QuinIf my home timeline is any indication, the number of Move orders Ableton has gotten from blind people across the world in the past 24 hours has gone up by like 300%. Mostly thanks to some random dude making an open source project.
Sean Randall@TheQuinbox I got one for my daughter for Christmas but I've not even seen it. I am a very untypical blind person.
@TheQuinbox How much are people paying for those?
@NicksWorld Mine was $500 for the move and an Ableton Live Intro license.
@TheQuinbox NGL, sorely tempted myself. Would be nice to have something to do with my hands that isn't directly computer-related. Curious to know how yours works out when you get it.
Toni Barth@TheQuinbox Sad thing is, as far as I know, people have asked Ableton to just provide us with an on-board screen reader from when the first video on it came out back in the day. They always avoided it with various excuses. Man, the moment we got the first device into our hands and noticed its basically just a Raspi we all knew it was possible, and not even hard to do at all. Talking about a company just doing as much as they need to generate income.
Matt Campbell@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Has anyone figured out how to hack the device to do TTS output on-device alongside other audio yet? I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on the reasons they gave.
@matt @ToniBarth That's what Move Everything does. It uses espeak or flight.
@TheQuinbox @ToniBarth Oh shit, I might have to buy one of these too. Don't know if the actual music application will be my thing, but I'm perpetually curious about how companies do Linux-based devices.
@matt @ToniBarth Hahahaha, totally fair reason, half the reason I impulse bought one was because I realized that it is literally a raspberry-pi in a box that makes music.
@matt @TheQuinbox I'd like to have one too, but I am kinda stuck in a moral loop hole. I find it unfair that a dev not related with Ableton fixed their accessibility issues, for free, and now Ableton is making thousands of dollars of someone's free labour.
@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Work on products or product features is always speculative. You look at possibilities, guess about what you think will be profitable to work on, and hope you're right. Given that, if I'm not mistaken, Ableton had already implemented a roundabout way for blind people to use the device, they arguably did the minimum that was legally required. I don't think I can fault them for not going ahead and implementing something equivalent to Move Everything. (continued)
@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Do we know how many thousands Ableton actually made because of Move Everything? Or how much it would have cost them to have their engineering team do it?
@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Even outside of a framework of sociopathic profit maximization, there are always competing priorities and limited resources. I was on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft. At the team's peak, we had more than 20 developers working on Windows accessibility. We still had competing priorities and limited resources.
James Scholes@matt @ToniBarth There is the business/legal case (although I'm not clear about which legal requirements you're asserting would apply to this product), and there is the idea that accessibility must be continually pushed forward to avoid a state of subsistence for people who need it.
These positions need to be reconciled for progress to be made, not treated as incompatible opposites. Acceptance of everybody doing the bare minimum isn't helpful, nor is dismissal of every bit of legitimate effort because it could've been better.
CC @TheQuinbox
@matt @TheQuinbox They implemented a mode that required an external device, e.g. mobile or pc, to operate it, which arguably makes it less "moveable" and more like "Ableton Stationary", and definitely more fiddly than necessary. Well, there are several people on Mastodon here alone who purchased a new device just because ov Move Everything. Check the GitHub commit history of the dev and estimate the time effort, I'm sure it'll already be positive now.
Andre Louis@ToniBarth @matt @TheQuinbox He's still piggybacking off Ableton's own screenreader output, so it's not like he just did this on his own...
@FreakyFwoof @matt @TheQuinbox That isn't what is relevant here. Yeah, he does that, but what is the reason so many people now (particularly now) get a new device? The reason is the on-device screen reader. And that is Move Everything. The strings were there before, Ableton could have done it, they didn't. The selling point is Move Everything.
@ToniBarth @FreakyFwoof @matt @TheQuinbox Not directly, at least here. In fact I was interested before. I have my phone around anyway, the screenreader is like, really awesome to have on device and will improve speed, but not the only reason I spent 500€. But yeah, a very interesting discussion.
