Are you looking for practical ways to get the most out of using Braille and JAWS? Want tips to help you work more efficiently? Join us Thursday, January 15 at noon ET for a live webinar, “Six Ways …
Ahahaha y'all wanna know why some people hear whispering and others don't? With the latest NV Speech? I know who might. @@radiorobbe who reported it first. The Root Cause: "Dot" vs. "Comma" NVDA Sets the Locale: When you set NVDA's interface language to Spanish, Hungarian, German, Polish, etc., NVDA configures the Python process's global locale (via setlocale) to match that region. In the US/English locale, the decimal separator is a dot (e.g., 0.5, 60.0). In many European/South American locales (the "supported languages" you noticed), the decimal separator is a comma (e.g., 0,5, 60,0). The DLL Inherits the Locale: The nvspFrontend.dll is loaded into the same process space. The standard C++ string parsing functions (like atof, strtod, or std::stringstream) often respect this global locale setting. So, all the YAML files become invalidly parsed because they use a period. Ha. Wow. What a bug.
So we're going to refine nasality a bit, to actually let you specify durations rather than just having it as an "always" or "not" type toggle. Sorry y'all. allowAfterNasals will be turned into a bit more for the YAML so you can specify durations for nasalities
The weirdest part of self-hosting isn't the control, it's the silence. I logged into my dashboard tonight via the tunnel. No banner ads. No "suggested content" algorithms designed to doomscroll me. No tracking pixels firing off to a data broker in Utah, lol. Just my tools, sitting there, waiting. We really forgot what the internet feels like when it isn't trying to extract value from us every single second. It’s quiet here. I like it. #digital #minimalism #selfhosted #SmallWeb #AdFree
Feeling sad again, nothing's compiling, I broke my frontend, oh no, and not even GPT is fixing it, and I don't have pro mode anymore, and I'm just so out of options I could cry from frustration over all of it. Ugh. Stupid C++ and its cast types. I hate cast-typed languages Hate them.
Question for people relying on alt text: When one posts contains multiple images, should each alt text be written independently, or does it make more sense for one text to refer back to previous ones? Like, when the first describes shape and colour of a flower, should the second copy that description and add to it (independent alt texts), or refer back, like "the same flower [from a different angle, showing xyz]"?
So, uh right now the calculateTimes function needs to be refined to handle special cases for English vowels and diphthongs. I'm also working on that for the Frontend. Support diphthong normalization in pack files. It's not added yet but next update for sure
Jak se z nás stali geokačeři Přemýšlel jsem, jak v pochmurném prosincovém počasí dostat děti ven, až mě napadl geocaching, který se ukázal jako trefa do černého. Pár řádků o tom, jak se z nás stali geokačeři. #děti #geocachingblog.eischmann.cz/2026/01/17/j…(reakce na tento příspěvek se může zobrazit jako komentář pod článkem)
yes, yes. The output for "level" seems incomplete, possibly missing leading "l" and "və." This might be happening because the pointer iteration isn't handled properly in the script. espeak_TextToPhonemes might modify the text pointer internally, and I may need to adjust this to correctly handle wide char pointers (wchar_t*) instead of using c_void_p. Let's fix that. Why not, let's fix it all. All the bugs. Fix fix fix. No breaks.
OK, I got some questions: 1) I assume the instructions at the GitHub page to deal with phonemes are outdated, since they talk about data.py, right? 2) If I want a phoneme to sound different in Portuguese, should I create a phonemes section in pt-br.yaml and put the phoneme parameters there, or should I modify a phoneme in phonemes.yaml itself?
@clv1 nah, I updated them just recently :) the instructions should be recent. It now talks about the formats for the various pack files, so definitely do a control+shift+R just to make sure you get the latest version. Espeak is able to speak many of them, but you have to like, read them as individual letters sometimes. Yeah. I think JAWS is the only one I know where there's a way to get Eloquence to speak IPA, and supported posts about this (ruf.rice.edu/~reng/jaws-ipa.ht…) but it's tricky for sure. I will switch to Espeak sometimes in this workflow (or Speechplayer) and see how it speaks the symbol and compare as it's the only one I've seen in NVDA doing some interpretation.
