Re: Accessibility in the FreeBSD installer and console

From: Klaus_Küchemann <maciphone2_at_googlemail.com>
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2022 23:00:09 UTC

> Am 07.07.2022 um 23:48 schrieb Hans Petter Selasky <hps@selasky.org>:
> 
> On 7/7/22 23:26, John Kennedy wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 07, 2022 at 10:11:52PM +0200, Klaus Küchemann wrote:
>>>> Am 07.07.2022 um 19:32 schrieb Hans Petter Selasky <hps at selasky org>:
>>>> The only argument I've heard from some non-sighted friends about not using FreeBSD natively is that ooh, MacOSX is so cool. It starts speaking from the start if I press this and this key. Is anyone here working on or wanting such a feature?
>>> 
>>> Possibly they didn’t want to  be rude and your friends didn't tell you the other argument  :-)  : according to the corresponding wiki page FreeBSD doesn't natively support any audio output at all on your friends current M1 Mac hardware.
>>>  since quite nothing is currently supported you probably will first take over working on the Audio driver …..and of course USB  :-)
>>   I think a huge benefit that Apple would have is that they might be
>> able to guarantee some sort of audio speaker, period, since they
>> control the hardware that the software runs on.  That might be a big ask
>> on FreeBSD, but maybe if there was some relatively ubiqitous
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Does Apple support voice-over in its bootloaders too? I think not, so at some point of technical breakage you will be stuck anyway - right?
> 
> —HPS

 good point … ( I think you mean feature textToSpeech when e.g. keyboard-interrupting into the fbsd-boot prompt in native Mac boot)

But implementing text to speech in native u-boot/uefi & FreeBSD bootloader on a Mac? 
..sounds like a huge project after having FreeBSD natively ported to Apple M1/M2..
But if that’s on your list I would not underestimate you :-)

...of course you would have VoiceOver/TextToSpeech e.g. in a uart- shell console when booting FreeBSD native on another board/machine…and that seems to be the easiest way  for non-sighted FreeBSD users/developers using the Mac platform  for VoiceOver who want to use fbsd-current native( those who are interested in  bootloader issues;-)

If you meant VoiceOver in MacOS bootloader : Macusers expect their Macs problem-free, a special world, unknown in FreeBSD:-)
There are exceptions, e.g. if you use a new MacOS on an older unsupported Mac - but VoiceOver wouldn’t help much there ;-)

K.