Speaking of which, I have to update it with the new values we added to the engine, gosh. Ah well, not hard.
in reply to Spacedog

@spacepup oh gosh I know, especially in a formant synth, I think we do have a good sound for it now in foreign languages but it'll get better. Once someone mentioned it was sounding more like a Z though that could actually clue me in on which way to tune it to make it slightly rolled. I definitely know ESpeak didn't get that one right until like the mid-2000s or later.

🇺🇸 We were asked for this in the past, and now it was done: our Liberapay account has been revived, find it at liberapay.com/IzzyOnDroid/

As @Liberapay has no option to upload a project avatar (or I haven't found it), and we're not using any of the hard-coded services, I hope you forgive us keeping my personal one in there for now. Should a change become possible, we'll of course update accordingly!

Kuuntelen tosi vähän musiikkia paristakin syystä, mutta joskus lenkillä Vorssan Suvi-iltaan kasattu soittolista auttaa ryytyneenä jaksamaan. Listalla on 99 % uudempaa tradia ja bluegrassia eli lajeja, joita kestän ylipäätään kuunnella, mutta seassa on jokunen nostalgianumero ja raitoja, joiden bpm sopii omaan kadenssiin erityisen hyvin.

Tänään tipahti peräkkäin Les Misin Do You Hear the People Sing ja perään Elina Salo alkoi vetää Kolmea iloista rosvoa :’-D

#luontoliikunta

in reply to J 🏳️‍🌈 no se yks Viitanen

Lapseton kuuntelee todellakin kotimaista lastenmusiikkia, koska täällä tehdään järkyttävän hyvää lastenmusiikkia. Vaikka joku Freija, Mutaveijarit, Mimmien fantastisen kaoottinen sovitus vanhasta Hirsilaulusta tai Lastenmusiikkiorkesteri Ammuun kaunis versio Kimalaisten kehtolaulusta, jota en saa kuunnella liian usein, koska jokin Mannerin tekstin tässä versiossa ravistelee aivan liikaa mun olematonta sieluani.

RE: mastodon.social/@droidify/1159…

Very excited to see #Droidify implement the #IzzyOnDroid download statistics!

This means 2 out of the top 3 #FDroid clients now show download statistics for apps downloaded from IzzyOnDroid. Hopefully this convinces more repositories to adopt this!

The part I love most is the different directions Droidify and Neo Store took it. Droid-ify went for simple, just showing the total amount of downloads, while Neo Store went for detailed graph.

What's your preference? Simplicity or detail? :)


Droid-ify v0.6.8 Hotfix :psyduck:

Fixed:
- Apk file integrity check failing
- Download stats data validation
- Performance in apps list

Full changelog available here: github.com/Droid-ify/client/re…

#droidify


IzzyOnDroid ✅ reshared this.

in reply to Sylvia

So I don't really see the issue to be honest. The only possible risk is if you disable Android's signature verification with XPosed modules (which would be a horrible idea) and happen to get the one signature that somehow would match in MD5. But both IzzyOnDroid and F-Droid already use an allowlist of signatures per app, so this would already be blocked serverside there.

Lacking index-v2 is not a security risk at all but would be nice for faster update checks.

This entry was edited (7 hours ago)
in reply to Sylvia

@TheJnx Obtainium on the other hand is often used to get APKs directly from developers with no malware scan or anything. So if a dev gets their system infected by malware and because of that uploads a build with malware, you will just instantly get that and infect your device, there is no party in between to scan or rebuild the app from source.

Personally, I find "dev gets their system infected by malware" a much more likely scenario, which is why I don't understand Obtainium as "more secure".

in reply to Sylvia

@TheJnx Of course SHA would be better, so nice to see LooKeR will fix that: mastodon.social/@Iamlooker/115… :)
in reply to Sylvia

for that reason I will continue to say that either Github or Codeberg, any other source, as such is for more experienced people, Obtainium is obviously safe (as far as it goes), allows more than 10 sources from which to download apps, but of course, it all depends on using reliable sources, review the code, use an antivirus (although I doubt the quality of these), that the repository has been reported in that case, etc.

I must admit that I have not stopped using Izzyondroid, only for one app (since the versions there seem to me more stable) but of course, Izzyondroid seems to me that unlike F-Droid allows a wider catalog of apps, but of course, for everything I use Obtainium itself because it allows me to save all those apps and apks that could be scattered on my device

State of Accessibility on Linux, 2026:

Users: Wayland broke accessibility.

Wayland: Not our problem, talk to the compositor.

KDE & Gnome: Expose what we need for accessibility, plz?

Wayland: Security risk. No.

Factorio dev: This compromise?

Wayland: Ok, fine...

Also Wayland: Actually, no.

User: *researches how to grow new eyeballs* It'll be solved faster.

