Can we take another shot at TTS support for Mudlet 3 [Yeah we can!]

[Athelia]

Hi everyone,

My name is Athelia and I an a disabled gamer. While not officially visually impaired I have cerebral palsy which causes gross and fine motor issues. In addition to not being able to walk, the nerves in my brain send mixed up signals to my the nerves in my eyes causing me to lose my place frequently. Bumping up the font size helps but messes with the layout of many MUDs internal map commands. I am using a Mac not only because I am a filmmaker but also because there is full-featured TTS in the operating system. However Mac TTS does not work in Mudlet. I was wondering if someone would be willing to undertake a TTS feature similar to the one in Savitar...maybe not annoying continuous speech like Savitar but something useable. I do not have a third party screenreader as I do not always need one but if we as a community could undertake a Mudlet TTS feature again. I (and a whole bunch other visually impaired gamers) would be very grateful. I'm sorry I have zero programming skills to help but I can cheer you guys on!

Thanks,

Athelia

Edited: 2017/07/25 to update title to reflect preliminary work "Initial QTextToSpeech additions" being done in Pull-Request #1188.

[Vadi]

Thanks for the prompting! How does TTS on a Mac work? How can I enable it and do what you would do?

Also, how does latest iota respond to TTS?

[Vadi]

Jotting down notes - http://blog.qt.io/blog/2014/05/14/acces ... in-qt-5-3/ Qt 5.3 is better with it.

[Vadi]

I've had a look, improved some things in the connection editor allowing you to tab around the place. Making triggers is a pain though, those 50 lines of patterns really get in the way.

If anyone has any ideas for the trigger editor, happy to hear them. I'm thinking it would have to be a special key combination that allows you to 'escape' from the pattern fields - maybe shift+tab or something? The difficult part is then communicating this non-standard method to the user. Each field can have a name and a description for accessibility reasons, maybe the reader will read out the accessibility bit too and the mention of the key combo could go in there.

I'll also admit that I do not know how these things are supposed to work, and until I do more research on it, my idea of accessibility is making sure you can navigate Mudlet entirely with keyboard, without a mouse, and the stuff that the screenreader reads out makes sense and isn't garbage. Happy to hear input from experienced users here.

[dicene]

(Note: the following is all based on the opinion of vision-impaired people that I have MUD'd with in the past and from a tiny bit of experience using a client built entirely on being operable without sight)

I've been interested in making Mudlet easily operable with just a keyboard for a while anyway, just because I prefer not to use the mouse at all when I don't have to. My thoughts on the script editor were that you'd be able to use something like ctrl+tab to tab between the three primary sections of the editor(the tree on the left, the trigger-creation parts, and the script window), this seems especially important to me since you can't just TAB out of the script editor box(since the tabs are being taken as actual tab characters in the box).

We'd also need shortcut keys for every single button in the editor(save profile, new item, new group, delete item, etc along with the buttons that change to the Script/Key/Alias/etc views).

The ALT+E shortcut for the main window probably shouldn't switch to Triggers every time you use it, if you're already editing something in another view. Makes it easier to toggle back and forth when ALT+Tab might not be as quick as it is for sight-abled users.

The biggest issue I could see here though with trying to use Mudlet with TTS software is that there is no way to scroll up through the scrollback one line at a time. That was the biggest takeawayI got from VIPMud, that you could trivially move up and down through the scrollback a single line at a time to sort of control your pace when reading back through things. Another big thing is that there was a way to skip the current line being read by the TTS software by hitting CTRL or something, which was great for before you got gags for some basic things like ambiance messages.

[Vadi]

Something to read for this: https://www.vincit.fi/en/blog/software- ... er-minute/

[Zaphob]

you'd be able to use something like ctrl+tab to tab between the three primary sections of the editor(the tree on the left, the trigger-creation parts, and the script window)

I like the idea! Need to see if it is plausible for all editors (triggers, aliases, etc.), and maybe add some visual differentiation between the three sections as well. Other than that, nice idea!

We'd also need shortcut keys for every single button in the editor(save profile, new item, new group, delete item, etc along with the buttons that change to the Script/Key/Alias/etc views).

