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Old 11-06-2018, 10:50 AM   #1
Meo-Ada Mespotine
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Default Accessability Feature-requests-thread

I stumbled upon a thread in the Bug-Reports-forum that made me think, that having a feature-request-thread dedicated to accessibility would be very useful.

So I think, I just start one and start with a request from Scottsdale:

https://forum.cockos.com/showpost.ph...39&postcount=1

Quote:
Hi,

Any chance that text labels for each fade-in, fade-out, and crossfade curve could be added in a future version? In particular, I'm thinking of the popup menus in Item Properties, and when setting default curves in Preferences -> Media Item Defaults.

Currently, screen reader users don't get any feedback in these popup menus, and - because the menus wrap - the ux involves a lot of trial and error.

Thanks in advance. Shout if there's any details I can provide that might help.

Scott
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Old 11-06-2018, 10:53 AM   #2
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I would love to suggest an API-function:

SendTextToSpeech(string text)

so I could add text to speech into my Lua-script. Currently, I don't think, that text, written by gfx.drawstr() is output via Text to Speech, making scripts being hard to access, especially gui-related ones.


I don't know, if TextToSpeech allows accessing Refreshable braille displays as well, so maybe this would be also a good idea to add to Reaper.
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Old 11-06-2018, 10:56 AM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mespotine View Post
I would love to suggest an API-function:

SendTextToSpeech(string text)

so I could add text to speech into my Lua-script. Currently, I don't think, that text, written by gfx.drawstr() is output via Text to Speech, making scripts being hard to access, especially gui-related ones.


I don't know, if TextToSpeech allows accessing Refreshable braille displays as well, so maybe this would be also a good idea to add to Reaper.
+1

If and when this happens I'm happy to add functionality for it to my GUI.
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Old 11-18-2018, 01:59 PM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mespotine View Post
I would love to suggest an API-function:

SendTextToSpeech(string text)

so I could add text to speech into my Lua-script. Currently, I don't think, that text, written by gfx.drawstr() is output via Text to Speech, making scripts being hard to access, especially gui-related ones.


I don't know, if TextToSpeech allows accessing Refreshable braille displays as well, so maybe this would be also a good idea to add to Reaper.
In addition to that: I would love it to be treated like the metronome, with the possibility to output a Text2Speech into an output-channel of my choice.
Otherwise, it could be a nightmare having TextToSpeech being output in the default soundcard, while the rest comes over my audio-interface.
Especially, if I can use only either of these devices as output for driver-reasons or other stupid things that you can't fix on Reaper's side.
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Old 12-01-2018, 01:08 PM   #5
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I don't know, whether this already is possible, but I would love to be able to change the font and fontsize of all dialogs/menus/etc in Reaper.

This would allow making fonts bigger for those, who are visually impaired and can't decipher small fonts.

Even if this would mean retheming Reaper, this would allow real cool acessable themes.
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Old 12-19-2018, 04:14 PM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mespotine View Post
I stumbled upon a thread in the Bug-Reports-forum that made me think, that having a feature-request-thread dedicated to accessibility would be very useful.
Hey mespotine, I'm arriving here a bit late to the party...

Thanks for the thought, it's clear to me that your intentions are good. This is a tricky message to convey via text (without accompanying body language and vocal tone), so please try not to take what I'm about to say as negative or as me being ungrateful.

There's a reason that the blind folks who are using Reaper try to avoid accessibility related stuff being grouped into a single thread. This has been the case for many of the projects I've worked on in the past, and I've seen it proven that accessibility tends to be developed at a slower rate when it's tucked away in a separate forum or thread. I guess this is because - in the vast majority of cases - developers and power users aren't relying on accessibility, ergo it's harder to keep it top of mind. That's why nowadays, the only time I'll take that route is if a developer has specifically requested it. Justin is currently doing a great job of nailing accessibility bugs and regressions posted in the appropriate forums, hence why I'm reluctant to change the approach.

Of course, a separate thread is useful when thrashing out the details of how a regression could be fixed or what the UX of a proposed feature would ideally be, but in reality, only a tiny percentage of the folks who are currently relying on accessibility visit this forum. I'm not happy about this, but right now all of those debates currently take place on email lists and WhatsApp groups before I arrive here to request Cockos take a shot at implementing anything. In an ideal world, I'd like to see more of the folks who are using accessibility everyday hanging out here and integrating with all of the other users who want Reaper to be the best DAW it can be, because I've met some superb people through this forum and I've felt very welcome here, but no matter how hard I encourage them, they aren't swayed (presumably because it's easier/more productive to operate their email client or send a voice note via WhatsApp than it is to operate forum software).

Seeing as you're a coder, I'm gonna drop a link to the GitHub repo of the accessibility bridge most folks are using, just in case you fancy taking a look at what we've got going on:
https://github.com/jcsteh/osara

One more thing - it's probably worth pointing out that all of the above describes the current situation for blind folks who are using screen reader software to access Reaper, because that's the only aspect of accessibility that I'm qualified to talk about. Some of the FRs in this thread would be most useful to low vision users. I don't know many of those (for some reason I only seem to meet people with full sight or none at all), but if I stumble across anyone who's low vis, I'll send them here.

Your API looks nifty, btw. If you'd like, I can take it for a spin and drop you a PM with some feedback on what it's like to use with screen reader software. Many of us love ReaConsole from SWS (I use that thing at least a hundred times per day), so it would be great to work with you toward adding accessibility to another power tool.

