Apparently! I don’t hide my data in any way, and constantly get ads in languages I don’t speak. Usually French, but sometimes Hindi or Chinese. And as a blind person myself, I’m not sure that my well paid full time job working in large enterprise and big tech accessibility is altruism deserving of thanks haha.
I don’t block anything. I work in accessibility, so it’s important to me to know what the experiences are like for my fellow users with disabilities. I also don’t want to recommend sites or apps that are riddled with inaccessible ads. I’d rather not give them traffic at all. Though even though I let them track me, I still get ads in a language I don’t speak for cars I can’t drive. What’re they doing with all that data?
I was having issues with outgoing federation to Mastodon on 0.19.0. I just did the update five minutes ago, so we’ll see if that fixes it. If you’re seeing this comment I guess it’s working at the moment.
AI dubbing: this makes it way easier for YouTube to add secondary dubbed tracks to videos in multiple languages. Based on the Google push to add AI into everything, including creating AI related OKR’s, that’s probably a primary driver. Multiple audio tracks is just needed infrastructure to add AI dubbing.
Audio description: Google is fighting enough antitrust related legal battles right now. The fact that YouTube doesn’t support audio description for those of us who are blind has been an issue for a long time, and now that basically every other video streaming service supports it, I suspect they’re starting to feel increased pressure to get on board. Once again, multiple audio tracks is needed infrastructure for offering audio description.
I like lire. It works with any of the popular feed syncing services, self-hosted, cloud-hosted, or it can just run locally on your phone. Also, when full text extraction works, it’s a gamechanger. Unfortunately some websites (like bleeping computer) block it.