Seems easy to fix. Any suggestions?

The ALT+E shortcut for the main window probably shouldn't switch to Triggers every time you use it, if you're already editing something in another view. Makes it easier to toggle back and forth when ALT+Tab might not be as quick as it is for sight-abled users.

I do not understand your suggestion. It is true, if you edit Aliases, then switch to main window and press At+E, then the Alias window will change and show the Trigger window. Is this not expected behavior?

On the other hand, if you edit Triggers, then switch to main window and press Alt+E, then the Trigger window will come to the foreground again. However, there seem to be focus issue, as the Trigger window does not gain focus. You need to click it, before you can write there. That could probably be improved.

Then again, what is the expected behavior?

The biggest issue I could see here though with trying to use Mudlet with TTS software is that there is no way to scroll up through the scrollback one line at a time. That was the biggest takeawayI got from VIPMud, that you could trivially move up and down through the scrollback a single line at a time to sort of control your pace when reading back through things. Another big thing is that there was a way to skip the current line being read by the TTS software by hitting CTRL or something, which was great for before you got gags for some basic things like ambiance messages.

I suggest Alt+Up and Alt+Down, as this seems to have no effect yet in main window input line.

In the same regard, we could define Alt+Right as "skip current speech" and maybe also Alt+Left as "repeat current speach from beginning"

What do you think?

[SlySven]

Having recently gotten bitten when trying to clean-up the key-bindings code we really need to review the short-cuts we have defined and list them somewhere in one place (Wiki page anyone) and identify when they are functional - such a list will have to take account the variations in modifiers on the three primary OSs. This perhaps might help to identify what we can use and where. My initial thoughts are that we may need to provide an almost application wide one to take the user back to the main console window of the currently active profile...

For the record there are currently the following defined on the main menubar:

• <ALT>+c "Play" - Which I would like to rename to "Configure and Connect" or just "Connect" so as to match the toolbar button.
• <ALT>+d "Disconnect" - Not present on the toolbar
• <ALT>+r "Reconnect"
• <ALT>+p "Preferences" - Which I would like to either rename to match the "Settings" on the toolbar button or to rename the latter to match that.
• <ALT>+e "Script Editor" - Confusingly it calls up the editor in the "Triggers" view mode - also there are currently no menu items to give access to the other five views in the editor
• <ALT>+n "Notepad"
• <ALT>+m "Show map"
• <ALT>+o "Package manager"
• <ALT>+v "MultiView"
• <ALT>+l "Compact input line" or "Standard input line" - though the current code for this toggle is broken as it is a per profile option but does not update itself to refer to the mode for the currently active host when multi-playing and a different profile comes to the foreground...!

[SlySven]

Re, last but one post, <ALT>+<UpArrow> and <ALT>+<DownArrow> will need to be <ALT>+<KeyPad>+<UpArrow> and <ALT>+<KeyPad>+<DownArrow> on macOs (as the arrow keys are part of the keypad there) and also <ALT> may not be called "Alt" on the macOs either...

Furthermore - it will be necessary to check what the keys are for spelling checking and accessing history on the main console command line - and IIRC there is another short-cut that means scroll the split upper pane to the bottom and remove the split but I can't recall the exact key-press for that but it is also active on the main console command line.

[Jor'Mox]

As a Mac user, I note that all of your keyboard short cuts use <option>+<key> rather than the standard (for Mac) <command>+<key>. Granted, my particular keyboard also has "alt" written on the keys that say "option", so it is sort of like you are still doing <alt>+<key>... except that that isn't at all normal, and may just be because an artifact of my particular keyboard, rather than some standard interpretation of things in MacOS.

Interestingly, when I try to create a keybinding within Mudlet, my "control" key is called "meta", my "command" key is called "control", and my "option" key isn't captured (presumably because you are treating it as the equivalent of "alt" in Windows). This actually makes me wonder what would happen if someone were to make a keybinding in some other OS, import it into MacOS, and have it use "control"+"Q"... which is the set of keys that causes the program to quit. Would that be intercepted by Mudlet?