On Sat, 14 Jan 2023 21:39:06 -0600 "K0LNY_Glenn" glenn@ervin.email wrote:
Hi, A friend of mine just got a new Baofeng UV82, he is about to take his Ham Tech test. I sent him a Chirp install file, but I don't know if he will be able to access it with his screenreader in windows 11.
If you're feeling adventurous, I've been doing some hacking of `chirpc`. You can find my hacked up `chirpc` here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sjlongland/chirp/feature/chirpc-csv-import...
Assuming you have `chirp-next` somewhere you might be able to download the above file into the same directory along side `chirpwx.py`, then open up a command prompt in that directory and run (substitute COM1: with your radio's serial port):
python3 chirpc --radio Baofeng_UV-82 --serial COM1: --mmap radio.img --download-mmap python3 chirpc --mmap radio.img --export-csv radio.csv
Then you can open up `radio.csv` in a spreadsheet tool (I use `gnumeric` in my testing since it's lightweight and does the job) -- that should at least let you "see" what's in the radio, assuming the spreadsheet tool is itself accessible to screen readers.
Loading setting back in is still a work-in-progress. I actually have to re-factor that so I'm not re-inventing wheels on import, but the way it *should* work is this:
python3 chirpc --mmap radio.img --import-csv radio.csv python3 chirpc --radio Baofeng_UV-82 --serial COM1: --mmap radio.img --upload-mmap
I'll point out the above is 100% untested -- especially on Windows. I've been using the GUI to upload/download, but then using `chirpc` to actually do the updates due to bugs in my particular install.
I can understand the CLI is not for everybody either -- I'm only proposing this as it might work-around some of the compatibility issues and at least offer some minimal functionality.
A big downside with this approach is you miss out on integration with things like RepeaterBook, etc. Not a problem in my situation since none of those services seem to cover VK repeaters, but it'd be a big nuisance for US-based operators that use such services.
I did look into the situation of accessibility, and it seems it's a mess: wxWidgets (which Chirp-next uses) doesn't seem to have any working concept of accessibility, and while a module for Tkinter (Python's built-in GUI library) exists, that enables it on Linux/Unix not Windows. I'm not sure how well PyQt5 fares -- historically Qt has been problematic in the past.
The other options seem to be some modern GTK+ Python wrapper, or something "terminal"-based (`urwid` perhaps).