Paweł Masarczyk

Deep into my first day at the State of The Map 2026, the world's biggest Open Street Map conference, and everyone's been lovely giving support, helping me navigate the sessions spread across three buildings on a university campus, handling the self-service lunch experience and generally making the event enjoyable. Nervous for my talk tomorrow. If you'd like to see/hear me geek out about GPS navigation for the blind, but most of all, the benefits of OSM data for our community, it's tomorrow at 16:45 CET. Unless I mixed up the links and/or the tech fails, the Peertube stream is at: https://peertube.openstreetmap.fr/videos/embed/rHGTro2UhSN9XGzekQoVxP?autoplay=1&warningTitle=0&p2p=1&peertubeLink=0 #SOTM2026 #OpenStreetMap #OSM #Accessibility #Blind

For the last three or so years I have been co-hosting EBU in Action, a quarterly podcast of the European Blind Union where we discuss various topic of importance to the community of blind and partially sighted people in Europe. Episode 14 is out as of two days and since there are many blind gamers on Mastodon, I thought I might do a special shoutout about it. It was my honour to have @svenja@mstdn.games also known as SvenjaDev on Twitch and Philip Bennefall, the person behind things such as Q9, Tarzan Junior and of course the Blastbay Game Toolkit (BGT) framework that many popular audiogames are based on, as guests for this one. We touched upon a lot of topics from the history of gaming for the blind, modding vs. native accessibility, e-sports gaming, streaming right up to AI so go ahead and check it out. #Accessibility #Blind https://ebuinaction.podbean.com/e/press-start-to-play-levelling-up-gaming-through-accessibility/

And speaking of friends and tech things, another person took a stab at having an iOS app created that is a completely VoiceOver accessible FMDX and Kiwi SDR tuner with all sorts of nifty features like automatic RDS read out by VO, tuning through the rotor and headphone controls, all of the web interface features like the presets, built-in chat etc. as well as recording the played radio output. Having been involved in testing, I can say this is the closest we may get to having an actual global radio receiver on a mobile device. Android version in the making. https://testflight.apple.com/join/bbTvprWc #Radio #Accessibility #Blind #iOS

For any fans of retro speech synthesis, a legend has spoken at last - well at least a legend for me. In the early 00's, Wirtualna Polska, one of the leading web portals providing free-of-charge mailboxes, daily news, TV schedule and many things that made Internet attractive at that time, has released their own speech synthesizer dubbed, very creatively, Syntezator Mowy WP. The main goal of it was to read out messages and contact status changes in their instant messaging app, WP Kontakt, later Spik, pronounced like the English word "speak". It was an exe running in the system tray, waiting to be sent text. It wasn't compatible with any SAPI version and other than WP Kontakt, it was only ever used in various instant messaging software, mostly through third-party plugins. It's based off Festival but the voice base belonged to WP. Years have passed, the instant messaging scene in Poland, once ripe with local products, was taken over by the international solutions the likes of Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp and so Spik and the accompanying TTS ceased being developed further. The installers for both the male and female voices are hard to come by (the male one is still hosted by several general purpose websites with installers for all sorts of things but I still pulled it off one of the old copies of the original website that the Internet Archive has to offer). The link for the female voice is dead there and the only single lead I got by Googling the original installer's file name is a web folder of someone on a Polish file hosting website - sadly, this one's expired too, so unless someone's got a copy of it locally, it may very well be lost media. The original software can be installed but won't speak. Thanks to one friend tinkering a little, it started speaking through all sorts of modern things and the attached recording is the male voice reading huge numbers - it could actually go upto heptillions. #RetroTech #Accessibility #Blind #TextToSpeech

On my way back from my parents' to Vienna and I was driving through the Czech Republic. In tribute to that fact, have my first NVDA Composer thing - Jozin z Bazin by Ivan Mladek, because we all need some more songs about swamp monsters called Joseph, or something... Could be better but given that it took most of the 4-hour ride to put it together, I don't think it's bad. Haven't found the special Nokia mode with the wav exports yet which could have saved it. Shall we call this #Composituary #NVDAComposer?