Hi, all. Apologies for the length of this, but I'm sort of diving head-first into Android development along a pretty unconventional path, so I'm encountering lots of unusual issues along the way.
By way of background, I'm totally blind. While doing one of my semi-regular Google pokes to see if anything new was happening on the Android accessibility front, I discovered Donut's accessibility API. Now I'm flirting with the idea of writing an open source Android screen reader. Of course, most new developers likely take on a less challenging app, and I don't know how far I'll take this, but unless I (or someone else) do this, "Hello, world" is pretty useless. :) First things first, are there any similar efforts out there? Would anyone be interested in working on something? I've seen http://slimvoice.googlecode.com, but in addition to there being no contact information to be found, they're going in several directions at once, and I'm just not sure how productive that will prove. Anyhow, my development environment pretty much has to be console-based, since I've not found accessible Linux/GTK IDEs. I'm also into Scala rather than Java. To that end, I've downloaded the Android SDK and have set up the Android plugin for SBT, my build tool of choice. I can successfully start the emulator, and can shell in with adb shell and poke around. SBT seems to successfully communicate with the emulator, I can build an apk and successfully install it. This is pretty much where my knowledge breaks down, because the graphical aspect of the emulator is entirely inaccessible until I can get a working AccessibilityService speaking which, I gather, I can't do without tweaking the emulator. So, questions: 1. Should the emulator provide TTS via native sound hardware? 2. From http://developer.android.com/reference/android/accessibilityservice/AccessibilityService.html I read: The lifecycle of an accessibility service is managed exclusively by the system. Starting or stopping an accessibility service is triggered by an explicit user action through enabling or disabling it in the device settings. This creates a chicken and egg problem, since I can't enable my app unless I have an accessible emulator, which I hope that my app can eventually provide. Is it possible to enable whatever lifecycle tweaks may be needed from the adb shell? 3. I think that my initial goal should be an AccessibilityService that captures events and dumps applicable data to stdout on a shell. What I can then do is play around in the emulator, see what events are generated, what data those events contain and slowly construct a meaningful text stream. This stream can then eventually be piped into the TTS service, but simple printlns would involve fewer moving parts and would help me get started much faster. This, however, requires the ability to start the service from the adb shell so I'd have my service's stdout in my terminal. Is this at all possible? I've discovered the am command, but it's not particularly googleable, and I can't figure out how it works. :) Thanks a bunch. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
