Hi everyone.

About Ethin's question:

As for the boot manager, yes, that would be covered by the speech

synthesizer protocol. Perhaps we could extend this to the setup utility too
(as well as all other things displayed on the screen)?
Answer: This is the target from my point of view. Since we have the
advantages of drivers at UEFI, there is no reason for not having
accessibility at pre-OS anymore. We could also think in future to add other
kinds of accessibility, like the magnifying glass (that would be some
multi-layer version of the GOP driver), that would help low-vision people.
Just one thing for everyone to think about. The "Convention on the Rights
of Persons with Disabilities" say that a person has the right to access
information. So if someone buys a notebook, all information accessible to
"common" people must be available to all kinds of people, in a way they can
choose to use this information or not.
*" (e) Recognizing that disability is an evolving concept and that
disability results from the interaction between persons with impairments
and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and
effective participation in society on an equal basis with others, ..."*
Details can be found at the United Nations web site
https://www.un.org/disabilities/documents/convention/convention_accessible_pdf.pdf


About Andrew's comments and questions:

What member functions to you think that EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL should

contain?
Answer: From my perspective, this protocol would need at least the
following functions (names may change after more discussion.)

- EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL.LoadStream()
This function is intended to copy some data to the dma buffers that
were allocated previously by the AudioController driver. The initial idea I
had was to add, in the case of my MSc, a HdaDriver.efi that is responsible
to do all the HDA controller initialization (allocating dma buffers,
configuring the PCIe bus if needed). Not sure if this initialization should
we added to the EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL, because this could create
problems when using other controllers or concepts, like I believe ARM
platforms do.My understanding is that the platforms should have a driver to
initialize the audio controller/codec, so the EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL is
just worried with loading and playing information.

- EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL.PlayStream()
This function is responsible to play the stream. This is done by
setting one specific bit at the controllers configuration space (pointed by
the bar[0] pcie configuration register at the pcie config space.) At this
project I don't think we need to be worried with implementing an sound
server to enable multiple streams at a time. To the actions done by this
function are much simpler. Just play a stream.

- EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL.StopStream()
This function is responsible to stop the stream play. The opposite of
the previous one. Maybe we could use a single function that receives some
parameter to start or stop the play.

- EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL.SetVolume()
This function is responsible to set the volume to be used at all nodes
at the codec (so it depends on a EFI_AUDIO_CODEC_PROTOCOL that knows the
commands a given codec needs to receive to process streams.)

- EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL.SetStreamSpeed()
This function is responsible to set the speed a given stream should be
played on. Just to clarify, visual impaired people have an amazing capacity
of understanding sound streams in incredibly fast speeds. So the
possibility of setting the stream processing speed is what makes them be as
productive as a person with usual vision capacities.

- EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL.UnloadStream()
This function is responsible to clean the buffers and letting them
prepared to receive other audio streams.

Still about Andrews comments.

This gave me the idea of adding a EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL and
EFI_TEXT_TO_SPEECH_PROTOCOL

driver to the EmulatorPkg that thunk down to the App to do the work. With
this we could prototype the UI part of accessibility.
Answer: This would be great, because we would split the development. One
focusing on the HII and navigation (done normally using the tab key, so
each element at the screen would need an tab sequence number and a
accessibility tag with what the speech software should say), and another
focusing on the drivers/synthesizer/audio files depending on our future
decisions.

So my understanding is that the list of things is increasing. It is
actually something like this (not ordered by priority):
- EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL: Protocol used to process the streams
- EFI_AUDIO_CODEC_PROTOCOL: Protocol used to communicate with the codec
- Audio configuration driver (HdaAudio.efi for example). Should this create
some other protocol, like EFI_AUDIO_CONTROLLER_PROTOCOL that is
responsible to configure the controller?
- EFI_TEXT_TO_SPEECH_PROTOCOL: Protocol responsible to convert text to
speech (using the EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL )
- HII changes to add tab navigation capabilities and accessibility tags at
each component on the screen

Are we aligned with the understanding?

I believe soon we will be prepared to talk about this on a design meeting.

Thanks and Regards
Rafael R. Machado



Em qua, 25 de set de 2019 às 22:08, Andrew Fish <afish@...> escreveu:

Rafael,

What member functions to you think that EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL should
contain?

I'm thinking if we had an EFI_TEXT_TO_SPEECH_PROTOCOL that driver could
produce a PCM/Wave buffer, it could then use EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL to
play the sound.

I poked around my Mac at lunch and I can generate text to speech from the
command line into a wave file via the `say` command line tool. I can play
the wave file from the command line via `afplay`. This gave me the idea
of
adding a EFI_AUDIO_OUTPUT_PROTOCOL and EFI_TEXT_TO_SPEECH_PROTOCOL
driver to the EmulatorPkg that thunk down to the App to do the work.
With this we could prototype the UI part of accessibility. We could also
debug the EFI EFI_TEXT_TO_SPEECH_PROTOCOL in this environment.

Thanks,

Andrew Fish

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