Re: [Flightgear-devel] That blaring voice...

[James T. <ja...@fl...>]

> On 30 Sep 2024, at 18:20, Josh Davidson <jos...@ou...> wrote:
> 
> If flightgear implements some sort of run once that asks that, no objections.
> 
> But this default blaring voice should be off by default
> 
> It's essentially a very very poor screen reader and I challenge to find a single other piece if software that puts such a thing on by default.

We can certainly make such a question part of the first-run sequence the launcher does, and yes in principle the current launcher UI is accessibility enabled because it’s built on Qt. Of course our main in-sim UI is completely invisible to a screen-reader of any kind.

> 
> However my objection is mostly with the read commands for ATC and ATIS. Because they don't stop. They keep blaring.
> 

This seems odd to me: the system only plays the messages you would hear with the corresponding frequency tuned .. and in the case of AWOS / ATIS, it’s of comparable quality. If you were seated in the aeroplane, you wouldn’t ’turn off’ ATIS or similar, you’d either adjust the volume, or change frequency … so why is what FG currently does, different? We certainly don’t want to default our COM radios to volume=0, and we do want to make COM stations play the best approximation of ‘real’ audio we can, so I don’t see how we could do better?

If you want to not hear the text-to-speech at *all*, ‘just’ set the ATC volume to zero, surely? And then you’re relying on reading the on-screen text, of course. Given that setting is in a dialog labelled ’sound’, I would say it’s not exactly hidden, and not an unreasonable default?

Kind regards,
James