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tommitytom / RetroPlug

A frontend for the SameBoy GameBoy emulator, with a focus on music creation. It runs standalone and can be used as an audio plugin (VST) in your favourite DAW!
MIT License
307 stars 16 forks source link

Accessibility for limited vision users #17

Open INFU-AV opened 3 years ago

INFU-AV commented 3 years ago

Thanks to RetroPlug LSDj could be easily designed to be accessible if reading out names of parameters and cursor position would be available to visually impared, and/or through some other solution compatible with open source screen reader, NVDA!

juanreina921 commented 3 years ago

Hey, my name is Juan, and I also think there could be a way for screen reader accessibility, especially for those who have less vision and those like myself, who have no vision at all. I am also using the open sorce screen reader NVDA, and am a hardcore chiptune fanatic. Maybe like what @INFU-AV said, we could have the screen reader speak cursor position, speak effects an parameters,or even speak something like Alert., Lsdj has started. Upon starting of lsdj. @tommitytom I am not a coder by any means, but I would suggest you to grab the screen reader from here. https://www.nvaccess.org/download/ This allows you to get better familiar with the screen reader, so you can get a feal for how it operates. And lastly, there is a surtain file that is distributed with some games, and other software like retro arch. That file is known as NVDA controler client32 or NVDA controler client64.dll and is located in program files or program files x 86\NVDA. and if I am correct, it allows the UI to be more visible to NVDA. Only two downsides are these files must be distributed with the program for eas of use, and that you'll have to change the code for the UI so NVDA could take notice. I hope this helps, and we hope to here your thoughts and ideas on this issue.

tommitytom commented 3 years ago

This is incredibly interesting! It's something I would definitely like to implement further down the line, but will be quite a difficult task since it will require parsing the screen output from LSDj (RetroPlug currently has no idea what screen is being viewed, or where the cursor is on the screen etc). I'm currently working on implementing scripting functionality that should make tasks like this a lot easier, so I will revisit this when that has progressed further :)

cyberic99 commented 3 years ago

RetroPlug currently has no idea what screen is being viewed

I played with the bgb debugger running LSDJ, and I noticed that the current patterns, cursors etc, were located at a fixed offset and could be easily grabbed from memory.

This could be easier than reading the screen (which could be quite hard with custom fonts and colors)

tommitytom commented 3 years ago

@cyberic99 Yes I'll be adding the ability to access different sections of GB memory from within lua so that will most likely be the approach I take. Thanks for the heads up!