SonoBus and blind users

[Aman Singer]

Hi all,

 

          I just came across SonoBus, it's a pleasure to see something so useful being released. I am particularly grateful for the lack of latency, streaming audio is easy, streaming it without horrible latency seems to be nearly impossible. I am totally blind and have impaired hearing, so I use screen readers and a braille display to access both my PC and iPhone. I am currently using SoundWire to stream audio to an Android device, but am looking for a low-latency way of streaming the computer audio to an IOS device. Both my screen readers, though, are   having issues accessing the SonoBus UI.

          On Windows, the screen looks blank to the screen reader, though a sighted person I had look at it is able to see all the buttons and other elements mentioned in the user guide. If I may ask, is there a way to modify the settings and start a connection through the command line, through editing files or registry values, or by some other means which doesn't involve the UI? I have found a file, which looks something like an XML file, called sonobus.settings in %appdata%/roaming/sonobus, but I'm not sure what the values are supposed to do. I can't seem to find any other place where the settings are stored.

          In IOS, launching the SonoBus Beta app seems to make the built-in screen reader, VoiceOver, go to the status bar and be unable to leave it. A sighted person can see the controls on the screen, but the screen reader's focus seems to be stuck in the status bar. I haven't seen this sort of thing before in IOS, but this is my first use of TestFlight so it may well be that. If one of the developers could have a look with VoiceOver, as I said, it's built into every IOS device, I would be grateful. Just as I asked about windows, is there a way to connect using some sort of custom URL? So long as settings are remembered across restarts, this would make the program usable on IOS to some extent. As I said, it is the only program I know about which will stream with very low latency either from or to an Apple mobile device.

 

Best,

 

 

Aman Singer

 

[Jesse Chappell]

Aman,

Unfortunately, the cross-platform library I use (JUCE) to build it on
all the different platforms has no support for accessibility on any of
the platforms. I recognize that this is not a good thing,
unfortunately it will take a lot of work to ever make it happen,
unless they come up with a solution for doing it. So I'm afraid that
SonoBus is not going to be suitable for blind users on any platform
until that happens.

So sorry about that!

Jesse

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[Aman Singer]

Thank you, Jesse, for the extraordinarily fast reply. Just to follow up, is it possible to get the Windows application or the IOS application to connect on launch in some way, through a command line switch or, on IOS, through a URL? If that were possible, all that would need to be done is to set all the settings once and then run SB either from the command line, from a Siri shortcut, etc.

Thanks,

Aman

[Jesse Chappell]

Yes, that actually would be possible... the current launch URL already
brings up the connect window and fills in the information, it just
doesn't actually start the connection. It would be a simple addition
to the URL to let it also do that. Good idea!

Jesse

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[Duncan Chapman]

Just getting this to Adrian who is another VI Sonobus user

Duncan

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[Aman Singer]

Thank you, Jesse, for the extraordinarily fast reply. Just to follow up, is it possible to get the Windows application or the IOS application to connect on launch in some way, through a command line switch or, on IOS, through a URL? If that were possible, all that would need to be done is to set all the settings once and then run SB either from the command line, from a Siri shortcut, etc.

Thanks,

Aman

-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Chappell [mailto:je...@sonosaurus.com]
Sent: Sunday, December 06, 2020 4:20 PM
To: Aman Singer <aman....@gmail.com>
Cc: SonoBus Users <sonobu...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [sonobus-users] SonoBus and blind users

[Aman Singer]

I'm glad this can be considered. I'm a bit confused about the URL scheme I saw in the user guide. Is
http://go.sonobus.net/sblaunch?s=aoo.sonobus.net&g=GroupName
supposed to be entered directly into the SB UI or should it be entered into a web browser? Also, sorry to be repetitive, but is there a way to modify the settings in Windows by editing files or the registry? As I said, I found something called sonobus.settings, but that seemed to have only a few things in it, none of which had to do with sound, except if "filter state" has anything to do with sound. Thanks again for looking at this.

[Aman Singer]

Sorry to keep pinging about this, but if the current URL scheme just
launches the connect dialog with all the information filled in, would it be
possible to just hit enter when it launches SB and have the connection
started? I'm not sure whether this would work on IOS, but hitting enter
would definitely hit the "default button" in Windows, which is usually
OK/Next/Connect/...

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sonobus-users/1e2001d6cc16%2498ae87d0%24ca
0b9770%24%40gmail.com.

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HCBrXgArB8WQi6%2B2v78EtPg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jesse Chappell]

It looks like hitting enter doesn't work at the moment because that
button isn't the focused one, but it possibly could be arranged to be.

On iOS and mac the URL can be used to launch Sonobus directly, from a
web browser, email client, etc. On windows it will not. However if you
have the URL in your clipboard at the time you start SonoBus it will
also do the same thing and fill in the fields on the Connect page.

Jesse

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[Aman Singer]

If the URL could be set to OK a connection, that would solve the problem of connecting blind for all platforms. I should also say that some programs on Windows, the one which comes to mind quickly is the Jarte word processor, allows changes to be made in an accessible way by starting the program with a certain content on the clipboard. If modifying the settings is not possible by editing files/reg values, perhaps this would work so that, just for example, the jitter could be reduced/increased without using the UI?
Thanks,
Aman

[Mauro Bonan]

Brilhante!

[Mike O'Connor]

hi all,

totally off topic? apologies in advance.

i'd love to be able to use Ableton Link (a UDP, local-area protocol) to establish common time between computers across the public internet.

anybody know of folks who share this crazy dream? it would be amazing if there was a "Link" button in Sonobus.

details on Link are here:

https://ableton.github.io/link/

a paper about it starts on page 39 of this paper:

https://depositonce.tu-berlin.de/bitstream/11303/7886/4/LAC2018_proceedings.pdf

mike