hello there! my name is Alberto, one of the two founders of the yggdrasil screen reader project. first, we are glad our project made its way to hackernews, thou

hello there! my name is Alberto, one of the two founders of the yggdrasil screen reader project. first, we are glad our project made its way to hackernews, though I admit I didn't expect for it to happen so soon, when we only have some prototypes to show. Since I'm posting this comment here, I will also address some points: First, I'm amazed at the accessibility of this site as well as its responsiveness with screen readers, great job. Somehow, with its tabular structure, this entire site makes me think of a linux terminal, showing the output of some command like ls, a design I never saw before. However, contrary to popular belief, this is indeed a new approach to design in my perspective, but it's actually accessible which we know it's the opposite in most cases. Again, good job! Next, about screen readers, one such program doesn't read the screen as it is, performing ocr on the window and reading the text in that way. Everything is about a compromise between the UI library, native to the OS or third-party, and the screen reader, they usually share a protocol so to speak. Most protocols present all accessible elements rendered by a compatible UI library as a tree of abstract components, which contain information about the actual control, such as name, description, approximate position on screen, status(a checkbox is checked or unchecked), etc. What apple, google, microsoft, soni, etc have is not only a screen reader, it's called an accessibility suite, or this is how we call it anyway. This suite contains things for most kinds of disabilities, for example a way to controll the device via a component based on camera technologies called a switch for the motor impared), screen readers for blind people, visual alerts and text captions for the hearing impared, etc. Of all those tools, the only official screen readers are voiceover on apple platforms, talkback for android, narrator for windows, etc. about the name of yggdrasil, there has been another complaint regarding the fact someone couldn't pronounce it, however it's a strong symbol for everything we stand for, accessibility uniting people across the world, across devices and platforms, allowing the visually impaired person to work as efficiently on any of them as the sighted(most of you) would. Windows has good accessibility, mac is debatable but generally good, linux is the one with tec debt in this department, we're trying to fix that. Maybe the name is indeed hard to pronounce, though my speech synthesizer pronounces it right. We'll think about changing the name though, maybe Sequoia would be easier? about providing alternative input methods like voice controll and so on, yggdrasil will be scriptable through either lua, js, rust, probably a raw C interface would be exposed too, though with some limitations since C is very insecure if not used correctly, we won't want it to crash the screen reader due to some null pointer dereferencing or buffer overflow or whatever else. With that interface, alternative ways of controlling the screen reader could be developed, so yggdrasil could become a platform upon which other useful tools are built.