[Android Apps and Games] pvdeejay:
Hello,

Utter has been recommended to me by one of the eyes-free mailing list members. Eyes-free is a place where visually disabled people discuss all stuff related to accessibility of Android including accessible 3rd party apps.

I have just discovered how good Utter is and what a potential it has and might gain even more for me as a blind individual.

Let me congratulate for a fantastic job and thank for using standard Android Vidgets where possible. Settings and all the Utter's UI is briliantly accessible while using googles screen reading application called Talkback.

I think Brandal has received quite a lot of emails thanking for such great level off accessibility recently and I would like to thank in the public as well.

I apologize for giving a lot of wild ideas below however I am really amazed at this time.

While Utter is working it uses various channels to communicate its state to the user. The main interface is voice recognition as input and text to speech engine as output. However this is often complemented with toast notification saying for example "I'm listening", "Fetching", "computing" and maybe some others. Some error messages I cant remember specific phrases at the moment are only rendered via toast notification and not send for TTS output. The timing of these anouncements is that first Utter uses TTS output and afterwards displays a toast notification. While I am using screen reading app to access my android device the toast notification is read by screen reading app and sent to the tts again as it displays. Until the reading of the toast notification is finished recognition might already get started thus it may sometimes accidentally record a part of TTS output making the voice recognition fail. This might be varying depending on the TTS engine used. To elliminate this conflict I would like to consider an ability to turn these toast notifications off. I know this might just be usefull to blind people however can you please understand the point and does it make sense while you are reading my comments? Is it worth implementing? I cant call this issue a bug I feel it as enhancement request however even if it is going to be denied I would at least like to get assured it is well understood.

I have been reading some of the postings in this thread of course I havent read majority of them. I am going to ask some questions please excuse me if some of them might already have been answered earlier I most likelly missed them. Just point me where you think is appropriate and I will read that please.

Is there a way to:

- open missed calls,

- open call log even if there are no missed calls,

- call the person I've done the last incoming / outgoing call with,

- call a number, I mean dictate a number and call that number instead of calling contacts,

- Is there a way to control music playback, I mean basic commands such as, play, pause, stop, next, previous and possibly increasing / decreasing the volume? I know it is possible to ask to play a specific track. I am afraid while the music is playing voice recognition may not work so maybe this is not doable however while the music playing I am unable to stop it sometimes as TTS volume is too quiet comparing to the music and I am unable to set that seperatelly. If something like this was possible It would help me and other blind people to cross out one of the barriers.

Currently built-in android keyboard has a microphone icon button which can be used to start voice recognition and dictate a text into an edit field. While the voice recognition takes place it is highlighting words and phrases as they are recognized. Again this makes a huge interference with recognition engine as these highlighted words are being sent for TTS by the Talkback screen reader. While Utter runs the voice recognition it does not highlight the output while visual results are turned off and it is possible to sent sms / email / tweet / facebook status this way without the interference I have just described. This issue has been discussed at the eyes-free list it is known by the eyes free google developers however it has not yet been addressed. Would there be a way to control and write / append text into edit fields?

For example commands such as "write text in <language>" and "append text in <language>" what would even be able to take a language name to switch the recognition engine to. This would be even more flexible than the android keyboard dictation feature and again will help me and possibly others to overcome a long standing issue.

I am even not going to mention an issue where non english talkback users are unable to confortably write accented letters using onscreen keyboard and the only option for these people is to use voice recognition. So it may extremelly help these people as well.

And finally some really usefull and time saving experimental requests which are not solving issues they are just adding functionality:

Ability to hook into the accessibility subsystem and enable features such as reading current screen, possibly activating icons and other controls displayed on the screen, scrolling the screen up / down / left / right...

ability to manipulate the cursor in the edit controls and do some neat text manipulations such as cursor to the top/ bottom, next / prior line, place cursor before / after a word, delete word, replace word.

I would not consider these as too realistic features however perhaps something might be possible after all and maybe I am not only one imagining something like this.

I am looking forward for any replies.

Greetings

Peter