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phetsims / joist

Joist is the main framework for PhET Interactive Simulations. Joist creates and displays the simulation content, home screen, navigation bar, About dialog, enables switching between tabs, and other framework-related features.
MIT License
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Voicing design question: Should the Sim's Title/Name be voice-able? #920

Open terracoda opened 1 year ago

terracoda commented 1 year ago

As we designed the Voicing feature, we created an object type that allows for the voicing of on-screen text. I call this type of object a "reading block" and it has a "reading block response".

In the Voicing feature, a reading block response allows me to turn any "non-interactive text" into an action point (likely a button under the hood), that voices the on-screen text out loud in response to a learner's actions.

Reading blocks were conceived/designed mainly to voice important on-screen sim content, like the force value in Gravity Force Lab:Basics, but they are also used to voice a lot information in the Preferences menu, and all the information in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog.

The Sim Title in the bottom navigation bar is currently not a reading a block.

This was intentional because it would/could add a Tab stop at a strange place in the Tab order for keyboard navigation.

I am now reflecting on whether that is the best decision?

terracoda commented 1 year ago

Assigning to @jessegreenberg for comment, but interested in other dev opinions: @zepumph, @jbphet, and anyone else.

jessegreenberg commented 1 year ago

Yep! We can do this and it would be pretty trivial.

terracoda commented 1 year ago

Ok, good to know. I'll discuss with @BLFiedler and @emily-phet about the pros and cons of an extra tab stop when Voicing is enabled and where it should be - maybe first in the tab order, just before "Sim Voicing on-off switch?

terracoda commented 1 year ago

@emily-phet and @BLFiedler, going forward, should we think about making the Sim Title voice-able?

emily-phet commented 1 year ago

Sure! We probably didn't do this in previous voicing sims to keep things more simple. It's probably a bigger lift to add an extra tab stop into Joist than into the play area of a sim. We don't have a sim to implement this with, so perhaps this is an issue for future consideration, when a sim is being worked on for Voicing.

terracoda commented 1 year ago

I agree, it would be for the next sim that gets voicing.

Just an FYI, I don’t think there is an H1 for the Voicing feature, though there might be. I think they way this would work is the sim title reading block would use the same string as the H1, but it might not actually be an H1.