@GrapheneOS highly interested in seeing high quality open source TTS/STT, great work!

@zzt why are these videos flashing so much holy shit

@skye I made a video showing the difference with Orca, not that it's a great screen reader but it's good enough for a demonstration. Apparently my phone cannot record TalkBack's sound because google decided it's magically excluded so I only have what I got on desktop.

@skye I've prepared a comparison with PDFs generated with pandoc vs the same content as HTML, need to edit the recordings a little though, but here are the files.

I did notice that you can get somewhat more accessible PDFs with different Pandoc backends (like typst) though even then it only fixes headings.

@skye PDF loses absolutely all semantics, it essentially turns all your formatting into blocks of letters with a specific font, size and position, it only cares about the visual layout of the document.

Using a screen reader on one, you'll at best get it to read line-by-line, but it will treat a line as a paragraph and make weird pauses and generally be a bad experience.

You can make a standalone HTML file that people can open in their browser locally, as long as you don't put in any external resource references in it, HTML is great at conveying semantics if you use the correct tags.

@mitsunee @Daojoan IIUC that decline started with Google EEE-ing their RSS reader