blind accessible graphene first setup

shuteye

Hi all, I'm finding myself in need of reflashing my phone, but I'm blind and am wondering what can be done long-term about adding text to speech and open source talkback to the Graphene image so that when the install completes I can get screen reader access as I can with stock Google Android? I understand that we don't want any google source code on the phone by default, would a combo like open-source Talkback with network permition not enabled and espeak-ng qualify for inclusion?

Yeetchuh

Download Sherpa T T S from the F Droid App Store. It gives you different T T S voices to choose from all for free. They’re pretty realistic in my opinion. Way better than the robot sounding ones we’re all used to.

shuteye

Appreciate the recommend! Never heard of that tts before :) however the fact still remains, I'm unable to get tts going on that first setup screen after the fully accessible web installer is complete. Espeak-NG would be the best TTS to include in the distro by default as it is the only one I know of that has that "first boot" permition thus making it so that folks can enter their pin with speech on reboot of the phone. Now, if open source talkback was included with the default shortcut of holding down the two volume keys, then someone like myself could flash the phone, and get speech working right out of the box as opposed to having potentially unskilled sighted help take hours to read through everything and set it up lol!

Lucario1829

pretty sure first boot tts is being actively worked on since its an obvious accessibility flaw, but yeah, it doesnt exist yet. i think its being done by someone known as soupslurpr

soupslurpr

Join the GrapheneOS chat and keep an eye out in the testing channel if you'd like to test our upcoming TTS engine and provide feedback when it comes out!

shuteye

I'm so glad this is being worked on! Once firstboot is good, then all that'd be needed is to provide talkback open source as part of the distro with say the volume keys as a preconfigured shortcut. If that potentially poses a security risk, perhaps a separate build so that folks can get on a version at least and then download subsequent updates from there?

soupslurpr

shuteye Oh actually TalkBack is included already, the only missing part is the TTS engine and the shortcut you talked about.

charles25565

eSpeak includes Direct Boot, so it is easier to unlock your phone.

shuteye

charles25565 I made the mistake of installing the playstore version and it seems it does not have that first boot permition... had to get my sighted wife to unlock my phone lol.

Pocketstar

It is best to use this version of espeak, (see link below) and not an ad-infested version of espeak that is sometimes present on the Play Store.
espeak:
https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/releases
After that, I would recommend installing Sherpa (the one from woheller69) as user Yeetchuh recommended for a better quality voice.
SherpaTTS:
https://github.com/woheller69/ttsengine

shuteye

Pocketstar I'm definitely not good at installing sourcecode / compiling it, but I've always wanted to learn so will be giving Shirpa a try!

MetropleX

We're going to launch our own text-to-speech/speech-to-text soon which took months of work.

Source: https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1998971899037290734

Pocketstar

MetropleX Thanks! This is fantastic news to hear! No more fiddling with third-party libraries and a proper integration with GrapheneOS!
I know someone very close to me who is blind (she only sees light/dark through one eye) and uses GrapheneOS also, I'm sure she'll will be thrilled to hear this!
I use it myself for all kinds of things, like reading offline Kiwix-articles, reading books when I am doing something else and it provides a voice for a local LLM, (ChatterUI) and one can even use it to read some notifications, (Voice Notify) it is extremely useful!

shuteye

Oh this is so great to hear! So when this comes out, all that needs to be done to have first accessible setup from boot is to enable the "hold down volume keys" accessibility shortcut from within the default image folks install, and then talkback gets fired up automatically! Who can I talk to or where could I post to get this last action into the backlog for a future release?

Pocketstar

shuteye I'm definitely not good at installing sourcecode / compiling it, but I've always wanted to learn so will be giving Shirpa a try!

They do have a link to an APK on their main page. (OpenAPK)
https://www.openapk.net/ttsengine/org.woheller69.ttsengine/
Therefore compiling is not required.

However, in the future GrapheneOS has a TTS-engine available themselves. (Shoutout to MetropleX for informing me about it)

gristle-cause

GrapheneOS TTS engine is HUGE news

I'm using a HuggingFace SherpaTTS NextGen Kaldi voice. It's pretty high quality, but the app itself definitely approaches my minimum trust threshold