Blind People Problems:

Lately I'm encountering instances where people writing substitute a small letter L for a capital i. For example writing Al (AL) instead of AI (ai).

This fools the eye, but not the text-to-speech engines used by blind and low vision users to listen to the text.

This morning I copy and pasted the title of a novel from the story graph and it turned out that the word Idea was written with an L (ldea) instead of a capital i.

I wonder what is behind this phenomenon. Is it a virtual keyboard speed writing thing? Saving the user the extra click on the shift key?

What is for sure, this practice is bad for accessibility.

Edit:

Since not everyone sees all the replies I'll summaries:

The main possible explanation for the use of an l in place of a capital I, was the use of OCR to digitize text in an image.

Considering the fact that OCR is built into mobile OSs and apps these days it is quite possible that is was used and as a type of AI it is clear why it would not understand the context and mistake identical letters for one another.

A second possible reason suggested in the comments was that people are trying to obscure the use of the term AI from filters or crawlers by using the wrong letter.

#BlindPeopleProblems #accessibility #blind #LowVison #TTS #TextToSpeech

Pred pár dňami sme vďaka @Zvonimir Stanecic a ďalším dobrovoľníkom zverejnili prvý slovenský ženský hlas pre #rhvoice. Hlas dostal aj pekné netradičné meno Jasietka. K dispozícii sú hlasy pre #Windows #nvdasr #android aj #linux . Aktualizácie sa zároveň dočkala aj celková podpora pre slovenčinu, vrátane už skôr zverejneného slovenského hlasu Ondro. Ak potrebujete #tts #textToSpeech k čítaču obrazovky, na čítanie kníh, inštrukcie pre GPS navigáciu, pozrite si prosím podrobnosti na jednoduchom webe.

hlas.ondrosik.sk/

For the past couple of months I've been working on Pied (pied.mikeasoft.com), an application that makes it easy to use modern, natural sounding, text-to-speech voices on Linux. It does this by integrating the Piper neural text-to-speech engine with speech-dispatcher, so most existing software will work with it out of the box.

The first beta version is now available in the snap store: snapcraft.io/pied

And available as a Flatpak from pied.mikeasoft.com

(Other package formats will follow)

I'd appreciate any feedback if you're able to test it, thanks!

#TTS #accessibility #ScreenReader #linux #TextToSpeech

Google publishes the source code for their TalkBack screen reader. GrapheneOS maintains a fork of it and includes it in GrapheneOS with the help of a blind GrapheneOS user who works on their own more elaborate fork. Eventually, we'd like to include more or all of their changes.

TalkBack depends on a text-to-speech (TTS) implementation installed/configured/activated. It needs to have Direct Boot support to function before the first unlock of a profile. Google's TTS implementation supports this and can be used on GrapheneOS, but it's not open source.

We requested Direct Boot support from both prominent open source implementations:

RHVoice: github.com/RHVoice/RHVoice/iss…
eSpeak NG: github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng…

eSpeak NG recently added it but it's not yet included in a stable release and their licensing (GPLv3) is too restrictive for us.

RHVoice itself has acceptable licensing for inclusion in GrapheneOS (LGPL v2.1), but has dependencies with restrictive licensing. Both these software projects also have non-free licensing issues for the voices. Neither provides close to a working out-of-the-box experience either.

Google's Speech Services app providing text-to-speech and speech-to-text works perfectly. Their proprietary accessibility services app with extended TalkBack and other services also works fine. However, many of our users don't want to use them and we need something we can bundle.

There aren't currently any usable open source speech-to-text apps. There are experimental open source speech-to-text implementations but they lack Android integration.

We also really need to make a brand new setup wizard with both accessibility and enterprise deployment support.

GrapheneOS still has too little funding and too few developers to take on these projects. These would be standalone projects able to be developed largely independently. There are similar standalone projects which we need to have developed in order to replace some existing apps.

AOSP provides a set of barebones sample apps with outdated user interfaces / features. These are intended to be replaced by OEMs, but we lack the resources of a typical OEM. We replaced AOSP Camera with our own app, but we still need to do the same with Gallery and other apps.

Google has started the process of updating the open source TalkBack, which only happens rarely. We've identified a major issue: a major component has no source code published.

github.com/google/talkback/pul…

Google has been very hostile towards feedback / contributions for TalkBack...

This is one example of something seemingly on the right track significantly regressing. Another example is the takeover of the Seedvault project initially developed for GrapheneOS. It has deviated substantially from the original plans and lacks usability, robustness and security.

In the case of Seedvault, GrapheneOS designed the concept for it and one of our community members created it. It was taken over by a group highly hostile towards us and run into the ground. It doesn't have the intended design/features and lacks usability, security and robustness.

All of these are important standalone app projects for making GrapheneOS highly usable and accessible. What we need is not being developed by others and therefore we need to the resources including funding and developers to make our own implementations meeting our requirements.

#grapheneos #privacy #security #android #mobile #accessibility #texttospeech #speechtotext #talkback #blind #backup

add Direct Boot support for Android so RHVoice can be used with TalkBack before the initial unlock · Issue #271 · RHVoice/RHVoice

More information: https://developer.android.com/training/articles/direct-boot https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_packages_apps_Updater is a trivial example of using this. You need to mark a sub...

^GitHub