🪞 Introducing Mirror Hall, an app to turn any Linux devices into a second wireless monitor!

We use semi-custom P2P screen sharing optimized for low latency. Only Mutter-based DEs are currently supported as *senders*, whereas all DEs work as receivers.

This is our first unstable release, sp please be kind and report issues. If you are an #ARM user, we would love your help testing the gstreamer pipeline on new phones!

notes.nokun.eu/post/2024-09-22…

#linux #opensource #foss #gnome #apps #gstreamer

Our In-Process blog is out! This week, we feature NVDA 2024.3.1, Mykael making it happen in Brazil, RACQ's Road Ahead article, NVDA 2024.4 Beta 4 and Which reference is right for me?

Read it all here: nvaccess.org/post/in-process-2…

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Blog #News #Newsletter #FOSS

Annnnd the air quality monitoring array has been deployed at #MatrixConf! Can you guess which room the BarCamp is starting in? 😂

Tomorrow will be the real test of the venue's ventilation, as we're expecting about 4x the attendees that we have today.

We take the #HealthAndSafety of our community seriously and are requiring masks indoors this year. The data we collect will help us calibrate our approach with this venue when we return!

#PHPledge #PublicHealthPledge #AQI #COVID #OpenSource #FOSS

Wishing everyone a great time at The #Matrix #Conference by The Matrix.org Foundation starting today in Mitosis LAB in #Berlin, #Germany

foss.events/2024/09-19-the-mat…

@matrix

#TheMatrixConference #TheMatrix.orgFoundation #foss #floss #freesoftware #opensource #events #europe

GNOME 47 (codename “Denver”) is out today! I’ll be celebrating by upgrading my desktop to Fedora Silverblue 41 beta.

My favorite feature is definitely Accent Colors, but there is a lot of refinement and polish in this one. Check it out:

release.gnome.org/47/

#GNOME #GNOME47 #Linux #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #FLOSS

We love hearing wonderful success stories from our users. This week, we are very pleased to present to you Mykael, who is busy making it happen in Brazil!

nvaccess.org/post/mykael-makes…

Thanks Mykael! Would you like to share how you are using NVDA with us? We'd love to hear from you! Please do drop us a line at info@nvaccess.org

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Employment #Software #FOSS #Success #GoodNews

NVDA 2024.4 Beta 4 is now available for download & testing.

Changes introduced in Beta 4:
- Fixed the visual layout of NVDA’s Braille Settings page.
- Fixed an issue causing text not related to shortcut keys to appear in the Commands Quick Reference.
- Updates to translations.

Full information and download at: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-4b…

#NVDA #NVDAsr #FOSS #PreRelease #Software #Beta #ScreenReader #Accessibility

Upscaler version 1.3.0 was just released! The release is pretty large and includes some nice features and visual improvements:

- Introduce queue system to allow users to upscale images right after the other
- Add branding colors
- Port to latest Adwaita widgets
- Allow dropping remote images
- Allow pasting images from clipboard
- Make window draggable from anywhere
- Delete temporary file when unused
- Switch to Upscayl-NCNN from Real-ESRGAN ncnn Vulkan
- Update and rework translation
- Add Bulgarian translation

Unfortunately, I completely forgot that the GNOME 47 runtime isn't released yet. The update will be available later once the GNOME 47 runtime is out. If you want to try it out, you can build it from source (roughly a few minutes) using GNOME Builder: gitlab.gnome.org/World/Upscale…

#GNOME #libadwaita #GTK4 #FOSS #OpenSource #OSS #Upscale

The user "neeeeow" ported Bluecurve, the desktop theme used in Red Hat Linux 8/9 and Fedora Core up to 4, to GTK3/4.

Supports #XFCE and #MATE

github.com/neeeeow/Bluecurve

#linux #ui #2000s #foss

For those on the beta channel, NVDA 2024.4 Beta 3 is available for testing. LibLouis has been updated fixing issues in Spanish and adding new Thai and Greek tables. There are also updates to NVDA translations. Read the full info and download at: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-4b… (Note that Beta 2 released last week included the add-on update check fix included in 2024.3.1 today).

#NVDA #NVDAsr #Beta #FOSS #PreRelease #Update

NV Access is pleased to announce that version 2024.3.1 of NVDA, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, is now available for download. We encourage all users to upgrade to this version.

This is a patch release to fix a bug with the automatic add-on update notification. When automatically checking for add-on updates, NVDA no longer freezes on poor connections.

Full details and download at: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-3-…

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Patch #BugFix #FOSS #New

Okay, so I just have to rant about something that I think is going to hold the Linux Desktop back a bit, especially for blind users. That is config files. Specifically, editing some file that's got no kind of linter, or checker, to make sure that whatever the user put in it works and doesn't leave one without speech.

So, this is specifically about the Speech dispatcher, which is a package in Linux a bit like Microsoft's SAPI. Of course, there's that new one, Spiel, that's being worked on, but I've not tried it yet. So, you can run spd-conf to set up a config file, but a lot of folks tell me that, in order to increase the default speech rate for stuff like games that use speech-dispatcher, web apps that speak through speech-dispatcher, self-voicing apps, I'd have to edit the config file.

Now, that's not awful for me, I can do it. But there really, really needs to be a GUI for it. And if you ask *me* why I don't make it myself, I'll tell you that if it's so easy, you should have made it with the snap of *your* tallented fingers, instead of spending all that time being a reply-guy. Windows has a speech properties dialog. Mac has Spoken Content in System Settings. Linux should have something similar. And, if it turns out that there is and I just don't have the proper package installed, I'll gladly change my tune to "distros should have this installed by default."

