Two days ago, Twitter deprecated its streaming API. This means that third-party apps can no longer receive tweets and direct messages in real time, and have to wait 2 minutes to receive updates. As this is suboptimal for some people (and thus the #BreakingMyTwitter hashtag was born), people have started to search for alternatives. The most (if not the only) acclaimed candidate, at least in my circle of Twitter, has been Mastodon.

So what's Mastodon?

Mastodon is a decentraliced and federated social network. This means that there are multiple interconnected servers (called instances), and there's no central one (no instance is "above" any other, no instance has more authority than any other). You can follow and view the statuses of people in other instances by knowing their username and instance. Think of e-mail as an analogy: you can send an email from gmail to outlook, and there is no central email server.

Comparing Twitter and Mastodon

Mastodon is similar to Twitter, without the noise of ads or sorting algorythms. You get the statuses (or "toots", as they're called) in reverse chronological order. You can boost (same as retweeting in Twitter) and like toots, and of course, you can follow people. You have several third-party clients.

One key difference is that each instance has its own rules, and in some cases an instance can be more of a niche for a community in particular. You can, of course, self-host an instance for yourself or for more people, if you like. In joinmastodon.org, you can find a list of instances with their rules, though I guess there may be even more scattered through Internet, without counting the personal ones.

Another difference is that there are three home timelines: one where toots by people you follow appear; another one where all toots by the instance's users appear; and another one where all the toots from instances your instance knows about appear.

Lastly, Mastodon is open-source. This means that anybody can view its code and edit it.

Concerns

First, my user experience with the Mastodon official web client hasn't been as good as I'd like. Accessibility is lacking in some respects (mostly related to navigation and some unlabeled controls here and there). However, workarounds do exist, and I hope developers will listen to their users.

Also, I can see that IFTTT doesn't support it right now, so I cannot automatically post my updates and statuses from other services to Mastodon or vice-versa as easily as I'd like to. However, it can be done by using their API, with the Maker service (a fancy name for webhooks), which fires every time a certain trigger is used.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, post them below or drop me a line. By the way, you can Follow me on Mastodon, if you like.

As an English Studies student, I've taken several courses which dealt with phonetics (Spoken English, English Phonetics, English Phonology, and some others). In these courses, I had to read and write IPA symbols. This series focuses on this topic. I will explain the alternatives and tools blind people have, along with their advantages and inconvenients. Our first part deals with reading the symbols. So, let's get started!

Speech synthesizers

First, as these symbols are not available in every speech synthesizer, we must choose which one to use. If we are on Mac OSX or iOS, thanks to the terrific support of Unicode symbols that Apple has built into the speech synthesizer, we are good to go. If I remember correctly, there are some symbols where the speech goes silent (they have no description), but apart from that, in general the situation is better than with any other synthesizer. If we are on Windows, we have several options:

• Eloquence: With JAWS and the NVDA addon, the situation is really bad. Most symbols produce absolutely no output.
• Espeak or Espeak NG: Comes integrated in NVDA. Includes most symbols, and if a symbol with no associated description is found, the Unicode value is said instead. In my opinion, the best alternative for Windows, despite its robotic sounding voice.

I have no experience with other synthesizers or opeating systems. In Linux, I assume the default situation is the same as in Windows with Espeak, as Orca uses that synthesizer by default.

Despite what I said above, if you still want to use your preferred synthesizer (Eloquence, SAPI, etc.) and the IPA symbols are not supported, you could make your preferred screen reader interpret these symbols for you (at least in Windows), by using a dictionary or a symbol table. I've found two guides for JAWS, which include already made symbol tables ([1], [2]). I don't use JAWS regularly, so I don't know how well they work, or how updated they are for new (or old) JAWS versions.

Braille

I don't know much about how screen readers behave when rendering these symbols in Braille. I know that both NVDA and JAWS don't display them correctly, but they offer facilities to include Braille tables. The links above include Braille tables for JAWS, but if you use a different Braille code for phonetic symbols (as Spanish speakers do) you are out of luck. I know that Fonos, a program to write phonetic symbols in Spanish which is included in Uni2Bra, includes a jbt file which uses the Spanish Braille code. I will talk about this program in another post.

Regarding NVDA, I know that there exists a way to convert JBT files into NVDA compatible ones. I will investigate this and update this post when I find something. However, probably a configuration profile would be in order, as some symbols would be replaced by incorrect representations.

Actually finding the symbols

The official IPA chart in pdf isn't really accessible. Wikipedia is a better resource for IPA. It contains descriptions of all symbols, with sample sound files. Here is a pdf with the Unicode values associated with the symbols. This is another resource for IPA and Unicode numbers. These two files are intended to help in writing the symbols (or at least that's what I use them for).

I made an accessible version of the 2005 update of the IPA chart, based off of a less accessible one.

When all of this fails

When all of this fails, things are out of your control. Pdf files are famous for making reading these symbols somewhat difficult, for some reason. However, it might be the case that the symbols used are old, non-Unicode (Or PUA) symbols. If this is the case, and if these symbols are in a Word or Powerpoint file, copying these symbols from Powerpoint to Word might halfly solve your problem, rendering legible pseudo-IPA symbols (I instead of ɪ, for example), instead of weird symbols. This is more common if the font used in the file is IPA-SAM. I don't know why this happens.

And we've reached the end of today's post. I hope you've enjoyed it. If you have comments or questions, just drop them here, or contact me. Thanks for reading!

Updates

• 2019-10-31: Reorganize "how to find the symbols" heading. Remove claim that Wikipedia is not accessible (which isnot true anymore).

As I study English Philology, I have to take a course called English Grammar. In this course, I need, among other things, to analise sentences, and make syntax trees of them. Yes, those trees where you disect a sentence into phrases. But how do I, a completely blind person, do it? Images and arrows are inaccessible for me, and the Arboreal and ArborWin fonts, although I haven't tested them, seem to be inaccessible too. Here, I'll show the method I use.

How I do it

To draw a tree, I use Excel spreadsheets. To draw a node (an item of a tree) which has two branches, I use a merged cell, which splits into two cells below it. Then, if one of the cells has further branches, I do the same thing.

With this procedure, I can draw a tree with an arbitrary depth, and an arbitrary number of branches by node (although normally I work with two branches per node for this kind of tree). I think that with this system trees are easy to draw, or at least, easier than other systems I have tried. Visually, it works too, which is a plus.

Why I don't use brackets

I don't use them because trees can get really complex. I don't know if linguists use them for large trees, but I think that, in trees with brackets, fixing mistakes is harder than in my system. But, if you don't know how to use spreadsheets, or simply you want a more conventional system, this one may work for you.

Other systems

Of course, the possibilities are endless. If these systems don't convince you, and if you reach an agreement with your instructor (or your student), you may invent a system of your own. Also, if you are a better programmer than me, you may use something like nested dictionaries in YAML¹ or the Natural Language ToolKit.

Conclusion

I hope you have found this post helpful and informative. If you have any comments, send me an e-mail or contact me through Twitter. At the time of writing, I haven't added the possibility to post comments yet, but if it's available when you read this, and if you prefer a more public comunication, post a comment. Also, contact me if you have any doubts, and I'll try to answer your questions. Thanks for reading!