hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1446.txt

Episode: 1446
Title: HPR1446: Interview with Fernando H. F. Botelho from the F123 group
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1446/hpr1446.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:06:16

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Hi everybody, this is Ken Fallon. I'd like to apologize to start off with for the poor quality of audio on my side of this recording
There's a num bug with Fedora and Skype call recorder. There is no solution for it seems to happen and because it's a low source
Recording application
Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do. I didn't have time to
Come up with other solutions for recording. So it's only on my half of the recording and not on Fernandez half
So if you can
Green and green and bearish for a while. I think the interview is well worth listening to. Thank you very much
I
Everybody my name is Ken Fallon and today it's my great pleasure to be able to interview Fernandez
And I'm not even going to attempt your second name Fernandez. Could you tell us your second name?
Hotel. Yes, and you're from the F123 foundation is that correct?
Well, it's not actually a foundation, but it's it's a project. Yeah, it's it's led by F123 consulting, which is our company and
we do
follow
Free and open source software principles. So we support a number of
Libraries and developments that we think are important in terms of accessibility and the F123 itself is a distribution as well
Okay, very good and your website is f the number one the number two the number three dot org
exactly and we have
versions in English Spanish
Portuguese and French. So it's f123 dot org slash EN for English ES for Spanish and
FR for French and just f123 dot org the default is Portuguese
Okay, can you tell us a bit about your background how you ended up being involved with this company?
Well, we
I am blind so
I've always been interested in accessibility issues, but I worked in different areas. I worked from
for a small NGO in New York. I worked for United Nations Agency in
Geneva, Switzerland. I've worked with Swiss Bank in philanthropy services in Zurich and at some point in that
career, I thought I wanted to do something of my own and that's when we started F123
The idea behind F123 is that as most of your listeners probably already know
Assistive technology, you know the screen readers screen magnifiers and all kinds of
technologies that persons with disabilities need and use is incredibly expensive at least the convention
the conventional
solutions
sold in wealthy economies is incredibly expensive
So we wanted to have something that was based on open source software and that was affordable. So we
started F123 first and just me and my wife
You know kind of putting
Putting together a prototype at home on our free time
And this was back in 2007 and then 2008 and then finally we got a prototype going and we
found some funding and started our project in more of an official way in 2009
Launched the first version of F123 in Portuguese in 2010 in Spanish and English in 2011
And here we are keeping keeping it going
So were you born blind or did you
I was born with
With a visual impairment, but I was not blind and I was not legally blind either
I had just a difficulty
With sports and other other things but I could read slowly and I could get around
And then I lost a lot of my vision and I was about 16
And then lost just about all my vision and I was about 19 or so 19 20 years old
Okay, how did you get involved in software and open source?
Well, I've always been very interested in in software in general just because I needed it really
Bandly to to be competitive at work at school and so forth
And then open source it was kind of the obvious choice. I
I realized what technology could play a very
Constructive and positive role in in society as a whole not just getting things done but also
You know
Helping with decentralization of power and control and so forth. So I thought open source was and was a clear choice
Not just for cost, but also in terms of having a solution that is
That remains a solution a viable solution over the long term and the only way to do that is with
Decentralization of control and of
development
Okay, so you started this company? It's a for profit company. I believe
Yes, but that's a good question. It's technically a for profit company
But we what we are doing is what some people have been calling social entrepreneurship. So
Social entrepreneurs are people that are using
You know kind of solute strategies that are typically used in
For profit entities and they are using it to try to solve social and environmental problems in large scale
Yeah, and some people do that with NGOs other people do that with
With for profits and in our case it's technically a for profit because that makes it easier to get loans and and look for investors and so forth
But we have a commitment of re-investing any profits
into further development of our
of our work
And and our mission is really increasing access to education and employment for the blind and you know, there's never
There's always more than needs to be done in that realm. So we're not worried
About having any real profits anytime soon
Yeah, okay. This is a long way to go
So you um you put this together. You have a distribution. What's it based on?
