Accessibility features

Feature Requests
1

Some accessibility features Sailfish is missing compared to other operating systems or could be improved:

  • Font size: even larger fonts are needed, the current ‘Huge’ doesn’t cover all use cases.
    → ‘Giant’ has been added in Sailfish 5.1. :white_check_mark:
  • High contrast mode: presumably this would need to tweak the colour pallette, but also disable the glass ‘grid’ pattern.
  • Notifications: an option to make both the screen and the camera flash blink when receiving a message or a call would be needed.
  • Screen reader: is it possible to ‘just’ use Orca or other TTS software?
  • BrailleTOH: someone suggested to create an Other Half with a braille display.
  • UI animations: option to cut back on or disable animations.
  • ASHA protocol (Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids): uses Bluetooth Low Energy for streaming audio into hearing aid devices. Also see this thread: ASHA protocol for hearing devices supported

Some things are probably relatively easy to implement by Jolla themselves (like the larger max font sizes and the notification flashes), others would probably need some help from the community.

11 Likes
2

I was wondering to what extent GitHub - mkiol/dsnote: Speech Note Linux app. Note taking, reading and translating with offline Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine translation. can be repurposed. It has an API over DBus already. It doesn’t do live transcription yet.

4 Likes
3

This Youtube Channel (https://yewtu.be/channel/UCsVtXa3VN-aQd_HqMYb7uJg) has some videos about Sailfish related about accessibility for a low vision user.

The good point is that Jolla is already aware of this channel :slight_smile:

3 Likes
4

The Sailfish Silica Page component has a highContrast property, it is marked “preliminary” along with all the Background features.

Looks like this API would need finishing/stabilizing.

App authors could also use the Page backgroundColor property to disable the transparent background.

4 Likes
5

Great ideas here!A

More variety in font size seems a given one. But also font weight, while very pretty, the sailfish font is quite thin, making it hard to read sometimes even if contrast ratios are within the WCAG.

Also one idea I’d like to add is greater separation between elements. Now most things are implicit: separation is inferred by distance to another rather than by borders, even discrete ones. This tends to make things look like a list of text, rather than clickable buttons or actions. It’s sleek and pretty, but a bit more difficult to use.

Have to say though that my experiences are from the SDK alone, haven’t recieved my Jolla phone yet! :smiley:

1 Like