I absolutely hate touch screens! I love my current phone, a Pixel 9A. It has good battery, good speakers, a flat back, etc. But I am so fucking inefficient on a touch screen, no matter if its iOS or android. Want me to google something? Okay, let me look around for the web browser, double tap on it, explore by touch until I find the address bar which might or might not have been moved or altered in a recent app update, double tap there, type way slower than on a physical keyboard, hit search, switch my rotor/reading control to headings, and very slowly start reading through results. Touch screens are remarklably efficient for people with functioning eyeballs, and I've seen people who can text on a phone almost as fast as I can type on a computer. But for me, a metal slab with a glass screen and way more computing power than I would've ever thought possible, no matter how fucking cool it is that we can drop that in our pockets like its nothing, will never ever be as efficient as win+r, browsername, enter, start typing, enter, press h, boom first result. This is not helped by the mainstream screen readers on both mobile operating systems having agrivating bugs. On Android scrolling locks up your screen reader while it refreshes the screen, because we're apparently still living in 2005, and VO has just started getting worse and worse with every iteration. I see the downsides to this approach, but I'm really starting to think the best solution for mobile devices for blind people is custom hardware/software. There are plenty of examples of getting this wrong, but I think that's mostly due to people not eating their own dog food as opposed to it being an impossible task. Paperback for Android has shown me that you can make as polished of Android software as you want, but there are still no physical buttons on the front of your phone. For a truly efficient reading and usability experience, I'd personally want both blind-centric software and hardware with physical buttons. That's not at all realistic, though. Welcome to being blind in a world made for sighted people.
@TheQuinbox I'm sighted but I've been working on making a portable audio based desktop environment for these exact same reasons. I use a one handed keyboard and bluetooth headphones with a single board computer hooked to a portable battery bank. Sadly I found linux screen readers have been too slow to use so I'm designing my own. IMO screen reader first setups could be better than dedicated linux phones if you focus on keyboard access and ignore the rendering entirely.
@TheQuinbox Yeah of course! The tl;dr is the Twiddler 4 keyboard and a Khadas Edge 2 glued to a random USB-C powerbank. Orca for screen reader for now but I'm gonna slap together something else. Mostly geares towards jumping around the accessibility tree with fuzzy search. Maybe also speaking live regions in multiple voices to get more data through?
@mauve @TheQuinbox yo, that's awesome! do you have a git repo or something I can look at?
About the screenreader, sure you can build your own, and depending on what you want to do maybe you should, but me and some other people are working on a screenreader for linux, to replace orca because of multiple grievances we have with it. Work on it is really slow especially now because we're at the heuristics stage, but you know, it's a thing which may give you inspiration and stuff if you don't want to make it from scratch.
@esoteric_programmer @TheQuinbox No git repo yet, I'm just writing notes on how I'd like to interact with the system and figuring out how to get wayland to run without a physical monitor. I'm down to collaborate though! What's your new screen reader called? Is this that new Rust one that's been bouncing around?
@mauve @TheQuinbox yep, that one! it's called odilia. Really rough because now we're in the finding heuristics stage which works kinda antithetical to the architecture we set for ourselves, so we'll have to both work around that and find what orca does in certain edge cases, because I feel like from here on outward, everything will be pretty much implementing of more at-spi events and orca-specific heuristics
@mauve Holy shit, this sounds fucking awesome! I'd love to pick your brain about this.