It's based on the Ubuntu
Just because it made the most sense
Back when we started even today. It's it's a very
a very interesting
distro now
Given that they have not been
Giving accessibility the same level of attention they used to recently we have started reconsidering that choice
But we haven't had the time and resources to to really move on to anything else
So far so the latest version being launched
Right now in Portuguese is based on 13.04 from Ubuntu
Okay, I kind of have to ask this question
There
Jonathan. They do has his own distribution. I know there's another blind distribution
Jonathan Macargue sonar is an accessibility distribution
And now there's f123 are we
Are we seeing here in the accessibility community
Free and open source community exactly a reflection of what's happening in
the general open source community in so far as having
A pletra multiplication of distributions when people will think hey we should all get together and
And work together
Yes
Yes, I think we are seeing the same kind of stuff that you see in the overall
You know open source world and the the challenge is that everybody has
slightly different ways of thinking about
how to get things done and
the
somewhat different ways of working and
Sometimes you're able to work together. Sometimes you're not
What I think differentiates f123 from from some of the others, you know, there's vnex. There's
sonar there's
Linux accessibility in Brazil. There's all kinds of solutions out there
But f123 what we try to do is every time we have some funding that
That we can use in anything we want
We fund developments of upstream
Project so we helped with a webkit gtk
Improvements with helped with compass fusion is zoom the plugging
Improvements so we invest in things that benefit everybody else as well. Not just f123
Okay, and that's actually more less the same answer I get from
From Jonathan when we're talking about sonar
That things get contributed upstream and everybody vendors so
Okay, you know, so I don't I think what you have to do is
Anybody you know interested in in looking at what we've done
It's easy to just go to the list to do a search for f123 and there will be a bunch of thank you emails and so forth
Regarding our contributions. So, you know, so that's
So, um, what is the what's your plans for f123 for the next year or so?
Well, what we want to do is focus on content for a little bit
Obviously you never stop with the technical stuff, but we we also think there's a great need for
Not so much documentation. There's there is quite a bit of documentation out there, but there is a need for training materials
And in the language that people need them. So, you know, 80% of persons who are blind or visually impaired are in developing countries
And a very significant percentage of those do not speak English and you have most of the training stuff out there is all in English
So
We want to continue increasing the amount of material we provide to NGOs
Adding structures and just people at home studying on their own and learning on their own
That is in their own language
We will have to focus on Portuguese and Spanish
Early on in the process, but we will continue looking for funding to do the French version of of the stuff we have
Your friends you're based in Brazil. Is that correct?
Yes, we are based in Brazil and we have people using f123 in over 20 countries now
And we have English Spanish and Portuguese versions of f123
And there's plans for French versions
Yeah, that's that has been in our to-do list for a little while now
We we are a little surprised because we thought it would be
fairly easy to get funding from a foundation
Based in France to help us out of that, but it hasn't been that easy at all
You seem to be very connected with the
You know around the world as he or Argentina, Brazil, China, Costa Rico, Ecuador, El Salvador, France
India that you have
Interactions of government agencies and NGOs. Do you find you know where do you find that it's most beneficial to
You know to get accessibility help where you're really finding the helps coming from
Well, I think that nobody that wants to have a meaningful
Impact in the disability world
Can do it without partnerships, you know, so we from the start we've had two
Two major elements to our strategy, which is one working with others and two
Having a multilingual solution. So
So that's why you know, we we have had partners that are NGOs
We've worked with foundations. We've worked with a couple of government agencies
and
Because of my experience in the past and our focus in developing countries is we've had a
A fairly good and wide-ranging
Network of of contacts that we've been you know working with
And everybody needs a good solution. I mean, there's no
lack of need so
It's just a matter of getting in touch with them and and kind of getting getting things going which is not easy
But but it requires there's a lot of communication that has to take place
To get things going, you know
