Banner Ads Considered Harmful

If I have more than a few paragraphs to read, I either use a screenreader with audio output or braille.

* I should also note that if you have a digital subscription to The Economist, the entire weekly edition is professionally narrated. You can access it using the standard The Economist app.

* On Audible, if you have a PremiumPlus subscription, you get access to The New York Times Digest, which is a 30 minute audio piece published daily, which is professionally narrated

* Likewise, on Audible, if you have the PremiumPlus subscription, you get access to The Wall Street Journal Digest, which is a 25 minute audio piece published daily, which is professionally narrated.

I guess I should elaborate more on how I read.

Traditionally, my favorite way to read has been using certain screenreaders:

* PC (Windows): Kurzweil 3000 (for audio visual output) or JAWS (for braille with audio)

* iPhone and iPad (iOS): Voice Dream Reader (app) and VoiceOver (iOS accessibility tool)

I am a self-taught braille reader. Braille is the ultimate way of avoiding unnecessary distractions such as advertisements or visually stimulating "suggestions" trying to get you to buy stuff. Also, because I read linearly (both braille and audio), I notice the breakdown of conversations on sites such as Reddit (and even here), as the threads go further down the page, so I am less susceptible to bots and just falling for the distractions that social media offers. I have no social media accounts besides HackerNews.

To learn braille, I bought a Freedom Scientific Focus series refreshable braille display off of ebay secondhand for about 5% of the original list price. I have the 80-cell version, which is pretty much the largest braille display that you can get, from a pure hardware perspective.

Anyways, both JAWS (screenreader) and my Focus Blue 80 braille display are made by Freedom Scientific. Because these technologies are made by the same manufacturer, there are special features when using them in combination, that help people learning braille. On JAWS, if you have a Focus Blue series braille display, there is a special "braille learning mode" feature in JAWS. If you press the router key above any of the 80 cells (on my display), it will speak aloud the character for you. This is tremendously helpful when learning braille because if you are uncertain of what the character is via feel, you press a button (without looking--that is key to learning), and the character name is spoken aloud. Even for experienced braille learners, there are sometimes unfamiliar characters that we might come across, such as "&" which would be spoken aloud as "ampersand". So, it is helpful for anyone learning braille. This feature works for any braille code (all of them basically work with JAWS).

There is also a series of braille displays that are more commonly used in Europe, which have this feature, but in limited, more mainstream braille codes. They are the HelpTech braille displays. Ultimately, my dream setup would be the HelpTech Actilino (16 cell display) for on-the-go mobile use, an Active Braille (40 cell display for reading at home on mobile and with laptop on the go), and a Modular Evolution (88 cell display with 8-key braille [Perkins] keyboard for at home use and work use and at the desktop).

In addition to the Focus 80 Blue, I have a HIMS BrailleEdge (40 cells), which I use with my mobile phone and for on-the-go use with my laptop. I likewise got this for about 8% of the original price on ebay, secondhand, but in impeccable condition. I generally prefer to read with JAWS using braille and audio simultaneously, to reinforce learning of materials.

Sometimes I prefer audio only with some visual output (highlighting while the word and sentence are being read aloud, in different colors--green and yellow--respectively) or professional narration, when I want to relax, though. Also, when I drive, I listen to the newspaper.

Recently, instead of using Kurzweil 3000 ($400/year) for audio visual output, I have been using Dolphin EasyReader ($50 one-time purchase) for reading books when I do not want to use braille. It is basically effectively the same thing as Kurzweil 3000 except that it does not have a "Read the Web Feature" and math documents are poorly supported. For reading the internet and editing documents, I use Nextup TextAloud, which has the same multimodal highlighting feature for sentences and words, except in browser mode.

In browser (Firefox) mode, TextAloud only highlights the word being read aloud, in the color of your choice. However, you can generally export webpages as PDFs/Pocket/Instapaper and open it up in either TextAloud or Dolphin EasyReader, unless it is a copyrighted news source that I do not have access to via NFB Newsline. This happens very rarely, and in that case, I just use Textaloud in browser.

You can load SAPI5 voices of your choice to your Windows machine, and they will work 100% fully supported in both TextAloud and Dolphin EasyReader.

The best voices are the Cerence Deep Learning voices. The best one for text-to-speech, if you just want to listen to audio only with no text support (such as when driving) is Conversational Zoe - DL (see: https://nextup.com/cerence/) which is purely amazing.

In fact, I go on to NFB Newsline every morning, download my local newspaper, save it as a text file, and use a wrapper script (https://pypi.org/project/pyttsx3/) to make it into an mp3 file, which I upload to Dropbox for listening throughout the day, later in the day.

Alternatively, I can copy/paste text into TextAloud and save it as an audio file using Conversational Zoe Deep Learning SAPI5 voice. But, the wrapper is far more efficient.

Accessible math is not supported well in TextAloud or Dolphin Easyreader, unlike Kurzweil 3000. I am a graduate electrical engineering student, and to make my math texts accessible, via optical character recognition (OCR), I use either MathPix (preferred) (https://MathPix.com) or InftyReader (https://www.inftyreader.org/).

When taking notes, I also type up math notes in a braille code, using a braille keyboard in a code called LAMBDA braille, which converts to the same standard OCR format via a specialized software that I use called LAMBDA 2.0 (https://www.lambdaproject.org/).

Anyways, once the math material is in MathML format either via specialized braille formatting, MathPix, or InftyReader, I create the "math speech rules" using this package (https://github.com/zorkow/speech-rule-engine) with a short script I wrote.

After I do that, I likewise feed the output file with the speech math speech rules into the other wrapper script I listed (pyttsx3) in order to create the MP3 of the math document.

Anyways, the math part may sound complicated, but it is legitimately awesome! I have the best cheat sheets (permitted) on exams and the best notes of my peers! Everyone is jealous of my notes! Anyways, I also break down the MathML documents into smaller fragments, and make them into Anki flashcards, which is the ultimate study tool.

Sorry this is all over the place, but I can assure you that while having a print-related disability may have its challenges, you adapt and sometimes you can even be the envy of your peers!

Firefox does goofy stuff to tag manager, lots of ad block blockers block analytics too and no script and stuff too.

This is definitely not just an American thing.

But yeah, I have fond memories of some American commercials that still get me: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs

It's amazing different the attitudes can be towards things tech people see as silly or scammy.