On Sep 21, 2019, at 5:36 AM, Rafael Machado <rafaelrodrigues.machado@... <mailto:rafaelrodrigues.machado@...>> wrote:

Hi Everyone
Sorry for the delay on the response, to many things happening at the same time.
I will try to answer e-mails to this thread every Saturday or Sunday morning at least.
About Andrew's and Laszlo's comments and questions

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.

During my MSc I had to study a lot the audio and BIOS architectures. The idea was to eliminate the first barrier to the creation of a screen reader for pre-OS environment, that was the lack of some open implementation of audio control and actions at UEFI. To do that I studied the Intel High Definition Audio Spec and a lot of UEFI specs to understand better how to do that.
The initial target was to do all this development at OVMF, but as far as I could get, the sound card is not available to OVMF. as Laszlo mentioned at this e-mail there are some projects that may help on this, but at the time I was working on my MSc I didn't find this, so I did everything on a real system (a ASUS notebook).
It took me 2 years of work, because I didn't know a lot of things and working on a MSc degree at the same time having a 40hours/week job, being a father and a husband is not an easy task, but it got to what I was expecting.
The evolution of the project was this:
1 - First tests using some registers named "Immediate Registers", that later I noticed that are not mandatory. This is a simple C Major scale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-mgzcOnRCg&feature=youtu.be
2 - Some months later I started to work with the Ring Buffers and DMA memory access. For the ones that have good years, it's possible to listen some music behing the noise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ED2BSc89-Y&feature=youtu.be
3 - Later, wen I was almost giving up, I noticed that the problem was that one of my write operations was causing some misunderstanding between the audio controller and the audio codec. The controller was sending packets with 16bit depth, but the codec was processing them as 8bit depth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2De9dI9WbwM&feature=youtu.be

So the conclusion is that doing this at UEFI us much easier that doing at the OS level.
The reference code, that is just a proof-of-concept, and that has several things to be improved, can be found here:
https://github.com/RafaelRMachado/Msc_UefiHda_PreOs_Accessibility

Currently it is just an UEFI Application, but we can convert this to UEFI drivers after some discussion. Everything is released as BDS so companies can use without IP problems.
Just to give some more information about the need of this kind of solution. There is a lot of blind people that work with hardware support, so formatting disk, configuring RAID and booting dual-boot systems is always a challenge to them. Even set the BIOS clock. How to do that without the system's feedback?

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 agree this is the way. Writing a white paper as an official EDK2 papers is one of my targets since the beginning of my MSc almost 5 years ago.

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?

The solution to this would be the porting of some voice synthesizer, so no audio files would need to be stored. There are some open-source implementations that are not GPL.
This was described at my MSc as future works that can continue what I have started.

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 everyone's >>machines, so that would be really helpful for demos and design review.

I totally agree. Amazing words that I didn't have heard yet. Thanks!
As far as I could understand, and with Leif's help, some possible future steps could be (not at this specific order):
- 1) Convert proof-of-concept HDA driver to UEFI driver model with proper PCI discovery.
- 2) Design a prototype EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL, rework driver to produce this and application to discover and consume it.
- 3) Implement a USB Audio Class driver also producing EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL and ensure test application remains functional.
- 4) Separate controller and codec code by creating an EFI_AUDIO_CODEC_PROTOCOL, implement this in HDA driver, and separate out the codec support into individual drivers.
- 5) Prototype audio output additions to HII. (using pre-recorder audio files)
- 6) Porting of some voice synthesizer to UEFI. (eliminating the need of audio files)

Beyond this, there are other things we should look at adding, like
- EFI_AUDIO_INPUT_PROTOCOL.
- Audio input additions to HII.

It's a lot of work, but I accept the challenge.
It may take a long time, but it is possible.

I am still trying to find some time to finish the translation of my thesis to English.
I wrote everything in Portuguese because there was not material about UEFI to the Brazilian audience, and another target I have is to show companies that we have people that can work at this kind of projects in Brazil, bringing this kind of development to south america. (Yes, I have complicated target, but I like the challenge :) )

Thanks and Regards
Rafael R. Machado

Em qui, 19 de set de 2019 às 14:45, Laszlo Ersek <lersek@... <mailto:lersek@...>> escreveu:
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