Only 200 emails a day though, because third party email delivery is expensive. Hopefully that’ll hold us.

Email delivery should also be a lot more reliable.

Hey, we’re back, and I didn’t have to do anything, because it wasn’t me who broke anything. I’ll take the win!

Different but kind of related: try to avoid finding the “best setup” and over specializing in it. I started using the eloquence speech synthesizer in 1997. It hasn’t had any updates since 2002. But I got so good at listening to it at extreme rates of speed, that it’s now nearly impossible for me to switch to something else. I have to go through all kinds of silly nonsense to keep this ancient 32-bit synth running on modern platforms. If I had only forced myself to use multiple different synthesizers, even if I was slightly slower with each individual one, I now wouldn’t have this horrible lock-in. When I am finally forced to switch to something else, it’s going to slow me down for months or possibly years, because of how much I’ve over-specialized in understanding eloquence at over 800 words per minute, and how much of my workflow I’ve built around my ability to listen that quickly.

the fact that credentials go stale immediately upon leaving.

One of our moderators is also having this problem. Unfortunately, I’m not, and no matter what I do, I can’t replicate it. Once I log in, I stay logged in. So as the admin of the server, it’s quite difficult for me to fix. Could you let me know what browser and version of Windows you’re using? I’m not sure that will help, as I’ve tested on both Firefox and Edge on Windows 11, and stayed logged in for days at a time. But the more data the better!

about 9 downarrows to get to the the content.

So once you get to the h1, almost everything up until the content is a link or button. So in NVDA, you can just press n (skip to next block of text) once or twice, and you’ll be there.

The reason we’re still listed as Alpha is because we need someone to retheme Lemmy, and nobody has had the time or money to find and pay someone to do it. If you think screen readers are hard, try using Lemmy with screen magnification. It’s not ideal. We’ll be remaining in alpha until we can find a designer to work on these issues.

However, in the meantime, Thunder on IOS and android is an excellent mobile app for Lemmy. There are also a few desktop apps, but none of them are more accessible than the web interface yet.

Also the features it ads are really nice. Cross-platform, SSL support, JSON, etc. If I actually had any game ideas, NVGT is what I’d use.

Also, if you don’t feel comfortable building bookworm from source yourself, and you feel like you can trust me, Here’s a build of the latest bookworm code from github for 64-bit Windows: https://www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/rd388d

If you use Bookworm and use the built-in support for espeak, you can get up to 600 words per minute or so. Dectalk can go well over 900 words per minute. As far as I know, cocoa tops out at around 500 words per minute. So all of the options accept piper should be fine for you.

It really depends on your use case. If you want something that sounds pretty okay, and is decently fast, Piper fits the bill. However, this is just a command line TTS system; you’ll need to build all the supporting infrastructure if you want it to read audiobooks. https://github.com/rhasspy/piper

An extension for the free and open source NVDA screen reader to use piper lives here: https://github.com/mush42/piper-nvda

If you want something that can run in realtime, though sounds somewhat robotic, you want dectalk. This repo comes with libraries and dlls, as well as several sample applications. Note, however, that the licensing status of this code is…uh…dubious to say the least. Dectalk was abandonware for years, and the developer leaked the sourcecode on a mailing list in the 2000’s. However, ownership of the code was recently re-established, and Dectalk is now a commercial product once again. But the new owners haven’t come after the repo yet: https://github.com/dectalk/dectalk

If you want a robotic but realtime voice that’s fully FOSS with known licensing status, you want espeak-ng: https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng

If you want a fully fledged software application to read things to you, but don’t need a screen reader and don’t want to build scripts yourself, you want bookworm: https://github.com/blindpandas/bookworm

Note, however, that you should build bookworm from source. While the author accepts pull requests, because of his circumstances, he’s no longer able to build new releases: https://github.com/blindpandas/bookworm/discussions/224

If you are okay with using closed-source freeware, Balabolka is another way to go to get a full text to speech reader: https://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm