Talon @talon@dragonscave.space

#Introduction For those that are new, Hi! I'm Talon! I mainly talk about #accessibility, #audio and #software - I mean to talk about more but for some reason that never happens.
Webdev during the day, audio game dev and music producer at night. Oh I also make sure dragonscave.space sorta kinda mostly runs.
#MusicProduction #AudioGames #VisuallyImpaired / #blind

So Microsoft Teams, the app, used to have this issue where arrowing through the message list with a screen reader would interupt the message it's currently reading with the word "Menu", effectively making reading messages impossible. You used to be able to get around this by just using the web version of Teams, but you guessed it, it now too does this. I just wanna cry.

OK so yes, there are no algorithms that dictate what you can and can't see.
But that still doesn't mean that scrolling fedi isn't very addicting.
So I guess that means I actually have to close it. And keep it closed. I can't just keep it up in the background. Because then I find myself mindlessly scrolling through the thing.
Sorry. I tried!

My GPD Win II broke earlier this year, and I can't use the new ones. I'm tempted to grab a Steam Deck though.
Also... Really Valve? Steam Deck?

I didn't want to have to go back to GitLab, but it appears as though Gitea is leaving me no choice. Unless someone has a better idea for a nice version control system that doesn't actively try to stop me from using it...
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/7057

I got jabbed today! Does this mean I have an excuse not to work tomorrow?

I get jabbed today! Somehow I thought it would both go quicker but also take longer at the same time to get an appointment...

And let's not even talk about code. A natural voice reading code is just... it just doesn't work. It just feels totally wrong. I need to navigate through code very fast. Not only do AI voices have quite a bit of latency, but if I'm quickly scrolling through a file I'm listening to the actual words just as much as I'm listening for familiar sequences of sounds. AI based TTS don't have that because things are ever so slightly different.
This also means that cloud anything is absolutely out. If you're making web requests to get your screen reader to speak then stop right now. I won't use it, you wouldn't use it, nobody would use it. I guess Apple can do this on their new devices because of the M1 platform, but even there you can absolutely feel the delay between pressing the key and the voice reacting to what you've done. The simpler the tts, the faster the response time, the happier I am.

I much prefer very algorithmic, synthetic speech for this. Not only is it very predictable in how it pronounces things, but it also speeds up much more. If you speed up, for example, Google's Wavenet voices, they start slurring words. This is obviously no good at all. It's authentic, sure, but it's annoying to me. I'm happy to use AI speech, for example the Siri voices that come with the new MacOS, if I'm reading something longer like a book, story and so on. But for every day use? No thanks. I think it's important that we don't get too carried away here. If I had the choice, I would choose a non natural voice. And that by quite a big margin. Here's your fun fact of the day!

I'm happy that we're getting more and more lifelike text to speech voices using AI, but here's something you might not know. These AI based text to speech voices can be unpredictable. It's not that they say things wrong or mispronounce any more than other speech synths do, but what definitely does happen is that it does not say the same string of text the same way twice. It might change the intonation, or even sometimes the speed of certain syllables from utteration to utteration. I use my screen reader with the speed very, very fast. Often I don't pay conscious attention to exactly what words are spoken because I've gotten so used to the text to speech voices that I use that my brain does this subconsciously. They have certain patterns that I can recognize and this tells me what the synth just said without having to understand every single syllable or word. This is important for reading short texts like names of buttons, window titles, web addresses, messages, usernames, etc.

Time Machine says backup is 100 percent complete. OK, but then why is it still going? It's been at 100% 5 GB ago... Oh... Oh I get it. It's THAT kind of 100%!

In today's edition of very loud wtf are you doing, I turned a tiny, unassuming pew pew laser noise into... these aggressive bass noises.

Fastly just renamed to Deadly

I'm a total Sidekiq noob and have no idea what Mastodon means with "No Sidekiq process running for the scheduler queue(s). Please review your Sidekiq configuration". Right!
"124Retries
5Scheduled
50Dead"
Right. Some of the dead ones don't seem too bad. And it appears as though things are actually happening.

Quick federation check. Are we borked?

No Mozilla, I would very much not like to use your VPN. Thanks. No, my opinion didn't change in the 5 seconds FireFox wasn't open. No, my opinion isn't going to change the next time I open FireFox, either. You're going to ask me again regardless, aren't you? Can I just say yes to make you stop? No? OK. Hey Mozilla, would you like to use my VPN? Hey Mozilla, would you like to use my VPN? Hey Mozilla, would you like to use my VPN? *repeats this phrase a bunch more while fading into silence*