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 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 :-)
