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Support VoiceOver

Open C-Loftus opened this issue 1 year ago • 2 comments

I do not have a Mac so I have no way of testing or developing this at the moment. Would appreciate any help or the ability to test run code

C-Loftus avatar Dec 07 '23 03:12 C-Loftus

I have a mac m1 I would be glad to try to help.

emmakat avatar Jul 14 '24 00:07 emmakat

Thanks for your interest! I have a mac now and have done some testing. Unfortunately Apple makes it really hard to control VoiceOver to do anything beyond the standard behavior. I think I am blocked on this. Don't have much bandwidth to begin with to investigate further though.

To my understanding:

  • it is not possible to interrupt existing speech by sending new speech to VoiceOver via AppleScript. We need this to allow for the screen reader to echo back speech the user says but do it in a way that is interruptable and in sync with the rest of the screen reader speech.
  • The VoiceOver AppleScript api is very limited, most functions are not relevant to this repo, and in general Talon has a pretty limited set of helpers for AppleScript.
  • it is not possible to write extensions for VoiceOver without doing something messy with ffi so it is difficult to override any existing behavior

If you have any different perspectives on this let me know.

C-Loftus avatar Jul 14 '24 00:07 C-Loftus