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by ndarilek 3526 days ago
I feel like you and I have had a vaguely related conversation before, but do any of the remote desktop access protocols support piping sound in addition to graphics? That might be a quick-and-dirty way to prototype something. I've been looking for a reason to play with Elixir/Phoenix, and if there's interest in this then I may try some sort of one-click Orca VM that pipes everything back to the browser. Interesting idea.

Also, I feel like there was an early version/prototype of NVDA Remote that ran in the browser. I remember going to a page, turning on forms mode or whatever NVDA calls it (I've been out of the NVDA loop for a while) and I could send keys/get audio from the remote machine. I think that was before the addon was available so I'm pretty sure it was web native, but I could be misremembering. I don't think there's anything preventing transmission of the Insert key, at least. Capslock or other esoteric modifiers may be trickier.
3 comments
bramd 3525 days ago
Hmm, I don't remember any such prototype/demo. However, the NVDA remote protocol is pretty simple, JSON messages over a TCP socket. Putting those messages on a websocket should be fairly straightforward. With the web speech API landing in Firefox as well as Chrome[0] you could even synthesize the speech at the client. There would still be the problem of sending special key sequences. Not just ins/capslock, but also shortcuts that are normally capturen by the browser/OS might get tricky.

Feel free to contact me if you want to develop an NVDA remote server in Elixir. I need a real project in Elixir to do more work in the language. I did some small Elixir projects and like it a lot.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_...

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camlorn38 3525 days ago
I'm pretty sure the NVDA Remote that runs in the browser still exists. You have to have the add-on on the target machine, however.
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mwcampbell 3526 days ago
RDP can carry audio.
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camlorn38 3525 days ago
It can, but not with a suitable latency for actual use. What you have to do is send the speech and ersynthesize on the far end. There's an NVDA issue for supporting RDP channels [0], but NVDA Remote made this very low priority and it's potentially blocking on another one to refactor how NVDA handles speech.

0: https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/3564

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