For a project I was looking for a #screenreader#accessible soundboard for Windows, where you assign hotkeys to a sound, and they play without bringing another window into focus. I'm surprised nobody has made this, with all of the radio broadcasters in our community. Surely Google is just failing me! #blind#a11y
@fastfinge I made one a long time ago called Blart Cart which just played audio through a self-contained copy of Winamp. You could whip something like that up in no time these days with Claude.
@fastfinge I actually spoke with Day Garwood about this some time ago, to leverage the KeyOp concept, with categories and the rest, to make carts. Primarily because I have so many bill wurtz carts no existing cart system would be able to handle all of them! I think the plan was to integrate it into KeyOP v2?
@x0@fastfinge I actually made such a thing, for both Mac and Windows, though sadly I lost the Windows version in a computer failure, but perhaps you can take some design concepts from it. It worked on having you make as many subfolders that you could switch to with the right and left arrow keys. Each folder would contain audio files, named after the key that would trigger it. So the way it worked is you pressed a key to enter the soundboard layer, selected a folder with the arrow keys if it you weren't in the right one already, then pressed the key for the sound you wanted. I had plans to add an option to preview the sounds on another device if you added shift to the pressed key and perhaps a mic playthrough to make virtual cable management on Windows easier but I stopped working on this when I got an audio interface with its own soundboard. The sourcecode for the mac version as a hammerspoon module still exists here github.com/pitermach/hammerboard
@fastfinge I would honestly love to see something like this - it’s why I continue to use Farrago on Mac. It’s the only accessible soundboard app I’ve found beyond Backpack Studio for iPad which I never liked for broadcast.
@stevenscott Interesting! I just...kind of assumed that this must exist! Though admittedly my needs are much simpler than yours. I'm just trying to trigger five different bits of audio during a presentation, without taking my slides off screen. I do a history of accessibility presentation frequently for some of our customers, with multiple sound clips going from the Apple II to modern neural text to speech sprinkled throughout to demonstrate how far things have come, and get folks reflecting on how much of modern technology has come out of accessibility research. I can put the sounds directly in the powerpoint, but playing and pausing sound clips from the presenter view with a screen reader is kinda fiddley. So I thought: "Hey, the blind radio guys must have solved my exact problem!" And then you just let me down. LOL
@stevenscott I messed with it, and it's exactly what I want! Unfortunately I had to read the sourcecode to figure out how it works. So to save you the effort:
When you run the soundboard.exe, no window opens. You need to press alt+control+something, and it will open a "browse for file" dialogue. Here you can find a sound (wav/mp3/whatever) you want to play on the hotkey you just pressed. If you have other hotkeys already registered, soundboard won't conflict with them; you just can't use those keys for sounds. I have alt+control+n for NVDA, and alt+control+J for jaws, so when I press those soundboard just does nothing and they do what they're supposed to.
If you press the key for a sound multiple times, that sound just restarts from the beginning. You cannot pause or stop a sound that's currently playing. So don't press the wrong key!
If you want to quit soundboard, press alt+control+q.
If you want to change the sound on a particular key, you have to open soundboard.ini (a file it makes in the folder with soundboard.exe when you run it) in notepad and change it yourself.
If you want to change the volume of soundboard, or make it use a different sound device, it doesn't matter what you want, because you can't. For simple lads like me, that's okay. But I suspect it might be a problem for all of you complicated radio professionals. LOL :-)
@stevenscott@fastfinge In fact, I could implement something like this in the program I’m developing: github.com/michaldziwisz/sara/ The program already has a jingle player with banks that you can switch between. What prevents me from adding global jingle playback is the fact that, for it to work efficiently, it would be necessary to register some kind of global modifier. Only after pressing that modifier would it be possible to trigger a specific jingle or change the bank. Personally, I can’t really imagine another way of doing it, but I’m open to suggestions.
@midzi@stevenscott Yeah, that makes sense to me. Although for me personally, entire radio automation software is overkill. I'm using this to trigger sounds during interactive in-person powerpoint presentations.
@ppatel@fastfinge@stevenscott@FreakyFwoof totally get that, but it's just a sound firing thingy with some management to it, you know the emacs or vim, started as text editor, become so huge and extensible. So, why not? nvda composer although not a sound board, aid in little composing.
@Jonathan@fastfinge some of the other stuff that you can download from there looks like it could be interesting, but just not totally sure what it is. I mean I guess one could just download it, and see what it is I guess, but that is a lot of stuff there.
@fastfinge@Jonathan I can't remember if I have that, but I heard about that, and think that is an awesome idea. I need to go find that one, as like I said, I don't know if I cgrabbed it, when I saw someone talking about it.
