Accessibility Improvement Idea: Local audio streams

[IdrisTheDragon]

To help those hard of hearing (and anyone else who is finding the speaker difficult to hear) be able to hear the speaker(s) in the room. Prehaps the video boxes in every room could additionally broadcast a local audio stream.

This could be achieved with the new bluetooth feature called Auracast. A more modern version of hearing loop technology, requiring no special hardware.

The video boxes use a raxda x4, which already have bluetooth/wifi hardware available. Assuming the bluetooth hardware is currently unused and the raxda has some spare compute, no additional hardware would be necessary.

The bumble python bluetooth library supports auracast and doesn't look like it would be too hard to configure. The biggest job is likely putting relevant information in the individual rooms and on the website.

Yes, people can already tune into the video livestream to hear the audio, but this is not very reliable in the busier rooms, where everyone is trying to use the wifi/mobile data. A local audio only stream could help reduce load on the WiFi.

(Idea inspired by: https://youtu.be/WmSM_yCyV3U)

[krokodilerian]

This sounds interesting. It depends on a few things:

• we need to fix the audio board in the boxes (which we're working on)
• we need to check if the antennaes are actually working, because they're usualy taped to the (metal) bottom of the box)
• and otherwise this should be pretty simple, a script to enable BT, something to push the data (the auracast library) and an ouput from the capturing ffmpeg of the raw audio to be piped to the bt transmitter.

Not sure what latency would be acceptable, but if people are ok with the video stream (which would be at least 5 seconds of delay), it should be fine.

How large is the support in end-user devices, how new is this standard?

[IdrisTheDragon]

It's fairly new (late 2022), but usage is starting to pickup from my limited research.

New Android devices are starting to support it, linux already supports it. Newer hearing aids come with it? A range of headphones are starting to support it, Including cheaper devices like earfun. Main omission is likely iphones.

List of supported devices: https://www.bluetooth.com/auracast/find-a-product/