A lot of people don't understand that there are alternatives to windows
A lot of people don't know where to begin how to install
So all of that requires a lot of friendly
You know accessible from
From a very pragmatic point of view kind of
documentation and help
So and that's something we try to emphasize a lot in our work
And do you find that that been based as a business that that helps you with that that you
You're at least seen as oh, we have some financial reward in pushing this technology
As opposed to if it's sometimes
Sorry, yeah
We do have a version that is free and then we have a version that we sell which which has a
A higher quality speech center
but
I know this whole thing of being a company or being an NGO. I mean in our case
I think it has helped more than hindered to be a company because we have been able to move fast
and
And I think it has been a positive overall but it also is an issue sometimes some foundations are not really
Used to supporting for profit entities and they are not even allowed in some places
So you know, it's not all
Just good news. There are some challenges to doing this as well
And sometimes they are also not very used to the open source philosophy, you know because it's the ultimate form of
of
Transparency right so
You know when you do a conventional
Project they have to verify everything you do by sending people to interview
The people you have helped and so forth when you do something in the technology realm that is open source
Is so much more transparent and so much more
High impact but a lot of these foundations they don't understand that very well yet
Do you
Rebels for for your code are
How exactly do you approach the F1 to 3 distro
We have
We know when we founded Compass Fusion
the person
Alejandro Leyva
He he worked directly with people from
from that
I don't know if it's called library or that that component
Now when we worked with web when we funded web gtk
Webkit gtk
That was done by a company called eGalia which is really really well connected and we're ready working
With all the upstream projects
So you know, we don't even have a ripple of our own
What we are going to have eventually is a is a repository probably on github
Where we will bring together what we pull down from Ubuntu
And we mix together with our kind of help files and shortcut files and so forth so that that
Mixing is going to be available for others to contribute to and so forth
That's not ready yet unfortunately
Okay, that's actually a request to have from the sonar project is
You know, I have another machine. It's not running the same operating system
But I want to be able to manually add the
The enhancements some of the enhancements at least
From that project onto my own desktop regardless of distribution
Uh-huh. That's something that will be really useful
Yes
Yeah, no, I think it's in the abstract. It's all very good in practice
It's a little more tricky
You know some of the enhancements we have for example
Uh, you know when you turn on you use the shortcut to open up
G-edits, you know text editor
Before it opens it up it tells you
Um, it gives you a kind of a help message
And now using control X you can cut a piece of text after you selected it using shift and the arrow keys
And then it opens up G-edits
And this kind of help messages gives it to you
For like four or five different applications
Which is really wonderful if you have a beginner and really annoying if you're not
So there's another comment to turn it off of course for more advanced users and
And that's fine, but it's not it's the kind of alteration to to the distro that is
May not be totally easy easily portable. I don't know. I don't know enough about the code
To tell you how portable that's gonna be
But um, but I'll talk to my developer. I think some of this stuff will be easily portable other things
We're gonna be a little more tricky to transport
So how's the how's your organization without you you have full-time employees or how does that work?
Well here most of the time we are three full-time employees
And we have other people that we work with on a part-time basis depending on funding
So depending on the project and the needs
We have other people coming in and out of the project
You know in software when you're doing a distro
You you either have a 50 or a hundred person
team or you have three plus
You know a bunch of consultants because because they're very very specific needs
So if we need something for Libre office, we're probably gonna go to Lanedo
If we need something with
Genome, we're probably gonna go to Egalia
You know, so we have all the people that we want and like to work with
But we we can't afford to have them on a full-time basis, but it's not yet
I got your name directly from
From the Orca project
Can you tell us what your interaction the Orca seems to be a
Central role in a central component obviously in all these
All the distros regardless yours included
Could you tell the listeners what what the Orca project is the probably sick of hearing it by now?
