The BT Speak (blazietech.com/bt-speak-pro), particularly in its "traditional" (non-GUI) mode, takes such an interesting approach to implementing a UI specifically for blind people.
From the mid 2000s until I got my BT Speak, I thought the only viable options were to either implement a screen reader for a GUI, or implement a fully custom UI designed specifically for speech output and whatever kind of keyboard or keypad the device supports. The BT Speak does neither. 1/?
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Trying out Tuba again and wow, I'm quite impressed! The login flow was as quick and painless as it gets, and the client feels quite polished.
In der Anwendung von freier, offener und wirtschaftlich fair betriebener Software sehen die Lukis eine praktische Verbindung zur #Freiheit des Evangeliums und vieler Narrative biblischer Texte.
Das war auch an diesem @luki@kirche.social Wochenende im Theologischen Seminar Herborn wieder zu spΓΌren.
Ganz praktisch ging es z.B. um #GNUTaler, /e/OS, digitales in Kirchengemeinden, #Grist, #Matrix und Bots, #DeltaChat, #ElementX und die Server-Admin bei @hostsharing@geno.social
Die Location war ΓΌnrigens einzigartig 
#FediKirche #digtialeKirche #selbstbestimmtDigital#Linux #FOSS #OpenSource
If you havent done your #twim post yet at matrix.to/#/#thisweekinmatrix:β¦ then please do so asap :) We want to publish it eventually :D
They stole my voice with AI
Elecrowβan electronics company that makes Pi and ESP accessoriesβused an AI voice for multiple tutorial series which sounds _almost exactly_ like me.
I never consented to have my voice used to promote Elecrow's products.
@matrix ARe there any recordings of day 1 of the conference? The videos at:
2024.matrix.org/watch/
Only seem to show Saturdays talks, not Fridays.
Would be even more awesome to see them on #Peertube.
All the session videos will be online in the next ~week or so, and one of our speakers will be generously mirroring them on PeerTube here: video.innovationhub-act.org/c/β¦
And we look forward to rolling out our own official PeerTube channel before MatrixConf 2025!
Since this conference was not recorded at the Matrix Conf 2024, Element's crypto team did another run internally and recorded itYouTube
Sensitive content
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But have you signed up for the Thunderbird Appointment beta yet?
From a Mailing List:
As some of you may already know, System76 is working on their new Linux graphical interface, the COSMIC desktop. They have created a form with some questions related to accessibility. If anyone is interested in participating in the survey, please access the address below:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIβ¦
#accessibility #Linux #foss #orca #blind
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one of my regrets is when i wrote that article on stylometric fingerprinting. i should have waited to get better at stylometric mimicry and focused on how i did that to improve anonymity and make it harder to connect alts (a bunch of custom vale.sh rules to remove style and conform to a boring technical style, then reintroducing a targetβs style). instead i kind of spawned this community of people interested in using it for forensics.
i know theyβll see this post but idc at this point lmao
on the other hand, LLM slop awareness has created more bad stylometric analysts than any blog post of mine ever could.
βthis was clearly written by an LLM because it uses [very common vocabulary preferences]!β
There are clear tells, and LLMs like ChatGPT do have a set of (cringeworthy) emergent loose style guides, but I usually donβt rely on this sort of thing. I donβt have a linguistics background. I can claim to be good at fingerprinting avoidance but actual fingerprinting is too error prone.
I don't run a BT Speak Pro, but I do develop hardware based on the CM4. An internal temperature of 50 C is faintly warm, but not much to worry about.
By comparison, an almost completely idle Raspberry Pi 5 on my desk is sitting at 54 C.
There are ways to reduce thermal activity, but they might affect the BT Speak Pro's usability
turning off cores is the big one.
Seriously, I'd check with Blazie if they think this could cause problems. You're not hitting thermal problems at the moment, and you might find the device becomes slow or unresponsive
βYou are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.β
When people call you a βsnowflakeβ just remember they're quoting Fight Club.
Fight Club.
A satire written by a gay man about how male fragility causes men to destroy themselves, resent society, and become radicalized. And that Tyler Durden isn't the hero but a personification of the main character's mental illness.
His βsnowflakeβ speech is a dig at how fascists use dehumanizing language to breed loyalty from insecure people.
#FightClub #MentalHealth #ToxicMasculinity #Psychology #MentalIllness #Snowflake
Something to look forward to! π₯³
Enjoy your weekend everyone. π―
#teaser #theme #design #comingsoon
had a desire to do some cryptography today and I'm very grateful for Cryptographic Right Answers latacora.com/blog/2018/04/03/cβ¦
looks like there's also a 2024 post-quantum version here latacora.com/blog/2024/07/29/cβ¦
Google have really stolen an accessibility march on Apple with image descriptions with rich detail, built right into Talkback.
No more sharing to other apps, just focus on an image, single tap with three fingers and select Describe Image.
Browsing images on social media has never been so interesting or easy.
