As we are thinking about localization in #247, I was also thinking about further accessibility features.
I think our menu-based system and the fact it can be controlled with hardware buttons may be good for blind users, that is; if we have some kind of simple hook that passes the highlighted menu item to a to something like picotts or festival, navigation would become fairly easy even when you can't see the screen.
This is not an immediate priority but I think a hackable project like ours could make an impact here, potentially.
It would be great to have proper screen reader support out of the box in one of the UIs on linux mobile and Sxmo seems like a great candidate for it. The demo with numen also looks impressive: https://lists.sr.ht/~mil/sxmo-devel/%3C20221108215538.rhg6ja4m6nfv62s3%40trantor%3E
An issue in the postmarketOS tracker was recently created showing interest in accessibility features, so if somebody is interested in implementing this or discussing ideas, consider reaching out there: https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/issues/2321
Regarding the keeping-it-lightweight aspect, maybe the screenreader feature could be implemented optionally (and for pmOS users would chose whether to enable it or not during the installer in the future?)
I've added this issue to: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Accessibility#Related_issues
90% of this would be to use an accessible picker in place of bemenu. (read the title, then read the currently selected item)
Sxmo would need an env variable to switch the menu command.
Other things that could already be done:
- switch SXMO_TERMINAL to an accessible terminal emulator (this exists, right?)--or perhaps one with brltty set up in it?
- set KEYBOARD_ARGS to something that would pipe typed keys into espeak or similar?
- override the inputhandler hook to announce what each gesture is doing?
- throw together a script for reading the status...
(After getting these tasks done, pmos could make another package to ship these overrides)
All we need is someone who is willing to do the work and someone who is able to determine it works adequately.
I would be willing to act as a tester if I saw that postmarketos should get espeakup, I understand that the package in question is not available for espeakup. The sxmo terminal emulator should be upgraded to an accessible version, but what about the implementation of the menus, how is the menu frame now implemented in sxmo. I would see this project as simple, as long as the necessary packages are postmarketos and sxmo. It would be easy to create a package from this, by installing which the accessibility changes would take effect
Thank you, dataaja95! I just checked, espeakup is in Alpine's testing repository. This means it can be installed in Alpine edge / postmarketOS edge.
Thanks for checking, I don't have a device yet where I could test this, would it be possible for someone to test what espeakup speaks in the current sxmo environment, in my opinion dmenu is not compatible with orca, linux screen size, I can't say about espeakup. The only tiling window manager that works with orca is sway and it requires sgtk menu on the PC side, which has the menus implemented https://git.stormux.org/storm/I38 Does sxmo use sway as its window manager or dwm or i3?
@dataaja95 we support various window managers but yes, sxmo on sway works very well. i messed with numen and piper-tts the last few days and realized that we first need to have stable audio in/output...