Project to make deluged accessible to totally blind users, please help.

soundwarrior20

Hi, I'm Trey. I'm a totally blind electronic musician based in the UK. I first had a deluge when it came out, but had to sell it because certain parts of it weren't accessible to me as a totally blind electronic musician.
I know that for awhile now, the deluge firmware has been open source.
I believe that the deluge could be a great musical instrument for many totally blind people to use.
I would like to collaborate with a developer/developers to make the deluge accessible to totally blind users. By creating especially modified open source firmware version.
Typically, totally blind people interact with computers via a series of keyboard shortcuts and text to speech. This is one of the paradigms I think that could be used to make the deluge accessible. I don't think we need to go reinventing the wheel in terms of paradigms and I'm going to outline the three main paradigms that I think could be used to make the deluge accessible along with what I would consider to be the best one below.
Firstly, we could configure the deluge to output information about what it's doing via the USB or midi ports, we write to computer program to relay that information to the blind user via text to speech. This computer program could either run on a desktop/laptop or raspberry pie. The massive disadvantage of this however is that the deluge needs to be connected to an external device hence it makes it less portable and portability is its main selling point :
Secondly, we could write the deluge firmware in a way where it narrates what's happening in terms of deluge shortcuts and knob movements in text to speech that is on board the device.
The big disadvantage with this second way of working however is that the text to speech may get in the way of the main audio outputs for live use we wouldn't want any audience hearing text to speech during a live set for example. Another disadvantage of the second way is that it may stretch the resources of the deluge processor and it may severely limit the deluge’s functionality.
The third way is to expand the deluge’s range of shortcuts even further to control functions where one may normally have to rely on vision to ascertain what's going on. This is the approach that I favour because it means less work for developers possibly and does not deviate too much from a pre-existing paradigm.

I would love to collaborate with you all to make an accessible deluge a reality for blind users and I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this post. Please comment here or message me privately :-) thank you for taking the time to read this post respect and blessings tray.

elauso

Regarding your first idea: I wonder how much work it would be to output the complete internal state of the Deluge via USB. Either by (ab)using MIDI or actually using a data transfer protocol to a host computer.

The easier part would then be writing software that takes two states, compares them to find out the change (e.g. "increased lowpass filter freq by 5") and announces this via TTS.