@FreakyFwoof @ToniBarth @matt Yeah, that. Move Everything is incredibly cool, but it also seems stupidly simple. Just intercept the strings being sent to the web app and pipe them through a tts binary.
@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox @matt This feels like one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't mentality chats. It's too much energy to ffight about what people *should* *could* *have* done. Corporations have to think about bottom lines. Hackers do not.
If Ableton end up Shirlocking the thing and rolling it into core, they better give the man some money. Until then, this is how it's done. It's a thing.
If Ableton end up Shirlocking the thing and rolling it into core, they better give the man some money. Until then, this is how it's done. It's a thing.
@TheQuinbox @FreakyFwoof @ToniBarth So maybe there's enough bureaucracy between the business decision-makers and the developer(s) inside the company who could have done it, that the decision-makers didn't realize how simple it would actually be.
@TheQuinbox @FreakyFwoof @ToniBarth Plus of course to really do it right, to the standards of a commercial product from an international company, you have to think about TTS localization, configuring voice and rate, etc.
@TheQuinbox @FreakyFwoof @ToniBarth I mean, there's a difference between a hack to be installed and configured by desperate power-users, and a proper feature with complete UI.
@matt @TheQuinbox @ToniBarth There isn't any other device like it in the world with a screen-reader on or off-board, so getting pissed at Ableton for implementing even 50% of that is just... Churlish. Anyway, people be people.
@matt @TheQuinbox @FreakyFwoof I didn't expect them to develop the entire Move Everything environment. A simple espeak and a settings screen giving you a on/off switch and some sliders, plus a button combo to enable/disable it would have been enough. No magic.
@ToniBarth @matt @FreakyFwoof Enough for you, not for the execs and product managers who are in charge of shipping this $400 piece of hardware. They could've just done what literally every other groovbox in the world up until this point has done, and say fuck blind people, but they didn't, and gave us a web UI. Is it perfect? No, in fact I even had a friend have to write an NVDA add-on to fix a bug with NVDA's live region implementation that showed up on the move website, but it's usable. Usable enough that one bored guy made a screen reader on the device. More than enough for me, at least for now. Way further than we've ever gotten before.
@TheQuinbox @matt @FreakyFwoof Sure, if you can accept the situation as it is, I don't blame you. I like the idea of the Move being finally accessible as well. But I can live without it too, and right now I don't want to support well-paid product owners in believing that they just need to give us the bare minimum to be valuable to a new user group. I know that it works like this in companies, maximizing income is a thing, but I won't support that.
@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox @matt Is it though? Is it the bare minimum? What about MPC? What about Maschine Plus? I'd say that's less than even that.
@FreakyFwoof @TheQuinbox @matt Devices that are inaccessible entirely. The only accessible device is the normal Maschine yes? That one is a stationary device, and it works stationary as a device, as you are supposed to connect it to some device, may it be PC, mobile, whatever, to work with it. That is how it works, not just for us, but for everyone. That is more than what Ableton gave us on the Move.
@ToniBarth @TheQuinbox @matt I'd also like to point out a simple thing you must have overlooked. Having an offboard screen-reader allows it to be used by anyone, with any synth they like, including those who read braille or just want it magnified. Bare minimum you say?
I say quite clever when you think about it.
*not* having the option of onboard, yes, silly, but I do not believe 'bare minimum' is at all a fair assessment. It had a screen-reader from day 1. Not day 365 oh look, blindies, let's be seen to be doing something, day 1.
I say quite clever when you think about it.
*not* having the option of onboard, yes, silly, but I do not believe 'bare minimum' is at all a fair assessment. It had a screen-reader from day 1. Not day 365 oh look, blindies, let's be seen to be doing something, day 1.
