r/BlindAndFine

More and more frequently, the people, communities and projects I'm interested in, are on Discord. I do not really know how to do Discord, but I am willing to learn. To me, the screen is a nonsensical mess. I'm sure it makes perfect sense to a fully sighted person, but I'm not one of those people.

So... How do you use it? Do you use the application, or the web site? Do you use hotkeys? Which hotkeys? NVDA / Talkback. Are there companion apps that help with this stuff, like there are for Reddit? Suggestions very welcome.

I remember there was once a JAWS script that worked with MSN Messenger that would click when someone was typing and read messages back once they appeared on the screen. I am wondering if someone could create such an add-on for NVDA for Escargot, which is MSN/Windows Live Messenger on a different server? It is completely usable without this, but it would still be appreciated. For anyone who wants to know more about the project or who wants a free account, just go to the below link.

http://www.escargot.chat

For anyone who may wish to add me, I'm dandylover1@escargot.chat.

To make a long story short, for most of my life, I have been interested in the so-called blind trades, both for pleasure and as genuine crafts. These include chair caning, mat making, basketry, broom making, rug weaving, yarn weaving, bookbinding, soap making, pottery, etc. I didn't include brush making because that requires a real workshop and can be dangerous from what I've heard. Likewise, piano tuning takes many years to learn, though i believe there is a school for that. I wrote to many blind schools asking for assistance, guidance, or even some general advice, but none wrote back to me. I contacted a mainstream basket weaver, but although she was nice, she couldn't help me. I found a very good series on broom-making on Youtube, though I must check to see if it's still there. The problem with many videos is that they explain things in a visual way i.e. "look at the diagram", "follow what you see me doing here", or the hosts talk while they're doing an important step that they're not describing, etc. Regardless, I started learning chair caning, but the place was far from my home, and I kept having issues with paratransit, so I had to stop. I have, however, made soap using the melt and pour method several times, and I've worked on both a lap loom (made of cardboard many times), an inkle loom once, and used a potholder kit at least once. I've also taken several pottery classes, but to go beyond air-dry clay or the type that can be baked in a home oven, it's necessary to have a kiln, which is prohibitively expensive.

Having said all of that, has anyone here ever been involved with any of these, or perhaps something I didn't mention? If so, was/is it as a hobby or to sell crafts? Where were you taught and how i.e. all hands-on, or with books, manuals, etc? If you sold/sell them, how did/do you do so i.e. through a workshop or factory, at a traditional flee market or craft fair, online via Etsy or Ebay, or do you have your own site? Would you be able to give me any general tips or advice regarding your craft?

Read this post if you don't know what is couch PTT

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlindAndFine/s/VLymxZQdiu

We have just released the official couch PTT client for Windows, and no it is not a lazy web app slapped together, this thing is a 100% native win32 desktop application, and don't worry Windows users and desktop users are synced together perfectly, get the app from here, please read shortcuts txt after extracting the archive

https://c.jumpingfridge.oo.gd/download/app.7z

I would like to try the demonstration Acapela voices with NVDA. I notice they have the 1.5 engine which works with NVDA 2019 and earlier, the 1.94 which works with 2025, and the 1.95 which works with 2026. But they don't have the one which works with 2023. Where can I find it? Are the Infovox voices pretty much the same?

