Hey,So I had some of the same issues with progress bar beeps that I did with NVDA. As an experiment, I whipped up this patch.
Basically, according to my non-coffee-fueled back-of-napkin calculations, the current implementation starts progress bar beeps at a few hundred Hz and scales them up to something like 2100. I don't objectively know what 2.1 KHz sounds like, but I do have some objective notion of what an octave sounds like, and just as a sighted person doesn't have to think about how far along a progress bar is, I think we should have the same convenience.
This patch starts progress bar beeps at middle C and ramps the progression up an octave linearly. I initially had a logarithmic implementation but found it more confusing than I thought. Perceptually the progress bar appeared to move quickly then slow down, which is consistent with the numbers. I haven't tested this out with faster progress bars yet so there may be some benefit to logarithmic, but one thing at a time.
We may also be able to drop the volume-scaling code if we're not ramping the frequencies up above 1 KHz, but I haven't tested that yet.
Thoughts?
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