Accessibility Features - what do you think?
#1
Inspired by the stream selection features for impaired people in PR4087 I thought about this whole accessibility thing some more and came to the conclusion that we could probably add more of these features to XBMC. As a starter I came up with the following:

Add a "accessibility" section to our settings and duplicate (if settings system is fine with this) some settings there:
- skin font / size
- subtitle font / size / color
- navigation sounds
- the impaired streams preferences of PR4087
- high contrast GUI (new feature, maybe via post-processing or just a high contrast theme for Confluence)
- screen reader (new text to speach feature, maybe via Google service, so that blind people could f.e. browse their music library)

What is the general opinion in adding more accessibility stuff? I know XBMC will never be 100% accessible, but we could at least provide basics.
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#2
For screen reading stuff, I was thinking it might be good to summarize what APIs we have that would allow someone to hook existing screen reader software into XBMC. So rather than trying to have a screen reader read the normal XBMC GUI, it would actually be reading text from JSON-RPC and/or a web interface. The idea came up in another thread where we used the iOS XBMC remote app to act as a text-to-speech interface for XBMC, using the iOS accessibility features, as the remote can basically act as a drop-in interface for directories, add-ons, the library, etc.

We could have a wiki page or some kind of future job board that mentions the use-case and the APIs, so that if no one internally wants to work on it we can easily attract outside developers who might be looking to develop a solution for XBMC. It would basically say "this is what we want", and "this is what is available", etc.

For the seeing-imparied type features (larger font, high contrast), it would be awesome to summarize a similar job/task page to lure skinners into making such an accessibility skin. Or something very basic, like taking an existing simplified skin like xTV-SAF, and making sure all fonts meet a minimal size, could be a good option. If we could make it so that a skin could also override subtitle settings, that would make a nice single-step install for those individuals.
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#3
This guy seems to be giving a go at it: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1626329
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Accessibility Features - what do you think?0