How to build a forum with a Readspeaker ?

PeterKurvers

Hello.

We need a forum with good accessibility for people with all kind of disabilities.
Users must be able to customize the forum.
Users must be able to choose email notification or not.
There must be a ReadSpeaker which can read per message, and can also read only the most recent message.
The language of the forum must be Dutch.

Who can give some advise ?

Greetings, Peter

clarkwinkelmann

Hi. Welcome to Flarum!

PeterKurvers We need a forum with good accessibility for people with all kind of disabilities.

We have not received a lot of feedback in that regard so it's hard to say whether the software meets your requirements in its current form. However if you notice any accessibility issue we will be happy to investigate and try to improve.

PeterKurvers Users must be able to customize the forum.

Could you give more details on what you'd like ?

PeterKurvers Users must be able to choose email notification or not.

You can choose whether you want web and/or email for each kind of notification.

PeterKurvers There must be a ReadSpeaker which can read per message, and can also read only the most recent message.

You can most likely get this developed as an extension.

PeterKurvers The language of the forum must be Dutch.

Flarum ships with English out of the box but we have third-party Dutch language packs available. We also have quite a few Dutch users here. Translating additional untranslated text is also easily done via a custom language pack or the web-based Linguist extension.

Flarum is known for its extensibility. If the features you need aren't part of Flarum out of the box or have not been made available yet, you can most likely get them developed for you by a freelance developer (or your own team).

EDIT: oops, I took too long to answer 😇 I didn't see the other replies before posting.

Ralkage

Greetings Peter and Welcome to Flarum Discuss!

When you say customize, what does that entail?
Users can manage/control which types of notifications they wish to receive in their user settings located here for example.
There is no extension that exists yet in our extension ecosystem that incorporates ReadSpeaker sadly 🙁 but that doesn't stop you from reaching out to an extension developer here (some users are also on the Flarum Discuss Discord server) and contract them to work on a ReadSpeaker extension for your community 🙂
You can find an already available Dutch Language Pack here, just follow the instructions on how to install the extension and what extensions the pack currently supports for Dutch translation.

Please feel free to ask any questions on here or in our Discord Community!

Roderik

I would like to add that the ReadSpeaker should actually be able to jump from message to message. We're not developers, by the way. We're just looking for the best solution to what we would like to do with our forum, which is most likely going to replace the old one.

Ralkage There is no extension that exists yet in our extension ecosystem that incorporates ReadSpeaker sadly 🙁 but that doesn't stop you from reaching out to an extension developer here (some users are also on the Flarum Discuss Discord server) and contract them to work on a ReadSpeaker extension for your community

clarkwinkelmann We have not received a lot of feedback in that regard so it's hard to say whether the software meets your requirements in its current form. However if you notice any accessibility issue we will be happy to investigate and try to improve.

clarkwinkelmann Flarum is known for its extensibility. If the features you need aren't part of Flarum out of the box or have not been made available yet, you can most likely get them developed for you by a freelance developer (or your own team).

OK. A developer who could do that would be very much welcome. Meanwhile, we could perhaps teach ourselves a thing or two. I'm also on Discord, so we will be asking around. Extensibility is exactly what we are looking for.

By the way, Peter and I are in this together. 🙂

Roderik

Ralkage & clarkwinkelmann

Thanks for welcoming us.

clarkwinkelmann
Some of my answers are in the post above yours. Yes, I added them while you made your response. 🙂 No problem.

Roderik

Is there any chance this thread can also get tagged with "Services"?

Roderik

I found out that it is actually a company. I didn't know ReadSpeaker was a company, but it seems they are offering what we are looking for. Now, it is just a matter of how we can implement it.

Kylo

Roderik Did you try to contact with them? Since they run the business, I think they can offer you some other platforms to comply with your needs. I'm not saying that Flarum is not capable of improving accesibility (on the contrary, almost everyting is possible with their extension API), but the beginning is always the hardest and definitely will take some time.