I've also seen this in Emacs packages like Ellama, where you have to set up Emacs Lisp calls to the right function with the right parameters inside your usepackage block, and it's hard for me to figure out how to add the openAI-compatible service that I have to Ellama. And AI hasn't helped yet.

So, having things being customizable is amazing. It really is. There are so many keyboard configuration settings, for example, that I think blind people are going to love playing with. But goodness, there needs to be something to change your system TTS stuff, and hopefully one day we can have a command to turn on and off the screen, like the iOS screen curtain so we can maintain privacy.

#Linux #accessibility #blind #LinuxDesktop #foss #tts

Our In-Process blog is out. Today we have a reminder of NVDA 2024.3, info on NVDA 2024.4 and our Beta / RC program, details of the upcoming SPEVI conference 2025 and a walkthrough of creating a portable copy and the highly anticipated change to the process which now creates a folder for you.

Read now at: nvaccess.org/post/in-process-5…

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #FOSS #Portability #Portable #Bea #PreRelease #News #Blog #Newsletter

Oh, thank goodness not having a fully functional screen reader isn’t a blocker for Fedora 41. We wouldn’t want them to miss their 10th anniversary of shipping an operating system without a fully functional screen reader, after all.

ar.al/2024/06/23/fedora-has-be…

#Fedora #RedHat #IBM #a11y #accessibility #screenReader #orca #linux #openSource #FOSS #ableism masto.ai/@phoronix/11307885166…

Something I really like about Forgejo is how seriously they are taking software freedom.
- They use Forgejo itself as their git forge, not GitHub
- No reliance or linking to proprietary corporate services such as Patreon, Twitter, Facebook etc. They use Mastodon and Liberapay.
- No Dockerhub, their OCI images are on Codeberg.
- No Discord! (really hate how many FOSS projects use it)
- Their documentation does not recommend proprietary developer tools such as VSCode or Sublime Text.
- They recently switched to a copyleft license

Very refreshing, considering how many other popular git forges are either proprietary or "open-core"

#Forgejo #Codeberg #FOSS #Git #GitHub

Some updates on my #Libervia work:

- Kicked off #email #gateway project (nlnet.nl/project/EmailXMPPgate…) using IMAP/STMP. Basic gateway should be coming soon.
- Preparing next major release: web frontend design & internal improvements in progress. The release will be *huge*.
- Started new desktop frontend; more details to follow.
- Aiming to resume blogging and weekly videos this week, if time allows.
- Targeting a Libervia-based service by the end of the year.

#XMPP #nlnet #FOSS #decentralization

NVDA 2024.4 Beta 2 is now available. Changes from Beta 1:

- The stability of NVDA’s Poedit support has been improved with the side effect that the minimum required version of Poedit is now version 3.5.

- NVDA is no longer as sluggish when arrowing up & down through large files in VS Code.

- NVDA no longer freezes while checking for add-on updates.

- Updates to translations.

Please go to nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-4b… for the full what's new & to download.

#NVDA #NVDAsr #Beta #FOSS #ScreenReader

It just occurred to me that none of the classic #InstantMessaging systems are still running. #ICQ, #AOLInstantMessenger, #YahooMessenger, and #MSNMessenger are all gone. I have lost contact with all my old friends there. I doubt I'll ever hear from them again.

The #OpenSource, #federated competitor to these protocols, #XMPP, remains in operation and has outlived them all. So did #IRC, the protocol that arguably inspired them.

Proprietary software and protocols come and go, but #FOSS endures.

This week in Plasma: inhibiting inhibitions and more!

pointieststick.com/2024/08/30/…

@kde@floss.social @kde@lemmy.kde.social
#KDE #Plasma #KDEPlasma #Linux #FOSS #OpenSource

NVDA 2024.4 Beta 1 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what the next version of NVDA has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome you to download the beta and provide feedback using our issue reporting process.

This release includes a number of improvements in Microsoft Office, braille, and document formatting.

For full information and to download, go to: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-4b…

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Beta #FOSS #PreRelease

If us users don't contribute to #foss software - using it, reporting bugs, providing feedback, donating whatever amount, choosing it over a closed source & more - at the end, it will be big corps & monopolies running our digital lives.

Last week, I used @organicmaps and @openstreetmap for my navigation. Added over 7 new spots (hotels, parks, POI's & more), making these maps & the app, a little more useful for us all. Also, quite happy to see that most places I visited where already there!

For those who use IBM TTS on Linux. Get the IBMTTS dictionaries, copy them to /var/opt/IBM/ibmtts/dict, change files like this, from Enu-main.dic to main.dct. And then it should work. Do change the rest of those files too. Root and abbreviantion. Oh yeah enu-abbr.dic should be abbreviation.dct. So: abbreviation.dct main.dct root.dct.

#linux #foss #accessibility #IBMTTS #blind

I really like the idea of, instead of collaborating on a document via (for example) Google's servers and Google Docs, being able to have collaborators' computers talk to each other directly and share edits that way.

I really hope that "local-first" gains at least the sort of steam the FOSS movement has — as I've seen people comment, FOSS doesn't help if your computation is happening on someone else's computer.

wired.com/story/the-cloud-is-a…

#LocalFirst #Cloud #CloudComputing #FOSS #Libre