So, I may not modify a phoneme in phonemes.yaml, because it would affect other languages, not only mine. Instead, I must create a new phoneme, then normalize it in my language yaml file. Am I correct so far?
@clv1 kind of. For language-specific tweaks: don’t edit a shared IPA key in phonemes.yaml unless you want every language to change. Instead: 1. “copy the closest phoneme to a new key (e.g. y_hu / ᴇ) in phonemes.yaml” 2. “in your packs/lang/<lang>.yaml, add a normalization rule that maps the IPA symbol to your new key” That keeps the phoneme table centralized, and language packs only decide which key to use.
Also, how can I hear each phoneme to perhaps discover better existing ones? Perhaps there should be a command line tool to extract and play phonemes, and test the voice each time I change a phoneme.
I have set the ESpeak dir and dll dir successfully, then opened the pack root, set my language to pt-br, and was able to play some phonemes at the list of all phonemes. But when I press the button to speak a text I wrote in the input text, it gives me an error. Pressing the button to convert a text to IPA gives an error too. The following two messages contains the errors.
for sure strange! Looks like it has to do with Espeak launching and maybe not finding espeak-data in the same path. We try to now find it more explicitly, and also if the error comes up again it should pass any Espeak errors through too. So if it appears again, it'll be more descriptive, LOL. eurpod.com/synths/NVSPPhonemeE… is the link, else the original one is the latest now too anyway.
3) Do you have special settings for NVDA to pronounce IPA symbols and unicode characters in general? Synthesisers like Eloquence, or ESpeak itself, tend to stay silent on most characters like those.
President Trump announces that from Feb. 1, there’ll be a 10% tariff on all goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, UK, Netherlands and Finland, increasing to 25% on June 1, until a deal is reached for the complete and total purchase of Greenland by the US.
I listen to someone recommend portfoliocharts.com and portfoliovisualizer.com and wonder if they're going to be accessible to me. I hope so, at least in terms of doing the things that I'd want to do, but they have "charts" and "visualizer" in their names, respectively... So we'll see. A lot of things out there weren't really designed with someone like me in mind. That's just my life. If I'm going to be using a new thing for some reason, then I'll wonder, am I going to run into any accessibility-related trouble with it?
Going to go eat something and chill a bit y'all, taking a break, let's check into the Next We Have podcast with Gareth Reynolds, love the show for chilling to. All his stuff, the more Gareth Reynolds I have in my life, the better.
It allows remapping your keyboard in many ways, and it's controlled from a simple configuration file (so, you can prepare one for your disabled friend).
You can, for example, remap the keyboard to only use its right half, if the left hand is dysfunctional (similar to the mirrored keyboard I made, github.com/clackups/qmk_firmwa… ).
Also, it should be useful for #disabledgamers , to map, for example, AWSD to different keys.
А як ви намагаєтеся спростити йому життя? Щодо мене, зараз я не вирішую ніяку проблему, але я сам сліпий, до того ж комп'ютерний ґік, люблю вселякі такі штуки, особисто коли це конфігурується у текстовому файлі.
@menelion ми випробуємо різноманітні альтернативи стандартній клавіатурі. Я зробив один фізичний прототип, але виявилося, що він не дуже зручний. Зараз розмірковуємо над новим дизайном.
А сенсорна не легше йому буде? Ну типу як у планшета, просто рухати пальцем по екрану? Взагалі, звичайно... жах. Сам терпіти не можу, коли людям мене шкода, але не можу утриматися від цього відчуття.
@menelion ні, там все складніше. Складно пояснити без відео. Рука рухається випадково, її складно націлити на клавішу. Ми уявили, що треба зменшити рух руки вздовж клавіатури, щоби простіше було націлити палець на потрібну клавішу. Тобто, кількість клавіш треба значно зменшити.
Тоді, може, щось на зразок джойстика (чи джойстиків) для вибору клавіш? Ну типу, один джойстик під одну руку, другий під іншу, і рухами вправо-вліо-вгору-вниз вибирати символ?
@BorrisInABox translation: one of our nodes has been sucked into a wormhole and will be available in approximately 9.42567 years with a latency of 7 light minutes. Your welcome.