Cheers,

Scott

Last edited by Scottsdale; 08-09-2020 at 10:24 AM. Reason: Belatedly noticed and consequently nuked a stray "dude"
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Old 12-20-2018, 11:00 AM   #7
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@Scottsdale

No problem. My intention of this thread is more a way to collect an idea of, what accessibility means in practice, which is a much broader thing than "just" screenreading-stuff, but also, how to use Reaper when your hands aren't really flexible enough to do mouse-editing and much much more.

I'm also very much into the idea of improving accessibility and discussing it with people in need is a real helpful thing to make ideas out of it.
Just like my FR about screenreader-support for scripts, so we can add that to scripts that are relying heavily on gui-related-stuff.
With only this feature alone, a lot of cool stuff and helpful tools and gadgets would be codeable right away.
So this thread shouldn't be much about "do this or do that", but rather bring into play, what it means to need accessibility and what it means in practice.
I'm not in need, so I have no idea, what is needed for those in need.

By the way, your link to the accessibility bridge is exactly that kind of helpful information needed. Maybe it is somehow possible to build an extension, that allows us to use it from Lua-Scripts so Justin doesn't need to implement it himself(he has a lot to do already).
So thank you for that


Regarding my API, this is the place, where I would love to add such things so it can be easily programmed. I also think about coding at some point something like SWS-ReaConsole you mentioned, but with more features and much more easy to extend than SWS unfortunately is.
But screenreader-support would be mandatory for that to make that useful.
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Old 08-09-2020, 07:51 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mespotine View Post
I would love to suggest an API-function:

SendTextToSpeech(string text)

so I could add text to speech into my Lua-script. Currently, I don't think, that text, written by gfx.drawstr() is output via Text to Speech, making scripts being hard to access, especially gui-related ones.


I don't know, if TextToSpeech allows accessing Refreshable braille displays as well, so maybe this would be also a good idea to add to Reaper.
Bumpalicious. It's sad, that gui-related scripts are currently unaccessable for visually impaired users.
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Old 08-09-2020, 10:27 AM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Meo-Ada Mespotine View Post
Bumpalicious. It's sad, that gui-related scripts are currently unaccessable for visually impaired users.
Bumpulous indeed. The more stuff I find on ReaPack, the sadder this becomes.

@Cockos, is there any chance that the GUI elements ReaScript can use could be exposed to accessibility APIs?
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Old 08-10-2020, 06:19 AM   #10
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ReaScript doesn't support gui-elements, so all gui-elements need to be drawn and managed inside the script.
Like, draw a rectangle, write a text into it, redraw it, when someone clicks on the rectangle.
Lokasenna made several gui-libs, who do this for less experienced scripters.

So, any accessibility needs to be coded into the gui-libraries, as no gui-elements of the operating system are usable and therefore you can't use the screenreading abilities of the operating system.
But it's addable with a SendTextToSpeech-function.

I probably would need to add tabbing behavior as well, as present in other dialogs, which would be difficult but possible already with ReaScript's abilities.
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Old 08-10-2020, 08:46 AM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Meo-Ada Mespotine View Post
Lokasenna made several gui-libs, who do this for less experienced scripters.
Got it. I wonder, would there be any mileage in starting a PM thread with you, me and Lokasenna? I can't code for toffee, but I've gotten pretty good at constructive feedback.

Last edited by Scottsdale; 08-10-2020 at 08:48 AM. Reason: What sort of idiot puts a space before a question mark? (rhetorical question)
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Old 08-10-2020, 09:09 AM   #12
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Lokasenna unfortunately left the Reaper Community and even though I plan to overtake his gui-project, I hadn't time to invest yet.

But, I keep you in the back of my mind. Especially when I want to write down some best practices for good accessibility descriptions I definitely will need your help.
A cancel button says nothing if the description doesn't give good and precise context, which we "see-ers" probably often forget.
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Old 08-10-2020, 09:30 AM   #13
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Meo-Ada Mespotine View Post
A cancel button says nothing if the description doesn't give good and precise context, which we "see-ers" probably often forget.
There are times where some extra context being provided is helpful yeah, but extra context probably isn't needed for a cancel button if the behaviour of that button does what's expected (closes the dialogue and reverts changes).

Screen reader users will pick up on concepts, conventions and behaviours the same way that you see-ers do, it's just that ours tend to be centered around keystrokes.

So in this example, we'd expect Escape to be bound to cancel, and we'd probably be a bit jarred if cancel wasn't next to OK in the tab order, because they're both longstanding conventions.

Make sense?
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Old 08-10-2020, 05:42 PM   #14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Scottsdale View Post
There are times where some extra context being provided is helpful yeah, but extra context probably isn't needed for a cancel button if the behaviour of that button does what's expected (closes the dialogue and reverts changes).

Screen reader users will pick up on concepts, conventions and behaviours the same way that you see-ers do, it's just that ours tend to be centered around keystrokes.

So in this example, we'd expect Escape to be bound to cancel, and we'd probably be a bit jarred if cancel wasn't next to OK in the tab order, because they're both longstanding conventions.

Make sense?
Definitely. Looks like some basic conventions could be included into the behavioral concept of the gui-lib by design maybe.
Yes, I'm excited for the whole accessibility stuff. Hope I can start working on that soon.
Will be tough but worth it, if I can pull it off.
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