@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.

@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 @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)

@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.

@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 @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.

@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 @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 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.

@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.

@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.