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Acessibility for blind users

#1

Hi, I am posting this for a blind friend who has difficulties accessing Cabbage and the forum.

I Tested the Cabbage with NVDA (2021.3.1) and JAWS (commercial
screenreader, not available for free for testing/evaluation, version
2020.2012.13) the interface of the Cabbage software, enabling one to
create instruments and effects using Cabbage’s own syntax and Csound
programming language. The probvlem can be tested with NVDA
(https://www.nvaccess.org/) because it is free and open source
software, and also has a log function. The problem is that when I
press Alt key, the screen readers (both JAWS and NVDA) do not
recognise that the focus goes to the menu bar. They see the File menu
text but do not recognise it as a menu item on the main menu bar, but
when I press the Up or Down Arrow to go to the menu, both the screen
readers don’t report anything. The same happens when I try to press
the Left or the Right Arrow to try to move from one menu to anotyher
(i.e. nothing reported like “Edit” or “View”). I am a blind musician
wishing to develop plugins with the Cabbage IDE/Framework since they
are using partially the Csound programming language and the textual
creation of the Cabbage effects and instruments (i.e. plugins) is
currently the only way which the blind and visually impaired people
can use with a screen reader to realise their development dreams come
true in practice.
Kind regards,
Juho Tuomainen from Finland

#2

Hi Juho, and @Oeyvind. The version of JUCE I use for Cabbage includes an accessibility module. I’ll take a look and see if I can see what’s causing the problem.

#3

I took a look at this and it seems that the Windows ALT+F shortcut doesn’t work on JUCE applications. It seems one has to manually select the File menu before any of the left/right/up/down arrows work. Of course for anyone with difficult seeing this is not possible. I’ll see if I can somehow trigger the file menu to appear using some other shortcut, but I fear it might not be possible. I’ll let you know.

#4

I have a rudimentary solution for this, but it’s not ideal. If one presses a combination of Ctrl+Alt+f, it will pop open the file menu. From there one can use the arrow buttons to access the various file menu commands. The problem is that you can’t move to the next menu with the left/right keys. Instead, to show the edit menu you can press Ctrl+Alt+e. I’m still waiting to hear back from the JUCE devs, but it seems there is no simpler, or more elegant way to do this. @Oeyvind would you mind asking your friend if they think this solution will be Ok for them?

#5

Wonderful. Thank you so much!
I have passed on the information to him.

Is this soution in the latest beta? at
https://dev.azure.com/rorywalsh/bcec3bb5-38dd-46ef-bf56-bf769f4c7253/_apis/build/builds/2537/artifacts?artifactName=Installers&api-version=7.0&%24format=zip

I sent him that link too, as it can probably be hard for him to find the beta download.

#6

Sorry, not there yet, I was looking for the ok first. I’ll let you know when it’s ready to go :blush:

#7

All good :wink:

#8

I’ll be back in the office tomorrow, I’ll try to roll out these changes then.

#9

I’ve just pushed through this change now. Here are the following shortcuts:

Ctrl+Shift+F = File menu
Ctrl+Shift+E = Edit menu
Ctrl+Shift+T = Tools menu
Ctrl+Shift+V = View menu
Ctrl+Shift+H = Help menu

It’s a little annoying that when you call up any of these menus you can’t use left/right to move through neighbouring menus. And the screen just reports Cabbage window rather than the menu name. But it’s a start. The new build will be availbe in Azure in the next hour or so. Btw, I’m assuming the user is on a Windows machine? The changes I’ve pushed through are for Windows only…