output backend for mac

[Timtam]

there currently is no output backend available under Mac. I know that there are ways to communicate via VoiceOver, but I don't have any experience with mac yet myself. I'd like this to go into 1.0 as well, but right now I don't have the time and devices to work on this myself, so i'll leave this open to later be moved into 1.0 as well if someone offers assistance with this.

[trypsynth]

@Timtam, I believe this was closed in #11

[Timtam]

not entirely no, the backend is there, but i'd like it to be the default backend under Mac without having to import it yourself. Will have to add this to the App at some point, but I think there was something I wanted to do first that was preventing me from just going the extra mile to do so.

[trypsynth]

I don't actually see why Tolk is the default on Windows. Accessible_output has been widely tested, and supports more screen readers (e.g. PCTalker and Zhengdu).

[Timtam]

accessible output2 isn't the default for various reasons, one being the fact that the developer isn't concerned about keeping it up-to-date on PYPI anymore and we cannot properly include it within any setup script portably when trying to grab it from GitHub. Plus it got some bugs like a total crash on Windows if the user remaps their temporary files location. Tolk is much more stable than ao2. Most of the other screen readers supported by ao2 under Windows are more on the experimental side anyway, like ZDSR and the older ones like Window Eyes which aren't even actively maintained anymore.

[trypsynth]

There was a merged Pr to fix that crash, accessibleapps/accessible_output2#5. In addition, Accessible_output2 supports PCTalker and other screen readers used by users in other languages.

[Timtam]

Thats not the bug I meant. Plus it still stands that new versions don't seem to get pushed to PyPI. If that was the case we could definitely argue about that, but unfortunately not all installation methods of python packages support installation from Git URLs directly, so AO2 needs to stay an optional dependency for now, and I won't make an optional dependency the default under any operating system. I'll make sure to watch ao2 closely and hope that the author will support it more actively so that we can switch to that at some point.