No, no, it's fine. The Orca is the screen reader
That is used by
The Genome graphical user interface
And because it uses some libraries that are widely
widely used and the Orca also works in other
Inter in another distros or interfaces that we are interested in like lxde
And so Orca for us is absolutely
Crucial and and very strategic
In its importance and and we work with them all the time
Not what we have observed is that all the Orca is moving really fast in its development
And
There's a bunch of bugs or dependencies or you know, I don't know how what would be the best name for it
A number of issues require modifications in the applications themselves
So libe office has a few bugs or quite a few bugs in accessibility that have been there for a while now
And they need to be addressed so that Orca in any other solution can work with its well or better
Firefox in gecko, you know, the library gecko
Needs needs fixing in in a number of areas so that it helps us deal with not just Orca
But any other screen reader to interact better with Firefox and Thunderbird
So what we are realizing now is that in more than ever we need kind of a joint effort
Between these upstream projects that are so important for the day-to-day user
And and Orca itself so Orca can do its part, but it doesn't get the job done if the other applications are not doing their part
But from what I hear there's a very low priority on accessibility on those projects
That they have a limited amount of resources as well, so
What's the solution?
Well, the solution is making more noise, right?
Yes, exactly
I think, you know, what you are doing is very valuable and what everybody else
Working with media and newsletters and podcasts
All of that is very valuable
What they are going to realize is that a lot of governments have
A criteria in their procurement in their in their processes that
Require them to purchase and contract for technologies that are accessible
So when they realize that hey, we're going to lose a lot of procurement opportunities
A lot of work
And funding if our our stuff is not accessible then they're going to give it a greater priority
I mean, it's what happened to Microsoft
They never cared about accessibility
They only started caring about it in the 1990s when Massachusetts told them they were not going to buy licenses because
Microsoft Office and Windows had huge accessibility problems
So it's uh, yeah, I mean
There's an ethical argument to be made. There's a social argument to be made. There's all kinds of even practical arguments to be made
I mean everybody else everybody's aging and a lot of the people
And that a you know at the later staging life have visual impairments
So you can have all these arguments but people still put it at the bottom of their priority list
Now when you talk about contracts we all live off of
Contracts for technical support contracts for software development contracts for licenses in some cases
And in in all those situations
um
If the customer
Requires it then you know people listen
Yeah, I know that that makes sense. I've also been thinking, you know, you got this graphical desktop
Which from the point of view of automation or you know doing anything interesting automation wise is very difficult and
As I'll come uh
In this uh
presentation
A few years ago I was actually an accessibility demonstration and I realized that there
These applications when done right present a lot of hooks where
Yeah, okay plug into but that could equally be my bash script that uh that does something when you know some API
Exactly works or that a twitter feed comes in. I know there are all the ways to get a twitter feeds, but you know that some proprietary
Uh, who appears in the webpage, you know, so they're definitely tech take the little reasons for non the people without the
Vision problems
Getting involved and yes, and then
You have the situation where you have people working on libraries that they want the these
Libraries to be as portable as possible. They want these same
Kind of codebase to be used in cell phones and we used in computers and we used in everywhere else
And the only way to make this really interesting and relevant is to
You know remind people look if you're working on the cell phone if your software is gonna be running on the cell phone
I may want to use it hands-free or ice-free, right?
