News on Odilia Screen Reader

Odilia Version 0.1.0 Released

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 22:30:18 -0600

After many months, in fact, just over a year of hard work, we are proud to announce the initial, beta release of Odilia: a new, fast, lightweight screenreader for Linux, written in rust for maximum speed and efficiency. Thanks to all the others who have been instrumental in making Odilia possible: @albertotirla (BGTLover) @mcb2003 (Fake VIP) @luukvanderduim (Luuk Van Der Duim) @samtay (Sam Tay) Federico Mena and Emmanuel Bassi at GNOME for answering my questions.

One More Thing - Final Prototype Released

Sat, 12 Feb 2022 11:47:27 +0000

As we announced recently, we decided that we’d learned enough from the Odilia prototype to actually implement the real thing. The prototype code, while functional, prioritised experimentation over quality, and thus we’ll be throwing almost all of it out completely, but the code is far less important than the experience we gained from writing it.

Enough Prototypes, let's do this for real

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 12:06:49 +0200

As of afew days ago, we decided we played enough with the tools and components of the linux accessibility stack to be able to say that we aren’t so ignorant anymore, we know at least the basics about how it all fits together, how our screenreaders read information from a linux gui app, how the gui toolkit and atspi work together to provide the required context for such tools to operate.

Since I don’t want to bore you with code snippets, git logs, conversations from who knows how much time ago and so on, I will quickly give you a rundown of everything we learned during this long, laborious but nevertheless fun and educational journey

The First Prototype Has been Released!

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 22:45:41 +0000

We know it has been a long time, however we are delighted to inform you that the first Odilia prototype is up on GitHub, with a very early alpha stage build for anyone curious enough to try it out. If you want to try it out, the link is here: https://github.com/yggdrasil-sr/yggdrasil-prototype/releases/ the screen reader can’t do much at the moment, however this is what it can do so far like any normal screen reader, it can read most components exposed by the Linux accessibility interface, such as buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.

Minimal speech-dispatcher Bindings Created

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 15:24:01 +0000

As of afew days ago, a minimal binding to speech-dispatcher (the TTS system for Linux) was created, which wraps the C functions provided by Nolan’s speech-dispatcher-sys crate in a safe Rust API.