Visually Impaired And Using The Acorn Control System

[Randy Farber]

I am visually impaired and using a mouse is almost impossible. Instead, I use a software program – JAWS by Freedom Scientific – that reads the screen to me. I am considering purchasing an AVID CNC which uses the Centroid Acorn as its controller. I would like your feedback on the following questions:

1. How much of the Acorn functionality requires a mouse instead of keystrokes?
2. Can the Centroid pendant or the Centroid USB BOB be used to create keystrokes instead of clicking with a mouse.
3. Is there anyway to get the cursor into the input fields on the screen without using a mouse, e.g. tabbing?
4. Is anyone visually impaired and using the Acorn control system. If so, what do you use to make the system useable without a mouse?
5. If anyone has any thoughts and would like to discuss off-line, I would like to with you.

[suntravel]

With a touch monitor you must not use a mouse.

Uwe

[cncsnw]

On the CNC12 side (blue background, left side of the screen) nearly everything is done with the keyboard.

On the Virtual Control Panel (VCP) (buttons on gray background, right side of screen) there are no keyboard equivalents, but a touch screen works well.

If you have minimal vision, and you do not need every last function that is on the default VCP, then you can customize the VCP to make the buttons that you do need twice as large.

[WesM]

On the CNC12 side (blue background, left side of the screen) nearly everything is done with the keyboard.

On the Virtual Control Panel (VCP) (buttons on gray background, right side of screen) there are no keyboard equivalents, but a touch screen works well.

If you have minimal vision, and you do not need every last function that is on the default VCP, then you can customize the VCP to make the buttons that you do need twice as large.

Most VCP buttons are tied to keyboard shortcuts. A macro keyboard would accommodate setting up custom keys for various functions.

I programed an adafruit feather RP2040 so that I could tie each VCP button I use to a physical button. its a script that runs on the board, so there are no startup sequences. I also have it working so that I can run an MPG with axis selector switch. The GPIO on the board can be programed to output any key combination. I could see doing something similar for any specific key combinations required to run the control in a visual impaired state.

[Randy Farber]

I looked up the adafruit feather RP2040 and it looks like I can purchase one for under $50. Does it take any additional equipment to program it, or is the programming all done from the Adafruit keyboard?

[centroid467]

Only equipment required to program a typical RP2040 device is a USB Type-C cable to connect to it, a finger to press the BOOTSEL button, and a PC to develop and compile the firmware. The RP2040 can use something called "UF2 programming" where it presents to the host PC as a flash drive. You transfer the UF2 file to that drive and it starts executing the code.

I'm most familiar with using C with or without the Arduino IDE but the process for programming this Feather RP2040 is going to be:
1. Write the code
2. Compile the code
3. Hold the BOOTSEL button and plug the Feather into the PC using the USB Type-C cable
4. Open the file browser and copy the compiled UF2 file to the RP2040 drive