@differentieel Yeah, that. I like the idea in principle, but just didn't want to deal with all the junk anymore. Things are worse to deal with now than they were back then.
@matthewcroughan Mostly, I got tired of getting blacklisted by <Insert_Big_Provider_Here> every couple of days, having to run around proving that I'm not a spambox or whatever.
@matthewcroughan @BorrisInABox @neil@co.uk You don't need to. You can end up on IP blacklists entirely by accident, or because $bigco just applies a weight to the entire IP range of your provider. And getting off them is hell.
@matthewcroughan @BorrisInABox It is when of them is your landlord, or your bank, or a job application, or anything else you need to interact with as an adult human.
Two of these are actual examples where I had this happen.
@Tutanota@mastodon.social Hey, I love what you do and I appreciate it, but please take the flatpak package more seriously. I hope you do this year.
Using an AppImage is not really a universal solution. For example, for those of us on musl distros (Alpine, Chimera Linux, etc.) that package is useless.
I really hope you consider treating flatpak as a first-class package because in musl it is our best and probably only option
@serrebi looks to be a timeline switching bug: it's telling me "home:" and "notifications": but not syncing it even with the setting to sync the timeline to the UI is checked. Very odd one. For sure the issue isn't that they're showing the same but that it's not shifting timelines even though the new one is announced to me. This one is tricky to pin down for sure. @Bri
@serrebi fixed: looks like I somehow had multiple instances of fastSM.exe up and running. Even simpler. Never let multiple spawn. Right now you can launch FastSM.exe as many times as you'd like. @Bri
I'm very happy with my frontend. It talks to my backend well. Saying that outloud will make me laugh every time. Sounds really dirty, but it's the truth y'all.
Indeed, I personally do notice a change in performance. To really test, just hold the tab key down. Do you hear the startings of letters consistently and does speech stop after you release it on a control right away? If so, the new frontend is not introducing performance penalties, I'd say.
Aha, how fitting for NV Speech Player. eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlay… is the first version to hit the 10th file milestone for my synthesizers. It's also the first time I'm using the new directory link. This copy fixes memory corruption problems in the frontend, Post-stop aspiration block was made non-brittle now, and the applyRules allocation performance fix. No new versions for awhile until we have tweaked more languages, so I'm done with new files at least until way later in my evening or tomorrow.
one thing that I dislike about NVDA at the moment is that whenever addon updates are available, it pops up with a dialog in the middle of whatever I am doing to let me know, hey, you can update your addons! Can you just send me a toast notification? Please and thank you.
I mean you can change that. Settings>Add On Store>Automatic Updates. Honestly though it's mostly at the startup and then I don't really mind anyway, get a bunch of random shit when starting up anyway.
Sadly you can't change it to a tost notification. Like either you can disable thaht entire check I think and then you need to check yourself, or enable auto updates, which is, idk, is that really better?
People asked for it, and I do think it's a great idea! All of my Speech synthesizers live at eurpod.com/synths - easy to remember URL, and if you want to check it for updates, easy to look at for a version difference. At most, we are only keeping the last 2 versions of a synthesizer, so they will not pile up here. Still uploading some of the larger files, but in the next hour this will all be updated. The old URLs will work for now, a little bit. As time goes on I will remove them from their old locations and update the blog page to point to this folder too.
Hlučnost tepelných čerpadel vzduch-voda je předmětem mnoha debat a panuje o něm mnoho mýtů. Když u nás bylo po ránu -15 ℃, využil jsem toho a nahrál jsem si naše tepelné čerpadlo Nibe F2120-8 při teplotě, při které už si opravdu mákne. I při takto nízké teplotě se jedná jen o šum, který už pár metrů od čerpadla nijak výrazně neruší. Tento model podle výrobce dokáže pracovat přes kompresor až do teplot -25 ℃, ale technik říkal, že ho mají vyzkoušené i při -28 ℃. To je na českou zimu dostatečná rezerva.
To byl split, že? Ten asijské značky dělají především. Je to levnější, ale menší venkovní jednotka, menší ventilátor, vyšší otáčky, větší hluk. Tohle je sice velká krabice, ale i při takových teplotách si to jen spokojeně vrní.
