Re: HFOSS Visual Audio

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Thanks Lennart!  This seems pretty interesting and something worthwhile 
to pursue.  Would you or anyone on libcanberra-discuss be able to serve 
as a technical mentor for a college intern working on this for 10 weeks?

Will

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mon, 02.03.09 15:16, Willie Walker (William Walker Sun COM) wrote:
>
> > Hi Vincent:
>
> Heya,
>
> > Thanks for the info/pointer.  Neat - looks like libcanberra has a way to  
> > bind textual descriptions to sound events:
> >
> > http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/libcanberra/gtkdoc/libcanberra-canberra.html#CA-PROP-EVENT-DESCRIPTION--CAPS
> >
> > I would be interested in talking with Lennert (CC'd) about this.  
> > Lennert, would it be possible to create something that could sniff the  
> > canberra traffic and allow us to be notified when something is being  
> > played and to extract the [con]textual information associated with it?
>
> Sure. That's one of the reasons we created libcanberra.
>
> Basically all you have to do is writing another backend for
> libcanberra that deals with sound event the way you want. You can then
> either use it as an exclusive backend for libcanberra (i.e. so that
> actual sound is not generated) or multiplex events to your new
> plugin and a sound generating plugin using the 'multi' plugin.
>
> The idea of the properties libcanberra uses is that we can pass as
> much contextual information from the application to the backend in a
> simple way as necessary. For example, right now besides the sound
> identifier and q descriptive text we pass mouse pointer positions (for
> event sounds that are triggered by a click), the application and window
> they originate from, an icon, and more. And we always can extend the
> set of properties. My insight into a11y is minimal though, so the
> current set of properties only includes what was obvious to me, so
> feel free to ask for additional properties.
>
> Some applications pass more context information then others right
> now. For example you currently see more of "Download completed." than
> "Download of file %s completed." if you understand what I mean. If
> some tools actually rely on those strings the situation might improve
> though and folks might get more careful with the properties they pass.
>
> Make sure to join libcanberra-discuss if you have any questions:
>
> https://tango.0pointer.de/mailman/listinfo/libcanberra-discuss/
>
> Oh, and my name is actually Lennart, with an a,
>
> Lennart