#linux #accessibility #wayland

Droid-ify v0.6.8 Hotfix :psyduck:

Fixed:
- Apk file integrity check failing
- Download stats data validation
- Performance in apps list

Full changelog available here: github.com/Droid-ify/client/re…

#droidify

Face the facts:
AI is here to stay. Don't like it? You anti? Sorry but, bye Felicia. This stuff's existed for years now, it just wasn't so exposed. And it isn't going to receed. It'll continue to build. Your anti-barriers shall crumble. Your computer will be artifcialified, and if you don't like it, might as well use ancient ones. Even those processors! Wonder why prices are rocketing up? AI. Run as much as you like. But it'll catch up. It's everywhere. It's been everywhere. That won’t change.🤖
in reply to Ethin Probst

@draeand Most of that was me screwing around, but from a serious perspective... yes. We don't know what's truly going to happen. There are theories, hypotheses, conspiracies, that sort. What we do know however, is that it is altering the balance. What was once locked in a box has been unleashed, and is flying high in the sky. The more serious part of my ridiculous post is that we're nearing that boundary where AI is sort of the new norm, and only so much can be done to suppress it.

I really love this one bug where Firefox dev tools' right-click Inspect Element button works reliably for a bit, then inexplicably stops and pulls up the browser console instead, meaning the item doesn't actually inspect the element. It pulls up the browser console input area instead, which is of course what I wanted to do in the first place when trying to inspect an element.

Related, I like this other bug where tabbing from the browser console switches focus between the text input and console messages, but shift-tab lives in its own world with its own unique list of elements, navigating instead through the console messages area and what looks to be a long list of CSS selectors and styles. I tried using this to reach the element inspector but can't do that either.

Becoming less and less apologetic about my AI use by the day. Want me to not use the water-and-power-guzzling mechanoid? Don't make it so difficult to use every basic tool that I have to ask another tool to use it for me.

Trump threat leads Greenland to release ‘crisis’ guidelines

ctvnews.ca/world/article/green…

We need the same here. If the Hummers roll in.

During the early pandemic, everyone was using online tools for lessons, work, & events. As soon as hegemons wanted not just "essential workers" but everyone back at the grindstone, the accessibility that online can offer was yanked back from disabled ppl.

We warned at the time that the lesson to take from how "horrible" people thought online schooling was was to *improve* it. That the years of ableist underinvestment in creative accessible online tools & training for presenters/teachers was largely to blame. Abled ppl ignored this or wrote op-eds saying online was inherently bad.

Just this week alone, we've heard how schools in Minnesota are trying to instruct students online and doctors are doing telemedicine because of ICE kidnappers. A rail crash in Catalunya resulted in a university cancelling exams because students can't commute to school.

Even if you're naïve enough to assume there will only be one pandemic, there are other reasons for accessibility.

#Ableism #Accessibility #EmergencyPreparedness

Reading about #Nvidia CEO crying about people not liking #AI, though it was a good time to recover this historic piece of art from the Copyright wars of the start of the century. Cc'ing @pluralistic

Original at flickr.com/photos/akma/9208227…

This entry was edited (19 hours ago)

In episode 1 million and 1 of Google breaking accessibility, someone decided to slap aria hidden on basically the entire page on google drive public link pages, but here's the weird thing, only in Firefox. I don't know if chromium and Safari browsers just have a workaround just for this kind of developer/AI stupidity and bypass it and firefox doesn’t, or if something in google's code only breaks this on firefox.

Either way recovering out of this is fun. I have to use AXSHammer to kill all aria hidden. But, this doesn't always work. If I get lucky and the right thing gets focused Shift+F10 will give me the firefox context menu and I can do it. If not, well, just gotta keep refreshing the page until it does because due to the whole invisible to the screen reader problem NVDA/VoiceOver won't let me bring the mouse to anywhere useful to pop up the menu.

in reply to Sarah dreams of beans

If the most inspiring parts of Carney's speech are "facing reality" and "strength through cooperation" I have such good news! Neoliberals like him always co-opt their inspiring rhetoric from *actual* liberatory movements, and you could be getting your inspo straight from the source. See if land back, mutual aid, prison abolition, anti-fascism, community self-defense, labour solidarity, or privacy rights movements get you anywhere
in reply to Sarah dreams of beans

If the parts of Carney's speech that inspire you are about building up national power at the expense of ethics and ideals, maybe spend some time reflecting on whether building homegrown corporate fascism would actually do anything to resist the American regime or whether that would be complying in advance and land us in the exact same place

After a good 30 minutes, I've gotten Emacspeak working rather well with mastodon.el. Goodness all those Emoji. For now, n and p read next/prev post well, and t lets you know you're doing new toot. And that's all the making stuff I can do right now.

Dropbox link: dropbox.com/scl/fi/zz4632vjlau…

#Emacs #foss #emacspeak #accessibility #blind

Happy to provide detailed documentation to NFB for escalation to Meta. This needs human review from people who understand assistive technology, and it needs to be escalated to Meta's accessibility and legal teams.
How are blind users supposed to access Threads if screen readers trigger automatic suspensions?
#Accessibility #A11y #Threads #Meta