I may be in a car and I may want to listen to certain things rather than
Interactive it's visually
So you know then people start to understand, but it's it's uh, it's a long time. It's a long process
Yeah, exactly um and
Yeah, and this is something interesting that you know, we I mentioned earlier
The the whole challenge of the speech synthesis
You know one of the challenges we facing the free and open source software world is that we don't have a
Very high quality speech synthesizer
Uh, we we have a wonderful project which is he speak which is excellent. It's really fast
It's incredibly portable and it's very light so it can be used in all kinds of situations
Embedded systems all kinds of places
But uh, it's it's a little mechanical sounding and in some languages. It's it's challenging
For people to use it
So we need something that maybe it's not gonna be quite as fast in terms of its reaction time
And maybe it's not gonna be quite as light in terms of its
Footprint, but it's higher quality, you know more human sounding
And uh, you know, one of the things that have been trying to propose to people
Is this i've been contacted by an international organization
Uh, which in turn has been contacted by a number of governments. There's uh, there's quite a few governments
that uh
Do not
Do not have access to a speech synthesizer in some cases not even
One that is proprietary in other cases neither proprietary nor free
Uh, and they need something in their own language
So what what I'm thinking is we should and get a group together and um and develop in parallel, you know
We get once we have some funding
We can uh get some experts and developing parallel a bunch of languages
Uh, at the same time
Right because the process is is basically the same you you identified the phonemes of the language and how that's going to be
pronounced and and dealt with and so forth and um, and I think there are two ways to go about it
I mean to do it traditionally and concentrate the the
The development in universities in each country doing it with a central
University in the US or Europe
Uh, you know coordinating the effort and kind of leading all the teams
And we can also combine that with kind of a crowdsourcing approach where we have a website
Where people you know, interesting in different languages can go in and and change make changes to the the way things are pronounced
You know different words are pronounced with that really knowing the technology behind
And you know changing the phonetics
Of certain words and with HTML5
Or javascript or whatever the
However, you might want to describe it
You can uh press
Submit and hear the changes, you know the pronunciation of the change you just made and kind of vote on it, right? You could you could kind of crowdsource
The development of better pronouncing speech synthesizers, you know, there is definitely interest from governments
There is interest from uh technical guys all over the place and definitely from the blind
What we need is leadership from a funding entity somebody who can fund that central, you know that core team
In uh in Europe or in the US
That will then kind of
Lay this out and in about one to two years we could have like 10 20 30 different new languages available in open source
um speech synthesizers
What uh and doing some research for uh for this
Myself while in talking with Jonathan my my daughter has um
Is dyslexic and one of the things that we do to help her out as we got her a
Homebook and we use e-speak to
uh factor
Yeah, and uh people listening to this will be familiar with the e-speak text-to-speak in english, which is bad
But the text-to-speech in Dutch is just
Downright scary
She ran out of her room crying
um and as part of that i did some investigation into the
Human voices and i came across the Mary text-to-speech
Yes, sir
Yeah
As part of that i know that Jonathan Nadu has uh developed a
Insta-to-speech hub. He's got a speech dispatcher which uses a Mary text-to-speech
Day as part of that project there is the ability to to go in and read
Texts and create a database so that you can create your own
Um you get your own synthesized voices. Is that is that something like what you're thinking about or
I'm able to mark here
No, no, no, that's that's one of the possibilities. I mean i would prefer that it would not have a Java dependency
Right, I think it would make more sense if it was developed with uh you know
With a language that is truly open source free and open source and um and then i i think
You know
More leadership need you know somebody spreading the word out
Bringing people together explaining the steps to do all these things. I mean what sometimes it's overlooked
By by a lot of distros
Uh, that you know want to have a social impact
But don't is that people need a lot of handholding, you know, it's just a reality. I mean there's
There's a group of various sophisticated users and i i am assuming you're one of those and
Jonathan is another and the vinaux guys are others and
They play a very important role in the ecosystem
But then there is a need for others to just
Help people get things going, you know, and when they want a solution for a child or for a parent
Uh, they don't want to be installing stuff. They want something that is plug and play
Right, and then this is something that is
Sometimes understood in the abstract realm and other times not understood at all
And but never really understood in practice, right?
um
So when we do f1-2-3, you know, we do everything we we can to make it
uh completely
Uh, as automatic as possible as as
As easy to to understand and use as possible and uh and this is something that
Requires time and effort and it's not easy
And it's it's what's overlooked a lot of times. So yeah, Mary TTS
Is is an interesting option, but there's nobody out there spreading the word about it. It's existence
You know, it's just techies that know about it
And there's no infrastructure to do the
The changing that you know the improvements that you're talking about ready to go and
And nobody's marketing its existence
Um, you know, nobody's paying the bill to have a server
Providing this to everybody else and then pressing a button and have it work in your computer rather than in some servers somewhere, right?