PeterKurvers

Thanks for the quick answers.
Those notifications are very extensive. 😄

Some examples for the accesebility :

Keyboard navigation
Font size
different font
underline links
Highlight links
Highlight titles.
black and white
invert color.
big or small mouse cursor
Sepia
Inspector stand.

Some of our users need help using the forum.
Can a moderator adjust their settings ?
For example "Automatically follow discussions that I reply to."

Gretings, Peter

tankerkiller125

PeterKurvers Font size

Can be adjusted with some basic CSS/LESS

PeterKurvers different font

Again CSS/LESS

PeterKurvers underline links
Highlight links

This I think could be done via css? Not sure though

PeterKurvers black and white

The forum is already pretty black and white, however wherever you see the orange here on discuss that is customizable by the admin in the appearance settings.

PeterKurvers invert color.

This might be possible with an extension, however I would personally recommend that this be done via browser extensions.

PeterKurvers big or small mouse cursor

This is something that from my understanding is controlled by the operating system, I don't know/think this can be customized by CSS

PeterKurvers Sepia

Probably CSS/LESS?

PeterKurvers Inspector stand.

Not exactly sure what this is?

PeterKurvers Some of our users need help using the forum.
Can a moderator adjust their settings ?
For example "Automatically follow discussions that I reply to."

This is not built into the forum but I'm sure it could be done with a custom extension.

PeterKurvers

tankerkiller125 Not exactly sure what this is?

That is that the mouse cursor has a magnifying glass.

And I find the quote function very user-friendly 😀

tankerkiller125

PeterKurvers That feature would be an operating system thing, not a forum thing. Honestly you would want inversion and magnifying to be OS wide I'm guessing.

Kylo

I'm starting to realize that you don't need to touch Flarum actually. Because everything you asking for can be done through OS settings or Browser extensions and if you really need to deal with 'all kind of disabilities', this should be the correct route to follow. Just let them use their own setups that they're comfortable with.

PeterKurvers

Kylo I'm starting to realize that you don't need to touch Flarum actually.

Our current platform for internal communications has all these options for visually impaired people.
But it has no quote function, does not sort the threads by date of the latest post.
It has no e-mail notification, and no advatar.
And the read speaker can only start at the top of the page.

So if people who need it, can make changes to their brouwser, we can build a good forum with Flarum. 😀

clarkwinkelmann

Step-by-step implementation instructions. No downloads necessary. Just a few lines of code added to your website and ReadSpeaker webReader is ready.
https://www.readspeaker.com/solutions/text-to-speech-online/readspeaker-webreader/

Sadly it doesn't seem their documentation is available online without contacting them.

What I'd suggest would be to contact them, get access to the instructions, try if they work on Flarum (I would be surprised, but maybe some of the features will work out of the box).

Then if work is needed you could look for a Flarum developer and share the implementation instructions with them. It might be worth asking ReadSpeaker what recommendations they have for Single Page Apps (SPA). Most likely their solution works out of the box on server-side-rendered websites, but most likely not in SPA.

Kylo

PeterKurvers I'm not sure if I get it right but, here's how I'm using Discuss without any modification made in core files or without any extensions (I'm just an user here):

Click here to reveal

and I'm sure further changes can be made through browser add-ons. If they're visually impaired then you should teach them to set their preferences "globally" - not just for your forum.

Only thing you need is a solid TTS implemention.

PeterKurvers

Thanks for the answers. 😄

How do we get about the same color scheme as on this site?
https://www.oogvereniging.nl/english/

I think that should be possible, because the 1st welcome message that was automatically placed when starting
a test forum looks great. 😃

Greetings, Peter

clarkwinkelmann

PeterKurvers unless that other website is based on Flarum (it doesn't look like it), you will have to write the theme yourself.

You can change the "main" color of Flarum, which influences the header and primary buttons under the Appearance tab.

For anything more advance, you'll need to create a theme via custom CSS or via an extension.