[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Q: top three things you would like to change if that was easy?



Hi Sam

On 2019/04/02 19:01, Sam Hartman wrote:
> 3.5)  While I'm hear I want to call attention to one critical
> accessibility issue that we've made no progress on.  Throughout my entire
> time in Debian, super cow powers have been denied to me, all entirely
> because I'm blind.  It's true, I've been using Debian since the days of
> buzz and have never once received the blessing of the great moo.
> 
> In the beginning it wasn't so bad.  Like everyone I shared in the
> machinations of dselect.  I too could hit plus and try and predict
> what would happen next as a series of ever more complex screens greeted
> me.  Sometimes I even understood what was going on.
> 
> I looked forward to apt.  It was going to be a command line.  It had to
> be accessible.  And then one day I found that everyone else was exposed
> to super cow powers.  But I and a small number of others were denied.
> At first, I thought that the right approach would be to add ALSA support
> to Apt.  This is clearly wrong though.  We need access to moo even when
> talking to servers.  And besides we would not want to disrupt the sacred
> cow aesthetic.  So, perhaps we need to add a way to embed sounds in our
> terminal emulators.  We'd need to be careful though: we don't want to
> make the mistake of the web and the great blink tag.
> 
> Then I realized there's only one solution.  In policy we will mandate a
> mechanism for sending general MIDI as part of the terminal protocol
> required to implement the /user/bin/x-terminal-emulator alternative.
> And of course the mandatory Debian sound font for rendering this MIDI
> will be focused on accessibility of super cow powers.  Naturally we'll
> have to patch the kernel and the Linux console driver.  This is of
> course one area where HURD will demonstrate its superiority, because we
> can just call out to a MIDI engine rather than embedding one in the
> kernel.

Fascinating ideas there (specifics none-withstanding). Emoji's, along
with their specific meanings, have become quite ubiquitous and have
pretty good support on most terminal emulators these days. I'm wondering
if anyone has ever worked on audible emojis before (just did a quick
search, there's only some horrible cheap commercial applications),
because I suppose that you could represent a lot of things with a few
simple chirps, and you could probably have more complicated sounds for
things like cow emojis that make a moo sound. Then it shouldn't be all
that complicated for terminal emulators to associate a sound with an
emoji. It could also be great for libraries that do things like adding
colours to scripts, because then you could associate error tones and
success tones as well which would make apps that use those libraries
automatically more accessible.

-Jonathan

-- 
  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀  Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋   https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
  ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀  Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.


Reply to: