On 09/18/19 19:57, Andrew Fish wrote:

Rafael,

Please let us know what you find out. I probably don''t have the time
to help implement this feature, but I happy to help work on the
architecture and design for UEFI accessibility on the edk2 mailing
lists, and I can also represent what ever we come up with at the UEFI
Spec Work Group.

It would be hard to have a UEFI mandate for accessibility, given
there is no guideline on how a User Interface (UI) works. If
accessibility requires some from of hardware abstraction, like audio,
then we could likely get that into the UEFI Spec. What might be
possible is an EDK2 reference implementation of accessibility. Maybe
we could use the reference implementation to write a UEFI white paper
on design for accessibility? I there is an open source
implementation, and an official design guide this would make it much
easier for advocacy groups to lobby for this feature.

I've got some experience with accessibility as the macOS EFI OS
Loader has a UI for the Full Disk Encryption password. If you press
the power button quickly 3 times at the disk encryption password
prompt accessibility is enabled and Voice Over gets turned on. You
then get localized voice prompts when you move between UI elements.
Since this is the OS loader all the resources are stored on the disk.
You quickly run into a range of challenges since, audio is hard,
abstracting audio is hard (what codec does firmware have to support),
Audio files are not small and firmware is size constrained, the need
to localize the audio responses causes even more size issues, the
boot options are usually written by an OS installer so how would
firmware know what to call them?

I listed a lot of reasons it is hard but as Kennedy stated in his "We
choose to go to the Moon!" speech sometimes we chose to do things
"not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that
goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and
skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept".
If we have a design that means we can break the problem up into
smaller parts, and maybe we can find people that have expertise in
that part to build a chunk at a time. If we could implement the
prototype in OVMF that would show how it works, but run on everyones
machines, so that would be really helpful for demos and design
review.

Somewhat related, in April there was a thread on virtio-dev that
suggests there is interest in a virtio-audio device model:

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/virtio-dev/201904/msg00049.html

It looks like the ACRN project already implements a (non-standard, as of
now) virtio-audio device already:

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/virtio-dev/201907/msg00061.html

(This is all I can mention right now.)

Thanks
Laszlo