@FreakyFwoof @ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Good point about the advantages of externalizing the screen reader output, despite the obvious drawback for self-contained portability. It would have been beyond Ableton to reproduce the breadth of TTS and Braille options on Windows, iOS, or Android, let alone the choice of all three. They presumably realized that and decided to punt on that. Competing priorities, limited resources, tradeoffs everywhere.
@FreakyFwoof @ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Now, maybe that points to the need for a better shared platform for devices like the Move, a platform that has the accessibility ecosystem already built in. Some of us wanted Android to become that. But that didn't really happen; Google only really cares about their own devices plus the emulator, so you end up with Android forks for other devices, and no official maintained port for the Pi as far as I know.
@FreakyFwoof @ToniBarth @TheQuinbox The Move is, of course, based on Linux, and presumably GNU/Linux at that. I don't yet know much about the technical underpinnings of the UI; presumably it didn't use enough desktop Linux infrastructure (e.g. standard GUI toolkit running on X11 or Wayland) that running Orca would be feasible. And the TTS situation on desktop Linux isn't great anyway.
@matt @FreakyFwoof @TheQuinbox But guys, keep it up, i'm out, have to calm down off the line a bit ;).
@matt @FreakyFwoof @TheQuinbox Exactly. I'm still just talking about an on-board screen reader, accessibility is supposed to enable people to all access things in the same way. Sighted people who are able to look at the screen can use it without a second device. We couldn't. Obviously speech on the device doesn't cover all cases, but it isn't like the off-device screen reader is going anywhere now is it? You've got choices. That is what matters.
@matt @FreakyFwoof @ToniBarth @TheQuinbox Something else which could have been a factor is... What voice would you use. Like I know that the fact espeak is GPL makes it impossible to include in a commercial, closed source product. So is RHVoice, and iirc if they wanted to license something like vocalizer those companies typically would charge them for each unit sold even if speech is not being used. I wonder, does their distro includes it or is it something move everything installs. If it did would they have been able to use it from a legal point of view. Because if not I can see how a steep cost of a commercial speech engine could have been a factor in why it was done this way. Or it just could have been a case of not enough time or wanting to focus on what Andre said. The fact the move team was hit with layoffs before the device even came out probably didn't help either.
@pitermach @FreakyFwoof @TheQuinbox Whether eSpeak was off the table due to the GPL is an interesting question. The Linux kernel itself is GPLv2, but eSpeak is GPLv3. The Move is clearly hackable to some extent, so it seems unlikely that they would have run into the GPLv3's anti-tivoization provisions. There might already be GPLv3 components in the image anyway, if they're using GNU utilities. Can anyone tell me what distro they're using?
Kara Goldfinch@matt @FreakyFwoof @ToniBarth @TheQuinbox also with the off-board one you have the advantage of not sending your screen reader out to the PA or whatever since the Move only has one output.
@matt @TheQuinbox @FreakyFwoof Sure is, I don't blame the Ableton devs, but the higher-ups here. But in the end, the money goes to the company, and mainly to them, because their paygrade is way higher. For me, such things are important. It doesn't have to be for you. I think, what we say by now getting a Move is "yep, well done Ableton, your way works", which proves them right, they won't change anything later down the line.
@matt @TheQuinbox I might get my hands on a used one on eBay or something.
@TheQuinbox I just saw this in my google feed this morning, in an article. I got one of these hoping that things would get better, Looks like I got my answer, at least I think so. I’m looking forward to messing with this
Pratik Patel@TheQuinbox It's awesome. Isn't it? Even though I don't have the time or the budget to play with this, it's good to see so many happy people.
@ppatel @TheQuinbox Some people are salty because Ableton themselves didn't put TTs onboard, but there's always someone.
@FreakyFwoof @TheQuinbox Yes. I can see people making this argument. They should try to convince the company to incorporate this thing into new firmware rather than complain about it. A little compensation for the dev for the great work wouldn't hurt either. I'll take accessibility wins whenever I can get them.
@ppatel @TheQuinbox What exactly is going on with this?
super hell@TheQuinbox 300% seems low