Hello,
From time to time I am googling around and trying to find out if someone has tried to use XBMC even if he or she is blind. This is the closest to my issue I was able to find so let me add my story here and maybe we might able to cook something up.
I am blind so currently I am just organizing my media through file manager and playing them in a variety of audio players mostly VLC media player. I have three kids and they don't find particularly easy hunting for their favorite songs, cartoons and movies searching the folders tree inside the file manager. While I am at it I would also like to concentrate viewing movies, playing music, access to youtube and possibly other sources at a single place.
I would like to use this on linux on a typical desktop PC and if I will master XBMC enough so it becomes usefull to me and convenient for my kids I am considering buying raspberry pi or other cheap computer for running it.
I haven't yet installed XBMC on linux because its default behaviour is that it uses its own X session and is not shown inside a desktop enviromment. Most accessible on linux is gnome with included screen reader called orca. Starting a new X session with an app not yet known to me after reading rumours it might not be accessible is not something I might be able to make some use of. So I have started my XBMC venture by installing it on windows.
Unfortunatelly the situation is not much better while running XBMC in windows. In order to gain access to windows apps I am using free and open source screen reader NVDA (
http://www.nvda-project.org/ ). From my point view the main XBMC window as shown to me when starting XBMC for the first time appears to me as an empty window. For sure it may look well and the controls are visible on the screen I am unable to access them at all. However what is positive that when pressing arrow keys I can hear a clicking sound so at least I know XBMC is running.
Now I would like to ask for my options. I would really like to start with something really simple so I might be able to make something out of this. Looking through the folder structure of installed XBMC I think there is an web UI addon. Am I correct and can I enable it somehow at least to get some initial settings configured?
For the actual viewing / browsing the media I might use the IOS / Android remote clients if I find them accessible enough. The prior postings here indicate at least IOS remote client might be usefull. Can I somehow configure my instance of XBMC running on windows to accept connections from remote clients if I have no access to the XBMC graphic interface?
Here is page on mithspeech an attempt at providing some basic text to speech output to mithtv:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythSpeech I guess the user interface paradigm of XBMC is somewhat similar to mithtv. As I have read earlier in this discussion thread all the textual information is there somewhere it just needs to be conveyed to the visually disabled user some how. Writing MSAA accessibility support in order to make XBMC accessible on windows, writing ATK interfaces in order to provide accessibility support on linux would be a complex task. Unfortunatelly I haven't even thought about IOS, android and perhaps more platforms XBMC can run on. Making XBMC into a self-voicing app would perhaps be a good idea for an addon. On linux, windows and android there is a light weight speech synthesiser called eSpeak which can do TTS in more than 40 languages so if indeed possible I would be happy to make some good use of it. Do you think there are APIs for intercepting current menu position within XBMC? Alternativelly is there a way to hook into the procedure which plays those tick sounds while navigating XBMC UI using the keyboard? Can you describe XBMC UI controls a bit? Are they derived from any toolkit or is the UI specific to XBMC? Are there common UI elements such as menu items, checkable menu items, edit fields, collections etc? Is there some material I can read in order to better understand this?
I apologise for a detailed post hopefully it is not completelly boring and it makes some sense. I would welcome any kind of cooperation, hints and even a speculations about how this might be done. If indeed possible without having access to the graphical UI I would also like to get hints on how I might be able to configure my instance of XBMC.
Thanks and greetings
Peter