Yeah, does that make sense? I get it
No, no, there's one thing that I'd just like to mention that java is released under gplv3. So it says free
It's as free as anything else. There's also um
There are also I'm reluctant to open it up now because of the bandwidth connections
There are online
Uh places where you can websites where you can record in voices for a Mary TTS and from what I understood about it was
the
The libraries for the voices were more of a problem than the speech synthesizer. So theoretically if you recorded
If you were able to get the database for the
Language and the audio and the sounds that could actually be taken and put into e-speak as well
So all the projects can benefit once
But I think the issue that a lot of the text-to-speech engines are having is that
While some parts of it is is open other parts the databases or the original source material is closed and owned and therefore
They can't go back in make modifications for that
I understand yeah, that's probably the case with
Pieco or whatever the Google voice is called and um
So yeah now I agree and and I have to say I'm not an expert in speech synthesis
Well, what I'm an expert in in is is the non-technical user and the non-technical user
Has no idea of any of the complexities we're talking about
Here she only knows that he can either not have access to anything or have access to e-speak
Or have a pirated copy of of jaws and none of those are really ideal solutions for
for the non-technical user
And you know when we are trying you know whether we we put an international project together to
to collect
Recording soft people's voices or we are doing some more technical stuff with e-speak or
You know, what was the name of festival and things like now it doesn't really matter
What I'm saying is that there is a
We are missing a decent solution that is free that is in multiple languages
Especially languages that not are not financially interesting for proprietary software makers
And there's nobody doing that and I think there is a potential to do it with crowdsourcing
In terms of the development itself and the quality control kind of stuff
And as well as you know do this in parallel over maybe two years and we could get some
You know spread the knowledge they know how about how to make
TTS in in a number of developing countries and you know improve the situation
Yeah, because right now there's the hMM voice creation
Which is a program that you can download and it will it will present a GUI to you
And you basically follow a text you read the text like a I don't know if really with the karaoke concept where they
Where a bar follows the text
Exactly and the beauty of things like that is that
On one hand if you're reading a public domain work
The recording that you have the regular geoblog mp3 wow file can be uploaded to
The Librevox project as well to so you get a free free book as well as
That gives the database the the language processing engine
There are material the role material
I know they're talking about this book and this is what it sounds like and then I can go off and turn off my my databases
And all those databases are are available to people
Fantastic
I remember reading about it and it seemed to me that they were in the how-to on this page
Github may read to us if you if you go in there
That is important. It's tutorial
Uh-huh. You go into a lot of detail about
They have the technology, but the problem is they don't have the
um
The volume of raw data people sitting down recording the voices that the need to get the speech synthesizer
Yeah, that that should be something easily crowdsourced, you know
I mean, there's a huge amount of people that are retired or even people that are not retired
But are interested in doing something positive for for society
We have all the time we receive emails all the time about
You know, we want to help how can I help and a lot of these people are not technical, but they could definitely read
Stuff and we just need you know somebody to fund
Kind of a the back office to coordinate this, you know
Maybe do a little contest to you know send diplomas to people awards or whatever to the
Most hours the guy that produced the most hours of material. I mean, there's a medium things that can be done and
There's just just so difficult to find a foundation or a government that is smart enough
To think about these processes strategically, right? Yeah, it's a short-term investment with a huge
Absolutely huge long-term impact
There's social impact, which is what everyone to please interested in
Yeah, yeah, I completely agree
Yes
So
Is there anything else that we should talk about before before I let you go?
