Ideal Flight Accessibility phase 2

[Orinks]

Nice, I can't wait.

I just hope that in the future we can change these controls and not just have them be spoken.

I know the new flight sim is doing stuff for accessibility, so it would really suck to do all this and then it turns out fully accessible in the new sim. Apparently they're testing with groups of totally blind people, according to a recent article.

[Steve Waite]

Yep. No the work is transferrable to other projects and Ideal Flight is still going oy so some folk expect to use P3D and FSX for some time to come yet.

[Steve Waite]

"I just hope that in the future we can change these controls and not just have them be spoken."

How do you mean change? Do you mean select a key or control button. I suppose in FSX and P3D it's hard to work with the key settings. So do you mean having accessible keyboard and controller buttons setup?

[Steve Waite]

Back on your SID question. In the mission page, select computed approach and Initial departure fix. That way the plane can almost land itself. the waypoints are distributed by your planned speeds in the Aircraft Parameters. So you use the clock to time your crossing of waypoints. The Computed approach puts you on a 90 60 30 approach so you can catch the localiser.

If the route does not include the waypoint they want at VATSIM, copy paste in a waypoint in the Edit section and fill in the ID and Lat Lon. That would probably be a more satisfying way to do it. With the IDF you can take off with the AP on.

[Orinks]

No, what I mean is either with hotkeys, similar to how FSPassengers lets you change certain AP values, or a dialogue, to actually change autopilot values such as heading, altitude, speed, etc, and other value that is possible to change or switches.

We're limited to Tramp, FSX Pilot or Multi Crew Experience just to change that stuff.

FSPassengers way of doing it is pretty nice, but you have to be quick. You can justbe in the sim window, and then hit hand then a value quickly to set it. h260 to quickly set the heading to 260, a12000 to quickly change the AP altitude.

Still, that's what I mean by change.

[Steve Waite]

Well you have the hotkeys and button assignments in the sim control a lot, but you need a way to adjust other things.

A Panel that is accessible with the AP and things will be on there to adjust.

The first thing to do is add it all in, and during that the speaker is being hooked into it. So it will at least be speaking first, controlling later in the development. Then the flight assist will also be included at that time.

It's just the way things have to be progressed.

[Steve Waite]

In the PMDG SIDSTAR data at EGKK I got IGG25 as the IDF named SID on the route table IF briefing. Next WP is LINDY the UL151 airway.

In the briefing I see * IGG25, SID Route: SFD9P, Runway: 08R

Since that is the IDF directly out from the runway. The Computed IDF in the IF dropdown departures is the same thing usually.

In the PMDG FMS I load SFD9P which uses the IDF IGG25

In the PMDG SID I see:
OVERFLY IGG25

next I see:
TRK 119 INTERCEPT RADIAL 164 TO FIX SFD21

And most SID STAR information continues like that. We don't fly direct to the waypoint, it is an instruction for the FMS. Mostly we turn on to the SID waypoint after overflying the IDF unless strictly flying the SID which you can't program into the GPS.

What would be nice and on the todo list is a GPS waypoint set that approximates the shortest SID as does the IF IDF waypoint. And also for the STAR without setting toward a waypoint or loop back stage for hanging around.

[Steve Waite]

So with some aircraft we can upload or Export a file to the FMS, this usually only contains GPS waypoints of the IF route. But for some aircraft more data is included. For example in the FSL A320 the file includes the departure and approach if available. Incidentally the reason why IF's A320 file load super quick compared to other planners is because IF's files only include the bare necessities of data and strips away the print formatting and additional descriptive text that the FMS is unconcerned with.

[Steve Waite]

Not long before uploading. At the moment speech is experimental. In the sim, use the Kneeboard key (SHIFT+F10) to change kneeboard pages. When the kneeboard appears page one speaks out all the other pages. Then page two and so on each speak the page information. Hide the kneeboard to stop it. The waypoints are read out as we pass over them. Most of the important control speak out when operated like the compass roses and AP altitude adjustments and the on off buttons, over sixty items. I'm putting a few more things in yet, but this will just be a first test. There's no additional means to control the aircraft and there's no flight assist functions yet.

[Orinks]

Wow, great stuff. Using Tramp in conjunction with this speech feedback for now is going to be very helpful, I think.

So we can create an FSL A320 file or a PMDG file, but the means by which to load it, usually by going to a plan page and clicking a button, is inaccessible. Pretty much everything about those panels is inaccessible and we can't even do anything with the methods we've learned so far to do things in the sim. Hell, right now we need Tramp just as a means of entering values into the autopilot.

perhaps I might try using tooltips and hope that NVDA will read them as I move the mouse over them with the option on in NVDA, however that's hit or miss.

FS 2020 apparently has people with no eyesight testing stuff for accessibility, so maybe something will happen in regards to an accessible FMS panel. Well, an accessible panel, period, but a lot of these aircraft require FMS data to be entered before the autopilot becomes functional.

HTH.