Here is an example, taken at Bewdly safari park:
A rhinoceros is standing in a grassy field in front of a wooden fence. The rhinoceros is facing the left of the image, its head is down and its long horn is visible. The rhinoceros is gray in color with a large, bulbous body and short, thick legs. The grass in the field is a vibrant green. The fence is made of brown wood and has a wire mesh on top. Beyond the fence, there are trees with green foliage. The image is taken from a slightly elevated angle. The time is 11:29.
Thank you Google. As a totally blind person from birth, I never thought I would be interested in pictures, I love them now.
This thread highlights one of the things I donβt like the most about people on the fedi: the insufferable arrogance of people (usually tech folks) who think this place should stick to their narrow vision and openly disparage anything that deviates from from that.
The beauty of the fedi is we can literally do anything we want here. It doesnβt have to be one way or the other. There is enough space on the internet for us to have our own special little places.
The dogma I see from people complaining about not wanting ads, when you are literally promoting stuff in your bio or not wanting influencers when we boost the sentiments we agree with and saying everything should be free when being on the fedi costs money is so ridiculous itβs beginning to border on straight up bigotry. Itβs ok if one doesnβt like these things, but fighting to keep them out of the fedi because of that is replicating the centralized environments we say we allegedly one to get away from.
Not having these things is not what differentiates the fedi from centralized platforms. Giving people the tools to build whatever experience they want safely is what is going to put this place over the top.
Anything less than that and itβs just recreating less featured versions of stuff we already have.
Mekka does a good job of laying out why basing the direction of the fedi based on what we donβt like is a losing game, especially when those dislikes are based on shallow and myopic points.
My dislikes of places like TikTok outpace my likes, but one of the things it has over the fedi is diversity of content, which is ridiculous to me considering itβs a closed platform with wonky curation.
I can fun stuff, serious stuff, comforting and informative stuff all together because it has a variety of people from all walks of life sharing what they think is interesting.
The fedi has always fought against this diversity while claiming this place is βbetterβ while refusing to acknowledge the tooling is worse, safety is an after thought in most places and most fedi projects are managed by untrustworthy people.
I believe in the fedi becoming the de facto experience on the web, but there is a lot of to do to get there. We still havenβt realized the potential of this place because, quite honestly the platforms we have at the moment are not good enough for use by people who donβt have extensive experience in tech. And thatβs not even getting into the inherent bigotry of the fedi for anything not white.
This place still just lacks the basics when it comes to building dynamic communities.
Just learned about Emissary, the social web toolkit.
At first glance, it looks like an extensible server that lets you define/extend ActivityPub types with your own, or with custom workflows/access rules.
Now I have to keep myself from going down a million rabbit holes with this. Tempted to dust off my old federated Steam/Itch game/digital project distribution idea, seems a whole lot more doable with something like Emissary than entirely from scratch.
Matt Campbell
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in reply to Matt Campbell • • •The BT Speak's central application is an editor, a modified version of GNU nano. Now, nano is under the GPL, so I guess I'd be entitled to share *that* code if I wished.
The other key component is what looks like a home-made terminal multiplexer, similar in function to screen or tmux, but tailored for the BT Speak UI. So, according to the ps command (which I can run while accessing the device via SSH), that runs on tty1, and the editor runs on pts/0. 4/?
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in reply to Matt Campbell • • •The Python script uses a "dialogs" Python module, which is also directly used by some other programs that are written fully in Python. The BT Speak system is quite polyglot. ui-main and the libraries it uses are in C. As I said, there are several shell scripts. And there's another program I'll get to later which is in Tcl.
I'll write more about this dialogs module after I've studied it. 11/?
Matt Campbell
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in reply to Matt Campbell • • •I could go deeper on various things that I've discussed on this thread. But I think I'll just briefly discuss the software update process and wrap up with some closing thoughts.
The update process pulls from the private GitHub repository (using an authentication token, presumably a read-only one, that can easily be found on the device), then does several steps (announcing each one), including installing Raspbian packages and compiling some things on the device itself. Then it reboots. 21/?
Matt Campbell
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in reply to Matt Campbell • • •I hope that many blind kids have BT Speak units bought for them in the years to come. It seems to me that the openness of the software in this device (in practice, if not in license) could help future generations of blind hackers get their start. 25/25
(At least, I think this is the end of the thread.)
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Matt Campbell
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in reply to miki • • •@miki The origin Git remote is configured to pull from GitHub via HTTPS, with a token embedded in the URL in .git/config. No, I won't share the token. I presume it's read-only but don't wish to test that.
The first line in /home/pi/.bash_history is:
/BTSpeak/Tools/prepare-for-shipping -a
Haven't gone looking at other dotfiles.
miki
in reply to Matt Campbell • • •Come to think of it, this is actually not a great idea.
If they need / are forced to ever revoke that token for any reason, if it expires, or if Github changes their authentication mechanism, the devices are pretty much FUBAR and will need a far more arduous process to make them updatable again.
Steve
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in reply to Matt Campbell • • •I've always wondered whether you could do something like that, but with Emacs and a hypothetical "Braille notetaker mode".
It seems like the perfect piece of software for that kind of device.
Andre Louis
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