This is now complete. All services are back up, though expect slowness for the next 4-6 hours.

I don’t block anything. I work in accessibility, so it’s important to me to know what the experiences are like for my fellow users with disabilities. I also don’t want to recommend sites or apps that are riddled with inaccessible ads. I’d rather not give them traffic at all. Though even though I let them track me, I still get ads in a language I don’t speak for cars I can’t drive. What’re they doing with all that data?

All responsible server admins have them defederated. Hate speech and genocide denial, that is almost certainly against the law in Canada, Germany, and other places. We defederated lemmygrad for the same reason.

As someone who is completely blind, I pay for OpenRouter in order to have AI describe images to me. If more people bothered with alt text, I wouldn't have to. But it is what it is. I suspect there are models I could run locally that would do what I need; on IOS, apple handles all image descriptions locally on the phone, and they're perfectly adequate. But on Windows, nobody has created an easy way to get a local model running in the Open-source NVDA screen reader (https://www.nvaccess.org/) but there are multiple addons that work with OpenRouter. NVDA is open source and entirely written in Python, so it should actually be pretty easy to do. The main reason I haven't tried it myself is because I have no idea what local model to use. None of the benchmarks really tell me "This model would be good at describing images to blind people". Whereas the giant cloud models are semi-okay at everything, so everyone just uses those. But if we could use a smaller model, we might even be able to fine tune it for the specific use-case of blind people. Maybe someday!

If we look at how toxic and racist the local city groups are on Reddit or Facebook, I'm not sure this is a good model. If I'm a black trans woman living in a small town in Mississippi, my local instance might not even be a safe place, for me.

Similarly, I would encourage blind folks to join us at rblind.com rather than a local instance, because a local instance might not take our needs into account: many have captchas, some use inaccessible themes, etc. At rblind.com you can be sure that we won't deploy an update or configuration change that will break accessibility, because the server admins and moderators are all blind ourselves. But the beauty of federation means that you can talk to everyone else on other instances, so being part of a particular identity group doesn't limit you to just talking to other members of that group.

That was me, and my bad. As a blind person myself, I’ve never tried to post an image. I knew including alt text was possible, but I didn’t realize the method was undocumented, and Lemmy doesn’t prompt for it. If I had, I would have offered help, not just snark.

Surprised nobody has mentioned my two favourites:

• Behind The Bastards: Robert Evans (formerly of Cracked fame) talks about the worst people in history for hours.
• Oh No Ross and Carrie: "When they make the claims we show up so you don't have to." Maybe start with the series on scientology, it's some of the best work they've done.

Most of the other stuff I listen to is either industry specific or fandom/hobby specific.

NVDA. Without it I literally couldn't use my computer every day, or do my job.

I wish I knew. I followed the link to the Matrix community, and it was just confused people and trolling NAZI's. No Nicole, no attempt at catfishing.

Man, I’m getting flashbacks to my days running omenserve on undernet. I had no idea people were still doing this! How does the content compare to places like Anna’s archive these days?

So we at rblind.com blocked lemmygrad pretty much right away, for the reasons stated above. But I'm starting to wonder if the future of Lemmy instances might not be organized around topics. I'm not sure that, if Lemmy takes off, moderating a "general interest" style instance is sustainable. I'm also not sure everyone centralizing onto one or two general instances is a good idea. Once we get out of alpha, the intent is for us to be an instance focused on posts and topics of interest to the blind community. We disabled community creation for that reason; I don't want someone signing up with us and creating the FunnyAnimalPictures community,, because as a blind person, I just don't want to be their admin, not because that content is bad in any way. Parcially sighted folks who want that content can federate with whatever instance has it, and I can trust those people to moderate and admin that community. Federation seems to be as useful for better distributing administration and moderation workloads as anything else. My real worry is that beehaw is too general and open. From the description, I don't really understand what it's for, or who should be there. At least I know the purpose of lemmygrad, and what kind of people I might find on it, making the "block" decision super easy.

What about folks on low spec Android phones? Or folks who browse with JavaScript off? Every solution to block AI will block some percentage of humans.

So when I read that, I thought you meant instances owned by corporations. I think it'd be pretty nice to go to lemmy.microsoft.com and they'd have groups for all the Microsoft products where users could get support, learn about updates, etc. And you'd know it was an official community because it was hosted by Microsoft. But you could federate, and wouldn't have to make a forum account for every single company you wanted to interact with. I'm imagining lemmy.apple.com, lemmy.microsoft.com, lemmy.sonos.com, lemmy.linksys.com, whatever. I'd like that.

You posted an image without alt-text in a thread about blind folks? Really?

Yes and no. We do block Lemmygrad for hosting truly vile Russian propaganda.

Though it's causing folks to look at other alternatives, and realize it would be a good idea to have one. So even if communities don't end up moving, Reddit's power is reduced slightly, just because other places do exist.

Don't depend on this one, yet. The instance is still crashing every six hours or so for reasons I don't understand and can't make headway on.

Because the documentation on how to set up and run a kbin instance is incomplete. Entire sections just say todo. We need something we can run now, not something we might be able to run in October, if we are lucky.

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/...

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

Thanks, the Backwards compatibility is huge for us! We have a bunch of users who depend on mlem or thunder, so I was assuming I'd have to wait until updated versions of both of those apps was released to upgrade rblind.