Hehe, ty seš nadšenec, u nás bylo -17℃ a já byl tedy taky koukat, jak to běží, že to nepotřebuje použít ani elektrickou patronu, ale telefon jsem nechal doma a honem pospíchal za ním A upřímně, všímám si, že nejhlučnější je TČ v teplotách okolo nuly, asi jak je "hustší" vzduk plný vody a ten to protlačuje lamelami a i ventilátor běhá na vyšší otáčky. Jakmile je mráz a klesne vlhkost, tak je to paradoxně daleko tišší, protože ventilátor sníží otáčky. Sice se více namáhá kompresor, ale ten je u dnešních TČ tak kvalitně hlukově zaizolován, že není skoro vůbec slyšet a to ani při 17 pod nulou.
@electriccz to ráno jsem na střeše 15 minut ometal sníh z panelů, takže 15 sekund u čerpadla už byla maličkost. 🙂 Jinak mně nejhlučnější přijde, když jede na zpětný chod a chladí. To ho občas slyšíme i v koupelně, nad kterou je.
We will be doing some performance tweaks in the C++ wrapper next update. I can already see people complaining that there's a slight hit. You want to know why? I made a mistake. Or maybe GPT. Well one of us did anyway. I wrote the base C++ outline for it and then it helped me. But uh, at the moment we are allocating memory for out and copying the entire text string for every single rule, even if the rule doesn't match. If we have 50 replacement rules (common in phonology), we are re-allocating and copying the full text string 50 times per function call. Ouch ouch. I'm fixing this.
It would be easier to ignore if people (not you) made free test accounts for testing their Mastodon client posting features. *old person grumbling noises*
@jscholes Even easier when you host your own instance ;) I thought about doing that, but I'd be creating another account basically on the same server posting to the same local TL. Once I add this visibility combo box this will stop being annoying too.
@jonathan859 @jscholes Quite a bit opposite to most of the Windows clients though. Plans are for a 100% native desktop app, no scripting languages like Python or JavaScript, and for it to be closed-source shareware. If I'll actually get any users, I do not know.
@jscholes Oh, interesting. Well, will probably depend on the interface and features and stuff. I have no doubts that it'll be a great product with you developing it though. Good luck.
@flyingpenguinMwauthzyx @jscholes Unpopular opinion these days, because not everything has to be open source. I don't know anyone who'd contribute to it and I don't see the requirement. Tweesecake also wasn't OSS and people loved it. I like OSS software yes, absolutely, but it's also work to respect kinda. I know that wasn't your intention just saying my thoughts. Of course Quin can and probably has a different reason.
@jonathan859 @jscholes that is true, and I can see that side of things as well. On the other hand, I can see why people want open source software as well. They get to modify it however they see phit if there is something that they dislike or if there are things that they want to change for instance.
@jonathan859 @jscholes like for instance, currently I am using a mastadon client. And yes, I know I probably spelled that wrong. Anyways, there are a few features that I want aded, so I might just vibe code it in. As unpopulare as that is, python is not my language of choice, so as a result, I am not good at it lol.
@jonathan859 @jscholes Okay, can't resist. So in the unregistered version, the app works perfectly except that every tenth time you post, an additional post is made that's an advert for your app, and at the end it says, "Please beg this user to register this program. Registration eliminates these posts."
The great thing is, people should not notice changes to existing sounds and tonality. What did change were expansions of rules we can define per language, but to everyone else, this update should not introduce changes in UK and US English, or how the voice sounds. That was not the goal. The goal was to decouple the IPA rule tokenizer into a nice, beautiful frontend.
A upřímně, všímám si, že nejhlučnější je TČ v teplotách okolo nuly, asi jak je "hustší" vzduk plný vody a ten to protlačuje lamelami a i ventilátor běhá na vyšší otáčky. Jakmile je mráz a klesne vlhkost, tak je to paradoxně daleko tišší, protože ventilátor sníží otáčky. Sice se více namáhá kompresor, ale ten je u dnešních TČ tak kvalitně hlukově zaizolován, že není skoro vůbec slyšet a to ani při 17 pod nulou.
Matthew J
in reply to Tamas G • • •