Re: [chuck-users] Controling Chuck - building accessible GUI

Hi there again. Hope your having a good holiday. I've not forgotten about the XUL interface to ChucK idea. I've benn working on a little test page which summarizes the basic XUL elements and documents some screen reader hints. I've only tested with Jaws, so would be interested to see how Dolphin handles it. Try the following: http://www.mit.edu/~rjc/xulTests/tests.zip If you unzip that in windows and then click on "run simple as chrome", this should launch firefox with the page loaded, and without any of the browser window furnature. This is probably the mode in which we'll want to use it, and it is the mode which seems to work best with Jaws. The XUL document explains more. Note you can also just open the simple.xul file with firefox and then turn off all of your screen reader's virtual buffer handling stuff (does Dolphin even have this concept - never used HAL ). I want to include more element types - the tree element is definately missing... I'd recommend installing the latest firefox nightly build: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-... If that doesn't work, try: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ and choose the windows installer file ... Even if this ChucK thing never gets off the ground, I still like XUL and what the Mozilla folks are doing. I think it is a powerful way to write GUI-based apps which does not require fancy visually-based gui builders. The suite of technologies (i.e. XUL/XBL/HTML + CSS + JS) keeps semantics separate from presentation and can produce some very powerful results fairly quickly. Ad the OS access through XPCOM and you have a great way to write GUIs for almost anything. -- Cheers, Rich ----- Original Message ----- From: "Veli-Pekka Tätilä" To: "ChucK Users Mailing List" Sent: Monday, November 19, 2007 7:07 PM Subject: Re: [chuck-users] Controling Chuck - building accessible GUI Hi Rich, I'm a fellow legally blind screen reader and magnifier user interested in ChucK running Win XP and the Dolphin Supernova reader & magnifier. I think our goals are actually quite similar. Although I must confess I haven't done much with ChucK lately. In addition to the cool, domain specific programming language it has, one of the big ideas intriguing me is the ability to use a modular synth independently. Needless to say I've never really used hardware modulars but did use Generator and reaktor before they went with portable and inaccessible custom controls and forgot both the keyboard interface and the user's color scheme. In the end, despite being a programmer, too, my goal is to do music rather than pure sound design or DSP so I would like to keep things practical. Nord Micro Modular is something that I'll have to look into, however I suppose the editor just is not accessible, at least the G2 demo release is not. So my thought was since I cannot use Reaktor, I would like to be able to achieve the equivalent thing somehow, at a practical level, putting together modules, binding hardware knobs to synth parameters, saving presets and playing the whole thing via MIDI in real time. In that context ChucK was not LInux only, was more real time than C Sound apparently and had a nice, easy programming language for the job. So far I am very far from realizing this Reaktor killer for the blind for several reasons. First of all there's no GUi really or no very easy environment to simply load a particular synth and tweak away. If there was an accessible GUi library for ChucK natively, and OO features like reflectionand access to object symbol tables (read hash or dict), one might be able to implement a facility that shows the user a list of editable synth parameters, and let's you MIDI learn any of them, saving the whole thing with the synth. This is very hard to do currently, you have to hardcode controller values and right some of the MIDi handling logic yourself, unless I'm much mistaken. The other major point is that ChucK's orientation is still at the Reaktor core level or lower and the focus seems to be on experimental sound design and DSP rather than on the modular end user level like that of Reaktor, Vaz Modular or the Nord, for that matter. With that said, there are very few analogs of the basic Reaktor building bloks at the module level, the idea is that you program them in on an ad hoc basis, which is fine if you just want to program. But if I'd like to use ChucK as a conventional modular environment, emulating existing modular patches and doing as little programming as you do in AHDL, when you plug logic components together, then ChucK isn't currently very well suited to that purpose. Of course, I'd like to handle patching textually, that's much faster than trying to achieve accessible, direct manipulation. Of course, since ChucK is fully programmable, nothing would stop you from recreating say the Reaktor 3 module library from scratch, especially given how much content there's for chucK already and how well the individual Reaktor modules have been documented. Still, this is a very big job and something I'm not up to yet. However, this might work well as a collaborative project, if the scope was narrowed to very early releases and an essential subset of the modules. The only thing I've emulated so far is the audio switch, with a parameterizable number of inputs, if I recall correctly. Your idea of using OSC and XUl is an interesting one though I know very little about both, I know much more about MIDI. Of the languages mentioned I only know Perl really well. One thing that worries me, though, is the accessibility of the Mozilla components. The thing is with Dolphin's mediocre support for FireFox, it is not quite as accessible as IE is just yet. So I'm afraid controls derived from it might be unusable at worst, Thunder Bird sure is not usable with Dolphin Supernova, much as I'd liek to. Testing is the only way to tell how well this XUL thingy works, I suppose. I suspect you're using the Jaws screen reader. Finally, given that ChucK doesn't currently support the kind of work I'd liek to do with it very well, and if you don't mind me asking, are there other environments that maybe serve me better? Reaktor is out of the question and somehow I've never been truely thrilled by SynthEdit. One app in addition to C Sound I always see mentioned about Linux and modulars is something called the Super Collider. Is that closer to what I'm looking for and what are the major differences to ChucK? I seem to recall Emacs being mentioned in that context, I've never gotten EmacsSpeak to run, although have a Ubuntu VM here. Last but not least, Rich, you might want to join the synth_programming Yahoo group. In addition to me there's at least one blind synth knut there, plus some mathematicians and programmers. We often talk about exotic forms of synthesis, and in fact I learned about chucK on the list, since my speech friendly pseudo code representations of modular patches started to bear a resemblance to ChucK code, which someone kindly pointedd out. my $self = shift; $self->Sleep(); # It is way beyond midnight localtime. -- With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@mail.student.oulu.fi) Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila Rich Caloggero wrote: Rich Caloggero wrote: There was a thread on this list back in January about control of chuck via OSC, a Python package. I have a few questions: First, I'm blind and use a screen reader. I want to build something that allows me to control chuck sreds via a GUI. I don't like Python much for programming, and am not sure if OSC would even work with my screen reader (anyone have any quick demos I could try just to see if the screen reader will deal with the UI toolkit at all)? What I was thinking of doing is building something in Mozilla's XUL language. This does have the ability to send network packets, and also can execute shell commands. So, was thinking about writing code in chuck and then pass arguments to each .ck file to change parameters. Of course, this might not work so smoothly if we wanted to change things on the fly. FOr this I guess I'd need to implement something like OSC's message passing scheme in XUL. Any advice, or suggestions? Anyone interested in rewriting audical so it works with a screen reader? There are so many great software synthesizers on the market now that work as both stand alone and/or plugins to popular hosts like Cakewalk's Sonar, but none that I've ever tried will allow the screen reader enough control to do real sound design. With effort, one can usually figure out how to change presets, but in a large number of cases even this is not possible. I was hoping that chuck could be used to build a fully accessible sound designers toolbox that could allow one to do things quickly and easily without having to write too much code. I've obviously never used it because it is very graphically oriented, but think of something like PD "Pure Data". You aparently can build all sorts of neat stuff by just plugging stuff together, without having to write a line of code. Thanx for any thoughts/suggestions... -- Rich _______________________________________________ chuck-users mailing list chuck-users@lists.cs.princeton.edu https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/chuck-users