Text-to-speech integration in PPSSPP's UI

[hrydgard]

Requested by Amethyst on Discord:

Would it be possible to ad in accessibility to the windows version of PPSSPP?
I am unable to use the program with the assistive software I need to use on my computer.
I use this program: https://www.nvaccess.org/download/
This is a library that can integrate the program into the app: https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/tree/master/extras/controllerClient
I am not a programmer, so I have no idea how hard or easy this would be to ad, but it would help out accessibility for the program a lot.
Games can be played without being able to see at all, such as fighting games and others, but to change emulator settings and open games isn't accessible at the moment.

This NDVA library looks fairly straighforward to use for a simple integration, like just speaking the selected item in the menus.

The client API seems to be licensed under LGPL 2.1, which should be alright for us I think, especially to just load the DLL dynamically.

I am a little concerned that the structure of our menus are not the friendliest to browse by audio though, but would be better than nothing.

[hrydgard]

Amethyst also reports that pressing Alt to get to the window menu is not working.

[FastenedBrick25]

NVDA in PPSSPP would be amazing! I can finally stop using retroarch for PSP emulation.

[unknownbrackets]

I am a little concerned that the structure of our menus are not the friendliest to browse by audio though, but would be better than nothing.

I'm not sure it would be that bad, although cases where we group things for layout reasons rather than semantic reasons would probably be confusing. I think there are not that many cases of that.

Some time ago, I added labels to all the controls and included the type, such as "button." As long as this exposed to NVDA/similar in some way (either as the type of control, which is ideal, or as part of the label) it should allow someone navigating using audio to understand how to interact. If there are cases where a control is misused (i.e. a clickable TextView or a Button for visual purposes that doesn't react to clicking), those would cause confusion.

Another thing that can cause problems, generally, is text that updates. In some situations (controller testing screen) one may want new text announced, while in other situations (settings after updating) it may not be necessary.

But other than those concerns (which are common types of issues for audio navigation of UIs), I don't think our UI is particularly audio-incompatible.

-[Unknown]

[RealAmethyst]

Hi. Has there been any progress to this? It would really improve accessibility for the emulator.

[hrydgard]

No, sorry, have not gotten aroudn to this. So much to do.

[RealAmethyst]

Ah. I've seen the changelogs and yeah a lot of things were fixed, so I understand. Is there plans for integrating this though?