Making Max Patches accessible
Does anyone have any recommendations as to how you could make a max patch more accessible to screen readers and other assistive technologies? I design software for kids with special needs to use but my patches are pretty much useless to anyone using a screen reader. Any help would be appreciated!
Interesting problem - the issues seem like they might be very similar to the old-timey HTML screenreader issues. Lots of work on the core standards and implementations went into making that better...
There *is* a text representation of patches that could be exploited (that we see whenever someone posts on the forum), but making this useful would be a lot of work. There are also a bunch of features that would help, such as hints and descriptive text, but again, they'd be only useful once harnessed.
I'd be very interested in hearing about your continued progress in this task, working as I do with musicians with a variety of disabilities. Are you familiar with V.J.Manzo's work?
Hi guys, thanks for the comments, really not sure where to start with this, text is not recognized, neither are hints, comments etc. I simply don't have the programming skill to try and create anything to amend this from scratch, if anyone from Cycling is reading this it would be good to hear what your thoughts are...
p.s the link to V.J.Manzos work was very interesting, I'm looking forward to reading more about his work.
I do worry that this might be out of my skill set to develop anything that would aid this situation, I have experience programming in Max but not in any other language. That being said this is important and I'm willing to give it ago, far too few DAW's provide support for blind users (cakewalk and reaper are the best at it). In OSX I believe that the built in screen reader Voiceover relies on Cocoa, so I guess I'll have to wheel out Xcode and start doing some tutorials. I believe you can integrate it with Max fairly easily but I wonder how easy it would be to create a single, one click to start application, that uses both Max and Cocoa, can you bundle stuff into one application like that? Also does anyone know how you go about making any software accessible to screen readers such as JAWS on the PC? Don't use a PC but would need to look at that as well.
Would aka.speech help you out here? Haven't really played with it, but as aka.listen is link to OSX speech recognition, I bet aka.speech is link to OSX screen reader.
This is perfect, I've seen the aka. objects before, just never noticed this in the past! Many thanks scatalogic, this will help allot! I wonder if there is a PC equivalent?