#partiallysighted — Public Fediverse posts

Captcha and blind users and their email addresses. Why it is a problem.

https://universeodon.com/@FreakyFwoof/111956924313468553

#Captcha
#Blind
#SightImpaired
#PartiallySighted
#EMail
#Spam
#Accessibility

#Blind and #PartiallySighted people on Mastodon and the Fediverse use special apps called “screen readers” that read text out loud, so they can tell what is on the screen.

There are many things that #sighted people can do to make their posts more accessible to people using #Screen Readers.

It is all fine. And also there are #SpeechToText apps, allowing people dictate their posts. But wouldn't it be nice to have a #VoiceMessages available as well? In a way similar to instant communicators? It could work as a #ServerSide #plugin or in a client. Perhaps somebody is already working on it?
How do I make posts more accessible to blind people on Mastodon and the Fediverse? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse

I have an #accessibility question for #blind and #PartiallySighted users who use text-to-speech tools.

Has the recent development of machine-learning based synthetic voices such as Piper, Coqui, Mimic3 and Amazon Polly had any useful impact for you, or do you still use e-speak style voices?

Do the tools you regularly use support "Neural Voices" of the kind mentioned above?

I've noticed that integration is limited - for example, I can get transcription and reading tool Speech Note (https://flathub.org/apps/net.mkiol.SpeechNote) to read me anything I like in a range of up-to-date voices, but Gnome Orca - my OS-wide screen reader - remains intensely hard to customise.

But I'm a Linux user, and thus aware that accessibility remains an embarrassingly low priority in practical open source development, even where the component parts exist.

For example, few of the projects linked by the Piper team (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper?tab=readme-ov-file#people-using-piper) are focused on accessibility.