@maddy Oh yeah, GrapheneOS, the OS that's fine officially shipping sandboxed proprietary Google Play Services but will not ship a screen reader because it's GPLv3!

@nytpu @maddy wait, the fuck? they don't ship a screen reader? they're OK with being inaccessible???

@senil @nytpu @maddy We have a fork of the open source TalkBack which is maintained by a blind member of our community and is included in GrapheneOS. We've developed our own text-to-speech implementation meeting our requirements for better usability, out-of-the-box functionality, security and acceptable licensing. Our text-to-speech app is currently available for early testing and will be included in GrapheneOS soon. We then need to add support to our Setup Wizard for integrating TalkBack.

@senil @nytpu @maddy We were in the process of investigating a bunch of open source TTS apps and saw none of them supported the required Direct Boot support for TalkBack so we filed it as a feature request with several. It wasn't done with the intention of bundling them but rather because we wanted the apps to be improved. We found 1 open source TTS app which almost met our requirements (SherpaTTS) but it's too slow to be comfortably used with TalkBack so we decided to make our own and did.

@senil @nytpu @maddy Our text-to-speech app project is at https://github.com/GrapheneOS/SpeechServices and we're actively working on polishing it up for inclusion in the OS as the default enabled TTS service. TTS services handle untrusted input from other apps on the OS combined with a lot of the data they handle being privacy sensitive. It's also crucial for it to perform very well especially for the TalkBack role. SherpaTTS provides high quality output but is much too slow, which was the reason to make this.