[chuck-users] Controling Chuck - building accessible GUI

Stephen Sinclair radarsat1 at gmail.com
Mon Nov 19 16:35:58 EST 2007


Hi,

I don't know if I can answer your whole question, but ... well, first
of all for Mozilla, take a look at something I posted a while ago that
lets you send and receive OSC messages using the XUL framework:

http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog:communication_between_xul_and_osc

It's only been tested on Linux so far, but you might find it useful.
I'm just waiting for someone to do something more impressive with it.

Second, I don't know much about screen readers, but I'm surprised that
as a blind person you want to use Chuck in a GUI environment.  I
always thought that text-based things were much friendlier to use by
the blind, isn't that the case?  I figured something like Chuck would
be much easier to use by teletype than a GUI environment like
PureData.  I'm curious how well this screen reader thing works for
music.  I would think that control through a physical interface like a
MIDI controller, or a text-based braille reader would be much easier.

Lastly, I'm not sure Chuck would be necessarily "better" if converted
to a graphical environment.  If something like PureData is what you
want instead of writing code, why not just use PureData?  Chuck is
pretty much designed to be code-oriented.

Just curious,
Steve


On Nov 19, 2007 4:05 PM, Rich Caloggero <rjc at mit.edu> 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
>
>
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