Introducing myself
old7...@gmail.com
Greetings,
Since I just joined this group I thought I'd take the time to introduce myself.
My name is Chris and my ham call is WB9RSQ.
I am in south central Wisconsin.
Some but far from all my interests include preservation of audio from all forms of media with a focus on 78RPM records, open reel tape and 16 inch transcription disks.
My record library is close to 50,000 records.
My oldtime radio library is over 100,000 shows.
I have computers running many different operating systems but primarily Windows and Debian.
I am totally blind so access to the operating systems is through use of screen reading software such as Jaws For Windows, Narrator, NVDA and for Debian Speak-up.
Speak-up is from the shell prompt and currently none of my systems run a desktop environment so Nova isn't being used.
The scanning side of things is handled with SDR-RTLv3 modules, an SDR-Play DX and several radios such as Unidin SDS100, Icom R30 and R8500.
I do run DSD-Plus Fastlane but it's complicated window arrangement makes it difficult to do much other than set and forget.
Good quality SDR control and access for blind users has been a longtime issue and there are almost no options available.
The current focus on cross-platform solutions has, other than sdr-trunk, resulted in no accessible applications.
Accessibility covers a wide spectrum of things including the ability for screen reading software to actually read what's on the screen.
Then keyboard access for control and has the keyboard sending keys to the correct window in a complex layout.
Also displays that don't use so many resources to generate that screen readers don't have enough CPU to generate speech and respond to commands.
I just recently started playing with sdr-trunk after trying it many years ago.
Changes in screen readers as well as improvements in the JAVA access bridge seems to have made it almost usable.
Unfortunately it is still difficult in many areas.
Keyboard commands don't offer full access to all areas of the screens and controls don't behave "normally".
For example the ability to enable or disable a stream or set logging options come to mind.
No matter what keys I press I can't reach the controls and there are spots on the screen that I can tab or arrow to that don't speak at all.
One solution I use is to manually edit the playlists.
It would be nice if there was a complete listing with examples of all options that can be used for each of the functions.
By setting a few things inside an alias I figured out what needed to be in the playlist to select the stream to use and correct a name.
Since I have not been able to set logging options I have no idea what I could put in that deffinition.
Same for recording.
Still so far listening via sdr-trunk is proving to be far easier than useing DSD-Plus.
I'm not sure about some things I might call bugs but I'll save that for another message.
There is also of course the wish list but mine probably doesn't have anything not already beat in to the ground, NXDN, comes to mind.
So for the moment I am going to sit back and see how things go.
73