OK, I know this could be controversial, but it is not intended to be and honestly I’d prefer if you choose to answer just one word answers of your thought, I don’t wanna start any debates or anything like that. I’m just genuinely curious. And I checked through the rules to see if this was allowed, and I didn’t see anything that necessarily prohibited it so I hope this is allowed.
I want to give some context, so I am blind, and I was also having a discussion with another blind person a while back from a YouTube channel, and we agreed on a lot of things, but then I wondered if us blind people are assumed to lean one way or the other politically and how many people actually lean that direction or a different one.
So this is purely just for my own curiosity as I feel like it is generally assumed that blind people might lean more one way than the other, and I feel like I personally don’t fit that mold and I’m curious what other peoples thoughts are on this and if you agree or disagree respectfully. Cause the lady that I was talking to also was curious about this and we both feel kind of similar about this, and I was wondering if I am off on this or how common it is.
Again, I want to emphasize that I don’t intend or want to cause any sort of controversy or debating by putting this up, it is purely just for my own interest and like I said very short answers with just your personal opinion or direction is really all I’m looking for, I know everybody’s different and that’s fine but I was just curious about the consensus if there is one at all. And if people answer and want to know mine, I have no problem giving it, but I won’t put it in this initial post again because I want to avoid putting any bias in here on the post itself cause I just want answers from people as I am curious.

This might turn into a series I would host somewhere if I saw feedback.

A lot of people look at software development and think it’s an untamable beast meant only for a chosen elite. But here is a secret: programming is just something that can be explained to be complicated, or can be explained to be simple. Today, I am stripping away the pretentious vocabulary and making it as straightforward, carefree, and visual as possible for my fellow BVI dudes and ladies out here. Code doesn't care if you can see it; it only cares if it's logical. When you peel back the textbook jargon, everything breaks down into pure, tangible, everyday concepts that anyone can reach out and grasp.

1. Variables and Booleans (The Boxes and Toggles)

A Variable is literally just a storage box. Imagine a single plastic container in your RAM where you drop a piece of data, and that data can change over time. The "stuff" inside can be numbers you do actual math with, or it can be text (which we call strings). It can even be numbers that the computer treats like text—meaning you can’t subtract them, you can only glue them together end-to-end or clean the spaces out of them. Inside that box, you can also drop a Boolean. A boolean is quite literally a physical toggle switch. It has exactly two states: True or False. You can use a boolean to tell your program: "Hey, if the variable is_sad is True, remind me that half the planet is single, there are plenty of fish in the sea, and I'll find my partner eventually... and then playfully roast my absolute lack of game at the end anyway. But if it’s False, tell me something is wrong with me because we all know it's rarely False." It's just a simple binary switch.

2. Zero-Indexing and Arrays (The Egg Carton)

Now, some people get confused and think an Array is just a standard variable, but there's a big difference. If a variable is a single box that holds one thing, an array is a whole egg carton. Instead of buying 30 individual tiny boxes, naming every single box separately, and putting one egg in each, you just buy one big carton. The carton has slots numbered from 0 to 29. If you want the very first egg, you grab slot 0. It’s just a single container holding a sequential line of multiple slots. If you ask a human to count a row of objects, they naturally start at one. But in the computer world, numbers start at Zero and go upwards. To a computer, zero isn't "nothing"—it is a real, valid, physical slot in memory. It represents the very first position in that carton. Textbooks call it a "contiguous linear data structure," but it's really just an egg carton for data.

3. Functions and Libraries (The Blender and Takeout)

A Function is just a blender or a dedicated machine button. You throw some raw ingredients in (your input data), the blender spins them around doing a pre-set recipe that you wrote once, and it pours out a smoothie (the return value). Instead of writing 50 lines of tedious code to calculate tax every single time you process a transaction, you write it once, put it inside a button called calculate_tax(), and just smash that button whenever you need it to run. Libraries take this a step further—they are the equivalent of ordering takeout delivery. Instead of spending three weeks planting wheat, raising cattle, and baking bread from scratch just to make a single burger (which is the equivalent of writing complex audio-processing or graphing code completely from scratch), you just call a code library that another developer already built. You give them the data, they do all the heavy lifting in the background, and the finished result shows up at your door. You literally just write one line of code to import it.

