@freya What client are you using? Did you end up finding something platform-native with decent accessibility, notably skipping the nonstarter that is forced QR-driven verification that Element appears to have?

Mark Zuckerberg sues Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana, filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta. It’s not Mark Zuckerberg’s fault that his name is Mark Zuckerberg. But, like millions of other business owners, Mark Zuckerberg bought Facebook ads to promote his legal practice to potential clients. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page continually received unwarranted suspensions for impersonating Mark Zuckerberg. So, Mark Zuckerberg took legal action because he had to pay for advertisements during his suspension, even though he didn’t break any rules. This has been an ongoing frustration for Mark Zuckerberg, who has been practicing law since Mark Zuckerberg was three years old. Mark Zuckerberg even created a website, iammarkzuckerberg.com , to explain to his potential clients that he is not Mark Zuckerberg. “I can’t use my name when making reservations or conducting business as people assume I’m a prank caller and hang up,” he wrote on his website. “My life sometimes feels like the Michael Jordan ESPN commercial, where a regular person’s name causes constant mixups.”

https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/31/the-dumbest-things-that-happened-in-tech-this-year/

This new Jill Scott album is dope!

Update: Got the #avantalk dongle paired. Only to experience, get ready, a 370MS roundtrip latency with the #shokz OpenFit Pro. The latency figures all average around that value, and I will no doubt be sending these numbers to Shokz for review. This, plus the fact the charging case does not have any audio or haptic feedback whatsoever, make this the most disapointing Shokz product I have had the misfortune of spending $250 on.

What an absolutely pathetic first-run experience the #avantalk c82LE has been. Can't get through the pairing mode and pair the #shokz OpenFit Pro with it. the LED's are so small that even Aira, at their best, can't see it all that well. Oh well. The latency improvement may not even be that worth it anyhow. These already don't support AptX-Low-latency, and are honestly overblown for their price. Might be taking advantage of that 45day return. And returning the useless avantalk while we're at it.

Wow. This afternoon I got NVAccess' blessing to relicense TGSpeechBox. That means the SAPI5 project is moving into the repo tonight, as well as the future iOS and Android integration may be on the roadmap.
"Mick and the team here at NV Access have reviewed your request, and agree to the re-licensing.

NV Access retains the copyright to the original portions of the code, however we grant you permission to release those portions under your chosen permissive license (either MIT or Apache 2.0). Please simply ensure that the original NV Access copyright notices and attribution remain intact within the source files, as is standard practice with those licenses.

We also agree that renaming the project to "TGSpeechBox" is a sensible move. It effectively distinguishes your modern fork from the original legacy project and will help avoid confusion for users regarding support and features."

Want to read a Masto-thread in blogpost form? There's a tool for that: https://kiliankoe.github.io/threader

Thanks @mcnesium for the nerdsnipe!

@Tamasg @alexhall This is especially impressive on fujisaki pitch mode. I assume there are parameters for the bandwidth for the fujisaki pitch range? Case in point: Try reading a stromg with several long url's. it sounds like it's running out of gas near the end as its pitch goes way down, in a similar way to how Eloquence would toward the end of a long string. But coming off of Dectalk this is some really good stuff.

yeeeeeeees. Fuck hCaptcha.
Simplifying our CAPTCHA protections
The high volume of automated traffic we receive means we often need to distinguish between human users and bots. While we previously relied on hCaptcha to do this, we’ve now implemented Cloudflare Turnstile instead. Rather than presenting users with frustrating visual challenges, Turnstile verifies them behind the scenes using automatic checks.
While hCaptcha does offer an accessibility mode, it requires users to sign up separately and complete extra setup. Turnstile, however, works with screen readers without any extra steps. This change has been applied across raspberrypi.com, including on our forums, the Raspberry Pi ID page, and the Raspberry Pi Connect page.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/screen-reader-accessibility-improvements/

@roaratron porkbun.com I've found extremely good. Especially when it comes to managing the nameservers, as the resulting textfield for entering the nameservers is multiline, meaning you can often paste them straight from the provider you're linking the domain to.

TGSpeechBox v2.82 dropped!

British English sounds like itself even more. Nasal pops squashed. Word-final stops tuned per accent like breathy American, clipped RP. Allophone rules now match by phoneme class flags. Formants tightened. NVDA panel decluttered (600 lines gone!). Phoneme editor and NVDA panel support editing the same settings consistently.

All 13 boundary smoothing params now in YAML. Lip radiation fix restores natural brightness, while cascade bandwidth (formant sharpness) default is now 0.9 to give it less of a tube feel if you didn't lower it.
https://github.com/tgeczy/TGSpeechBox/releases/download/v-282/tgSpeechBox-2026-v282.nvda-addon
https://github.com/tgeczy/TGSpeechBox/releases/download/v-282/TGSBPhonemeEditor-v282.zip
https://github.com/tgeczy/TGSpeechBox/releases/download/v-282/tgspeechbox-linux-x86_64-v282.tar.gz
https://github.com/tgeczy/TGSpeechBox/releases/download/v-282/tgspeechbox-linux-Aarch_64-v282.tar.gz

Apple is losing the normals. At a superb owl gathering and everyone (all generations) is complaining about #iOS updates changing everything, and a specific example is enabling crossfade in Music by default.

Decision has been made not to update grandma's iPad going forward because that would render it effectively useless from her point of view. Have heard same complaint from my mother: "just when you finally figure something out they change it". Won't be updating her devices either.

"i'm watching my favorite leslie nielsen movie for his birthday"

"what's that?"

"it's the anniversary of a person's birth, but that's not important right now"

@PepperTheVixen @Raelis Case in point: What Google did to XMPP and is now doing to RCS. Embrace/extend/extinguish.

@Raelis Prosody - a modern XMPP implementation - is great, and would just need a modern accessible client (Miranda NG is still being maintained on Windows, but has nonexistent support for group-chats). The way current mobile clients handle push is not battery-optimized at all, which is a non-starter for anyone on a budget device.
Discourse, NodeBB and all are great forum platforms, but would need mobile apps written to ease onboarding.

@Raelis I'm in complete agreement with this take, only that there's currently yet to be a completely screen-reader accessible, FOSS, platform-native, easy-setup client for self-host servers that can handle even text groupchats/structured communities gracefully.
Matrix has its issues, and its most-used client has a completely inaccessible QR code as part of setup.

#UnpaidOpenFitProObservations
Sound Quality is great. Open-ear is true open-ear, even if they go on your ear as opposed to in front. However, a few things:
1. Roundtrip latency is estimated around that 300ms mark, again. Just like the 2.4ghz openmeet UC. So perhaps Bluetooth latency has improved in this model, but again we have no AptX-LL here. Something tells me the Avantalk dongle may not make a difference in this regard.

@KoRn2012_private @PepperTheVixen Stable. Until it locks up and says not responding, on a fully maxed out Mac Studio. Stable, until you run into their piss-poor ARIA implementation, the fact that you can't select text in any browser other than Safari, and let's not even mention true text-editing.

"Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers."
https://blog.corbin.io/post/805641962529177600/introducing-just-the-browser

@freya Oh yeah, they never did fix that on Miranda didn't they. I'm sure a modern, cpu-efficient xmpp client might at least fix part of the battery issues. Far easier and cheaper to do one on the computer though, of course. But XMPP is long overdue for some modern and light clients anyhow. Unless Matrix gets its shit together, at which point a lightweight, native accessible client would make it a whole hell of a lot better.