Well, I think that's that's really
You know, I think this represents well what what we are trying to do you know our
Technical work, but not just our focus on technology. We we are always focused on the end results
so if by you know to get people employed and educated we need
Better training materials that's what we do to get people
uh
Feed from proprietary solutions if we need a better speech synthesizer
That's what we want to focus on. I mean, that's
It's the end result that
F12 is interested in and we are always looking for partners
Volunteers
Anybody interested in South America and Africa in general and persons with disabilities
Uh, that would be great
Although we don't limit ourselves to that. That's those are regions where we have
Uh, a very important
Impact so, you know, we are
Anybody interested it's here. She's most welcome to to contact us. I can be reached at
Fernando at f123.org
Yeah, double link to that will be in the show notes just before you go. Could you tell us about the
Educational liver project
Ah educa sound liver is is like free education free as in
As in freedom
Yeah, this is a project we've done to
To bring in our access to f123 to open source solutions to kids with disabilities in Brazil
So we've had
A bunch of people in Curitiba, Brazil and in a couple of other places
being trained
In the use of f123 and with that improving their
Access to education and and employment. We've had that for about three years now and
We you're gonna start new classes now in
February in a bunch of NGOs around Brazil. Yeah, and that's the name of this this initiative
Because no foundation usually will will fund software development
But they will fund software development if together with that you're providing training and you're providing
You know software to to the kids and so forth. So they are interested in something
With very practical
Impact in the lives of people
And from what I'm reading here at the end of the
You're sampling some graduates that 55% were employed 6% were on practical training that led
That's expected to lead 12% had retired or have left
Brazil leaving
27% unemployed, which seems quite high, you know, but
I think you've taken into the context of of
blind people. It's would be
quite low really
Yes, exactly. I mean in in wealthy economies you usually have like in the U.S
The estimate people always throw around is 70% unemployment
Among the blind in Switzerland is 69% among persons with disabilities in general
And in Brazil the normal unemployment is probably around 95 or more percent
So
You know when you talk about the
graduates of any training that have
Only about 27% and employment. That's that's absolutely incredible
So that that's the kind of impact we want to have when we want to continue having the only differences that we want to increase the scale
So we are we're always looking for partnerships or clients that are
Governments or foundations that don't want to do large-scale
Project because that is the true potential of open source that is something where
Uh proprietary solutions cannot even get close to us
In terms of the the price performance ratio. Yeah
I think I think there's everybody listening to this. There's definitely something that they can do to help the situation
Well, if you're no matter how much of a hacker you are or what happens is where you fall in there's something that you can do
To help
This situation here whether it's bugging
Libra office or gecko or qt a conference is asking them why they have so many open bugs in orca
Whether it's sitting down with a good bug and just reading it along with the screen so that you can upload that to Libra Vox while at the same time producing
for ever on the day perhaps a
Good-sounding voice synthesized speech voice that can be used by the
by the
Visually impaired community
Or it's taking helping out with the mere tts project so that as you say building a website that it's gml5 compliant that somebody can go in
Under afternoon break and can read uh, I don't know a paragraph in spanish and then the following day read another paragraph
And the following day read another paragraph just so that it is completely
Uh completely transparent and and easy to do and that it goes out on twitter
Hey, I've just read it 15 minutes of gone with the wind or you're I don't know
Tale of two cities to support the Libra Vox mary tts project
So there is definitely something you can do and other than that you can get in touch with your political
Correspondence your political party your local town hall
Your local library and ask them what they're doing and spreading the word that this type of software is out there
Because at the end of the day whether you're a supporter of the ACF or f123 or any of the other good projects all this stuff is fed up stream and everybody wins in the end
Exactly when I have said it better
I've been saying it for a while people are probably saying you're missing
Well for landau, thank you very very very much for taking the time out of your day is there anything else that I didn't cover that you
I mean don't be a stranger. You can always you can always come back and give us updates. This is not a problem
Absolutely. I'll keep in touch. I'll let you know how things are going and
I think it's it's a joint effort. I look forward to hearing from you and
You know thanks to all your listeners for any support that they can give accessibility
Fantastic. Thank you very much and folks remember tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of hacker public
radio
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