4. OOP and Dependency Injection (Blueprints and Tools)

If you move up to Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), the terminology gets heavy, but the concept is basic. A Class is just a factory blueprint or a catalog layout for a car. The Object is the actual, physical car you built using that blueprint. The properties are just the specs (like the paint color), and the methods are just functions or actions the car can take, like press_gas_pedal(). Dependency Injection sounds like open-heart surgery on a live server, but it's remarkably simple. All it means is that instead of a function building its own tools inside itself (which makes it rigid and impossible to change later), you build the tool outside and pass it in as a parameter. You're just handing the chef a knife instead of forcing him to mine iron ore and forge his own steel in the middle of the kitchen.

5. Recursion (The Mirror Match)

Finally, there is Recursion. We've all stood between two parallel mirrors and seen the reflection repeat down the line. In code, recursion is just a function that calls itself inside a loop until a specific condition (called the base case) tells it to stop. It's a box inside a box inside a box, and you keep opening them until you find the prize, grab it, and stop. Programming isn’t an untamable beast. It’s just a toolkit of incredibly basic, logical concepts that sometimes get buried under a mountain of heavy vocabulary. Once you peel back the words and look at the mechanics, it’s entirely within your control. If any of you out there resonate with this kind of straightforward, fluff-free breakdown, let me know. If there's enough interest, I might seriously turn this into a regular series, breaking down the entire tech dictionary one concept at a time in the most direct way possible.

I didn’t think there was anything apparently wrong with this and actually there was some decent discussion going on, but you know we can’t have that apparently in R/Blind. So I’ll put this in here lol.
OK, I know this could be controversial, but it is not intended to be and honestly I’d prefer if you choose to answer just one word answers of your thought, I don’t wanna start any debates or anything like that. I’m just genuinely curious. And I checked through the rules to see if this was allowed, and I didn’t see anything that necessarily prohibited it so I hope this is allowed.
I want to give some context, so I am blind, and I was also having a discussion with another blind person a while back from a YouTube channel, and we agreed on a lot of things, but then I wondered if us blind people are assumed to lean one way or the other politically and how many people actually lean that direction or a different one.
So this is purely just for my own curiosity as I feel like it is generally assumed that blind people might lean more one way than the other, and I feel like I personally don’t fit that mold and I’m curious what other peoples thoughts are on this and if you agree or disagree respectfully. Cause the lady that I was talking to also was curious about this and we both feel kind of similar about this, and I was wondering if I am off on this or how common it is.
Again, I want to emphasize that I don’t intend or want to cause any sort of controversy or debating by putting this up, it is purely just for my own interest and like I said very short answers with just your personal opinion or direction is really all I’m looking for, I know everybody’s different and that’s fine but I was just curious about the consensus if there is one at all. And if people answer and want to know mine, I have no problem giving it, but I won’t put it in this initial post again because I want to avoid putting any bias in here on the post itself cause I just want answers from people as I am curious.

As the title said, for whatever reason I decided to create a text to speech engine from the ground up, the thing is I'm not going to go through the lazy route and make it AI based, naaaah, I went with formant

synthesis, which is quite literally producing speech out of raw noise and graphene to phoneme math that makes my brain ask for mercy, this thing is made with python and I might open source it later because currently it is definitely not done, so enjoy TailSafety ranting about getting married in Algeria for whatever reason

https://files.catbox.moe/8ldbiu.WAV

Update. Since writing this, I have spoken with the director of VCB, so I know it is still running. They have sessions every season, some for three days and some for four. Has anyone here attended Vacation Camp for the Blind (now called VISIONS Center on Blindness)? https://visionsvcb.org/what-we-do/vcb-traditional-services/ I am interested in going and would like to hear about your experiences. I'm basically seeking a good replacement for the Diamond Spring Lodge summer sessions, if anyone remembers those. They still exist in a new location and are now called VLANJ, but their sessions are once or twice a week, not residential, and they focus more on those with low vision and people who are losing their site. I am mostly interested in the fun aspects of such a place, not rehabilitation. If there are other places in America that would accept people from out of state (I'm in New Jersey), please let me know.