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Rockbox mail archiveSubject: Re: Accessible Mpeg player on iPod Video 30GB?Re: Accessible Mpeg player on iPod Video 30GB?
From: Paul Louden <paulthenerd_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:18:01 -0600 Hussein Patwa wrote: > Your mention of GSOC got me thinking. Would it be possible to make the > plugin accessible, I mean technically, or is it a practical impossibility > given limitations of Rockbox's architecture? Couild it be an idea to have > this as a possible GSOC project this year? Bear in mind I know little about > GSOC so forgive me if this is all just tripe. Bear in mind I'm not an expert in the area myself. My understanding is that accessibility in plugins basically requires two steps. The first is localization of the plugins - the plugins need to get their strings from a separate file rather than having them compiled in. This is what the GSOC work so far has been focused on, and I believe significant progress was made. The second step would be actual voicing of the plugin. Since plugins are currently able to control playback and exist concurrently with playback, I would imagine that when plugins don't exclude playback voice would be possible by allowing a voice file to be created off the plugin strings, and swapping it out for the primary voice file when a plugin is loaded. I don't know how much work this would be, and I don't mean to make it sound easy, but merely that it seems like it should be reasonable possible. Unfortunately plugins like mpegplayer offer an additional hurdle - they exclude the playback engine. You can't have music playing while mpegplayer is running. I'm not certain this will prevent voice, as the voice file itself has its own reserved space in memory that won't be claimed by the plugin as far as I know and voice can play when playback is stopped, but it may require some additional effort on top of what would be necessary for general plugin voice. Bear in mind this is all wild speculation, and I welcome anyone more familiar to step in and correct me. I'm just guessing, loosely speaking, that adding voice will be significant work, and adding it in to some specific plugins will be even more. That being said, another alternative might be the work in integrating espeak. If a GPLv2 version of espeak were ported, it could be added into the plugin library and allow plugins to speak their menu structure without pre-recorded voices. There would likely be significantly less audio quality than some of the better pre-recorded voices but it would offer flexibility. The main problem with both of these approaches is that they'd require significant programming time and time to learn the underlying systems. I don't know how much a non-programmer can contribute to either sort of effort, but I'm sure both ideas will be discussed as we approach this year's GSOC as accessibility improvements are a popular idea to post to help students think of proposals. Unfortunately simply having good ideas does not mean the students who read them will find them as interesting as you would find them useful. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: http://cool.haxx.se/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rockbox FAQ: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/GeneralFAQ Etiquette: http://www.rockbox.org/mail/etiquette.html Received on 2010-01-31 Page template was last modified "Tue Sep 7 00:00:02 2021" The Rockbox Crew -- Privacy Policy |