Rich Caloggero wrote:
Hey, just saw your blog and your XUL project, but didn't see any contact for you. So, glad you responded; thanx ...
Anyhow, text only interfaces are inherently more accessible, but not always optimal for the job. What I am ultimately wanting is something like PD, or at the very least a good synth like dimensionPro which I can actually control in real time. I want to play with sound, not play with code! <smile>
Last time I tried PureData, it was completely inaccessible to my screen reader. To make something accessible takes some planning (use the right toolkit and use standard widgets/components which have accessibility hooks already in them), and test with real users! For instance, if your going to use Java, then you either need to use Swing and its standard components, or write your own code to properly use the Java Accessibility API on your own AWT widgets (a fair amount of extra work so I've been told). Since most sighted software designers insist on creating their own widgets, accessible software tends to be hard to find, especially in music land.
You might give jMax [1] a whirl. It's in the Pd family and the UI is implemented in Swing. That said, doing sound design with jMax, Pd and friends is still programming for all practical purposes. I ended up in the ChucK world precisely because I find the interfaces of those programs to be inelegant for programming (and I'm particularly fond of ChucK's timing model). Most of the experiments that I've seen (including one that I started) in binding ChucK to interfaces are mostly concerned with providing a UI for interacting with ChucK programs, not supplanting ChucK's logical building blocks. Were one to have that goal, I think starting with the STK [2] (which ChucK also uses for a lot of the heavy lifting) would probably be easier. -Scott [1] http://freesoftware.ircam.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=14 [2] http://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/stk/