Kevin Hill (aka procount) has been making progress on PINN. He made up
a PINN-compatible image from the current Raspberry VI distribution, so we
can install it along with Arch and Raspbian Lite. He has also started to
think about ways to add a text-based interface to PINN, so that users can
perform its functions via SSH over Wi-Fi, etc.
As a sighted person with NO screen reader experience, I'm definitely not
the right person to be answering his questions. Might some folks here be
interested in jumping into the conversation? Here is the issue page:
- creating a blind-accessible, multi-OS Micro SD card
https://github.com/procount/pinn/issues/84
And here are his notes and questions:
=====
I've had an initial think about how I can enable a textual interface to PINN.
There are already 2 user interfaces to PINN:
- Standard keyboard and mouse with graphical display
- Remote VNC interface with graphical display
Currently these interfaces work on the same graphical display, i.e. a remote
user can see what a local user is doing and vice-versa. They are different
views of the same graphical display.
My first choice concerns whether the textual display view is:
- Another (third) view of the same graphical display (but described by text
for screen readers etc)
- A completely separate display that works independently of the graphical
display.
Option 1 means that the textual interface will follow all graphical dialogs and
pathways through the code. It will work exactly the same as now, but the menu
options and lists will be described in text.
Option 2 means the interface can be completely different to the current user
interface, with reduced options for only the required functions that are
necessary. There may be a conflict here if the blind user were operating PINN
whilst another user was using the standard or VNC interfaces and they try to
do different things, but this is probably an unlikely scenario.
In both cases, my vision of the interface is menu driven like that found in
the parted or fdisk tools; a bit like an 80's style Text Adventure game:
"You are at the main menu. Options are:
- install
- list operating systems...." etc.
With perhaps verbose and succinct modes to control the amount of text
displayed for beginners and advanced users.
My second choice concerns how the textual interface is presented. Again, I
thought of 2 possibilities:
- The display is like a normal terminal session over SSH - the output from
PINN is interleaved with the user input. The 2 streams are synchronous i.e.
when the user is expected to type some input, PINN will wait and not be able
to display any informative messages until the user has finished entering.
- The PINN output is separate from the user input, something like it is in
a chat application with a separate window for the input and output. This
allows the PINN output window to be asynchronous and display messages
whilst the user is typing an input. I'm not sure how this would work with
a screen reader. Maybe it means opening 2 SSh sessions to PINN, one for
input and one for output. It may be too complicated, but just a thought.
=====
I have no idea how accessible the GitHub issues page is. If it gets too
ugly, feel free to email comments to me and I'll add them to the page.
Note, however, that I'll be out of town until early September, so there
will be a bit of a delay...
-r
--
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin rdm@xxxxxxxx
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume San Bruno, CA, USA +1 650-873-7841
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