Ideal Flight Accessibility phase 2

[Steve Waite]

For confidence have a think about how things are working. When we turn on the voice in IF we are asking the simulator to send another 200 or so bytes of information. The actual amount of information is next to nothing, less than the data in a network packet header.

Even so there's a batch of readings IF only asks for when the Voice is active. Since this is a prior unused request, It is a possibility that one is unstable in P3D. Or it is made unstable by the addition of an addon that I have not tested. If that's the case I cut it out until fixed by LM.

On my rig and with my testing it all looks very sound within P3D itself. Problems usually emanate from the addition of something added to the sim like a plane or an airport. Poor overclocking, missing textures, bad simconnect demands, misspelled paths, unclosed P3D remnants etc.

Remember from past experience that IF doesn't actually do anything other than press buttons of your simulator. It is always best to start problem solving from the other perspective, but remember that IF is requesting some new bits of information, not much since most was already available in IF.

[Steve Waite]

In testing I've been building flight with IF by setting the weather to guarantee an ILS runway selection. The flight is built so that the navs are set already for the arrival. Then I start the flight and do Go to Approach. Once there I set APP on and basically she lands herself. Ease back on the throttle, extend gear and flaps. I hear the HSI callouts and the altitudes.

Now with Altitude you hear the feet Altimeter values until close to the ground level, where you will now hear only feet. On ground you get the on ground message. When stopped you get stopped message, and brakes on and off.

With closeness to the ground and closeness to stopped you hear more callouts. Less callouts as you climb and accelerate.

The on ground speeds are ground speeds. The in air speeds are indicated speeds. You can hear the speeds in the kneeboard speech. pause the sim and do SHIFT+F10 to cycle the kneeboard messages. These do not correspond to the pages. The VS speeds are irrespective of ground coming at you.

[Orinks]

Thanks for the info Steve.

I'd like to suggest that we have the ability to change the speech settings during flight. I'm not sure we can get to that during flight. In any case, I think that vertical speed should be the first thing that's toned down a bit. Because the vertical speed is being read so much, the waypoints and altitude callouts took a backseat.

I'll fiddle around and try turning off things like speed to see if maybe that reduces the info and gives me more of the altitude callouts and waypoints.

Ah, you just put up a new post as I was typing this, and I just read it. Perhaps there should be the settings currently for things that should be read as they change. With those turned off, can we have a keyboard structure to read the information manually at any time?

Great work so far.

[Steve Waite]

At the moment we can pop up the voice settings page in IF and the sim can either continue or pause - that's a setting in the sim. But we have to select IF to do it. There we can uncheck VS Altitude and Speed callouts and enable Radio calls and the voice log, near the top of the menu. The settings page also has access but you need to choose it in the IF menu when the sim is running as we can't change pages in IF during the flight.

The only keyboard command currently is to choose the kneeboard page SHIFT+F10. I pause the sim for that information to read out without interruption. That does not change how the sim keys behave.

We can now muddle through with the possibilities of what can be achieved. I'm going to look into adding hot keys but that's not straightforward, and in terms of reliability can fail.

If we enable the Voice log then we can pop up the log in IF during the flight to review the calls.

[Steve Waite]

Some notes I am making:

The sim rate description comes out wrong.

I am changing the Voice Setting page so that it does not read out the setup when the sim is in operation.

[Orinks]

Hi Steve,

Just a few things. I've managed to raise the speech rate a bit so that it'll read fast enough to try to read everything. I feel like right now I want less VS callouts and more of the flight level callouts, which get interrupted by VS callouts. I guess that's due to Tramp's autoflight changing them more often than they should be changed.

There are two speed checkboxes on the voice settings page. Do they both do the same thing and was an oversight on your part?

Also, can we have the flap positions spoken out in degrees rather than just flaps up and flaps down?

Thanks.

[Steve Waite]

Yes, I already read all flaps in degrees eventually getting around to reporting that, the voice is responding to the switch.

Thanks - The two speeds, second speed should say Vertical Speed, due a typo in the program selects the wrong description for the screen reader but displays the correct description in the form so I didn't spot it.

There's any number of items like that so if in doubt about a description the reader says, always report that.

Also I am doing a simplified VSpeed ascending / descending callout, will be selectable in the next preview. Maybe VSpeed can be set more behind in priority as well I'll look at that. VSpeed is lively in winds and turbulence as well. Also I notiice the airspeed swings if there are gusting winds.

In respect to reading out the calls we can do practically anything. So in the short term let's try and nail this part before moving on too far with assist functions.

[jfayre]

I think some of the extra verbosity is coming from how FS Tramp controls the autopilot. When I was experimenting with adding callouts for autopilot instrumentation in my Flight Following add-on, I noticed that Tramp will send several heading changes in a row while turning. These are often in increments of only a few degrees at a time. I'm wondering if it also might be doing this for vertical speeds.

[Steve Waite]

For reference, IF calls out at intervals:

VSpeed is called at 100fpm intervals below 1500ft and 500fpm intervals above.

Airspeed is called at 10Knot intervals below 100knots, 25Knot intervals below 250knots and 50Knot intervals above. Groundspeed is called on the ground.

Altitude is called at 5feet intervals below 50feet, 10 below 200, 50 below 500, 100 below 2000, 500 below 10,000 and 1000feet intervals above 10,000. Altitude is from ground below 1000feet, and Altimeter reading from above. Remember to press B for Kohlsman setting.

HSI CDI and GSI calls deflection 5% intervals below 10% and 10% intervals above.

[Orinks]

What is HSI GSI etc?

also, there appears to be a bug with VS callouts. When I uncheck the second speed box on the voice settings page, they continue to be called, unless I'm misunderstanding what it's supposed to do with it unchecked. I tried turning VS off just to get altitude reporting and speed changes.