Re: gnome audio

[Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>]

On Tue, 2003-02-11 at 13:24, Bill Haneman wrote:
> Have you thought about how, in addition to supporting multiple audio
> formats, etc., the spec could support alternate media (statusbar
> messages, etc.) which hooked into the audio events?  The basic
> requirement for accessibility would be that it would be possible for
> some non-audio channel to plug into the sound-theme; this would
> alleviate the need for desktop applications and utilities to provide
> non-audio info alongside the audio channel (which is currently required
> of applications which present audio-only information or events, in order
> for the apps to be fully accessible). It sound to me[*] as if this would
> be pretty straightforward to do in a general-purpose desktop sounds
> framework.

This sounds more like a UI/app-specific issue, or an issue with the
sound API itself. The sound events api should have an argument for what
to set as the status message, or whatever. Sound should never *EVER* be
the only method for notification of an event anyway. If it is, that is
pretty bad UI. Something may happen and you may not be around, or the
speakers may be off. It's more a usability issue than accessibility, I
think, though accessibility is a major portion of it. If you're deaf, or
you have the speakers turned off/down, you're going to have the same
effectiveness from the sound events. The theme spec is only for themes,
not for use of events in applications, and the API for the
implementation. Perhaps API could be included in the spec. Ideally, the
applications and possibly the events API should handle this aspect of
development. As a reference, I'll point you to a nice short UI "article"
that I discovered. There are more on the same site, and they are quite
good and useful.

http://www.pixelcentric.net/x-shame/sound.html


-- dobey

-- 
"So I gave up on that, and tried to install gstreamer. Get this. Their
 propose ``solution'' for distributing binaries on Red Hat systems? They
 point you at an RPM that installs apt, the Debian package system! Yeah,
 that's a good idea, I want to struggle with two competing packaging
 systems on my machine just to install a single app." -- jwz