Hey, #MechanicalKeyboard people! I just got myself a #Ducky One X wireless mechanical keyboard. As a #screenreader user who finds myself constantly running out of keyboard shortcuts, multi-level actuation sounded really exciting to me. Unfortunately, the browser-based programmer at duckyhub.io is entirely inaccessible. Apparently it uses a standard called #QMK or something? I don't build mechanical keyboards; I use them because I love the feedback, so I'm not deep enough into the hobby to know much about this. A browser-based programmer gave me hope that programming would be #accessible, but at least with the official website, that hope turned out to be false. So before I return this thing, do these standards mean there might be other software I can try to program the keyboard, to see if it's more accessible for me? #a11y#keyboard
@MostlyBlindGamer I am terrified of C. If I even think too hard about buffer overflows and memory pointers I'm afraid I might create a bug that causes my keyboard to explode while also sending all of my personal data to Outer Mongolia.
@MostlyBlindGamer@fastfinge The coding isn't anything like full C. You mostly just put some constants or basic calls in specific places inside a huge array, compile, and flash. I have an ErgoDox EZ with a lot of really cool customizations, and I did it all myself by following some tutorials. I haven't needed sighted help or had to think about pointers/memory management. For advanced stuff, they are used, but you don't have to know about them or understand them.
@alexhall@fastfinge absolutely. I like to introduce this in an initially scary way and immediately follow-up (as I did here) with a very approachable file.
QMK is probably the best tool for us. We exchange a requirement for tinkering-level technical knowledge for accessibility and the customization we need.
@fastfinge I’m not sure about multi-level actuation, but Vial is a firmware that’s based on QMK but it has a browser based GUI that will let you tweak the keymap with a lot of features, including macros.
@fastfinge I briefly wondered if Vial would work, which is how I’ve been reprogramming my #MechanicalKeyboard. Vial is open source, available as a standalone app and as a webpage (works in Chrome), see get.vial.today - It is essentially a GUI to remap #QMK firmware keyboards. However, the interface is very mouse dependent (as far as I could tell), and searches on their GitHub repository gives no reason to hope it has any better screen reader support. Sorry.
@fastfinge I'm not at all into the commercial part of the hobby, so can't answer for your hardware specifically. You would probably have to see about getting a debugger probe connected to your pcb. But apart from that there are programs like kmonad[1] and kanata[2], with which you can freely use most or all of the fancy qmk features by interrupting your inputs host-side and transforming them however you like
