The musings and ramblings of Jamie Teh.
I just set up a new Native Instruments Kontrol S61 MK3 keyboard. After installing the Hardware Connection Service as outlined in the set up instructions, the next thing you’ll need to do is update the firmware on the device. Unfortunately, I ran into significant problems here. The firmware updater could not detect my keyboard, displaying the message: Please connect your KONTROL S MK3 and click…
WhatsApp If you use WhatsApp on Windows, you are likely aware by now that WhatsApp have discontinued the UWP app and replaced it with an app that effectively just wraps the WhatsApp web app. Unfortunately, while the accessibility of the UWP app was quite decent, the web app has some major accessibility problems which have not yet been resolved. Fortunately, one of the nice things about the web is…
Before settling on the project to implement a full accessibility cache in Firefox, I investigated several other alternatives. In my last post, I discussed asynchronous accessibility APIs. Another alternative I considered is switching to UI Automation and having the UIA tree accessed directly in web content processes, rather than communicating via the main UI process. While this is not possible…
Accessibility API queries are generally synchronous: each query blocks both the client and the server until the query completes and returns its result. This causes significant challenges for modern, multi-process web browsers, requiring them to cache the accessibility trees from all other processes in the main UI process. This raises the question: why not make accessibility APIs asynchronous? As…
UI Automation (UIA) is Microsoft’s recommended accessibility framework for Windows, replacing the earlier Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) framework. Despite this, to access web content, screen readers such as NVDA and JAWS continue to use IAccessible2, an open source API based on MSAA. This is not just because of the significant effort involved in switching to a different API, although that…
Sometimes, it is necessary to move a row up or down in a Google Sheet. For example, I might be maintaining a list of tasks ordered from highest to lowest priority and realise that a task later in the sheet is actually higher priority than earlier tasks. This Google support article says you can do this by selecting the row and then choosing Move row up (or down) from the Edit menu. However, when I…
Everyone loves paying bills, right? One of the best parts about paying bills is surely that they usually provide all the amounts, billing codes, reference numbers, etc. with punctuation and spaces; e.g. amount $1,234, reference code 123 456-789. But banking and payment portals - sometimes even the payment portal for the organisation issuing the bill! - won’t accept spaces and punctuation! This…
The Firefox accessibility engine is responsible for providing assistive technologies like screen readers with the information they need to access web page content. For the past couple of years, the Firefox accessibility team have been working on a major re-architecture of the accessibility engine to significantly improve its speed, reliability and maintainability. We call this project “Cache the…
I recently got a new laptop: Dell XPS15 9510. While this is a pretty nice machine overall, its audio drivers are an abomination. Among other things, the Waves MaxxAudio software it ships with eventually leaks all of your system memory if you use audio constantly for hours, which is the case for screen reader users. I eventually got fed up and disabled the Waves crap, but this makes it impossible…
I’m finally learning to cook some decent food, so I need to be able to read recipes. For a while, I was reading them out of Simplenote on my iPhone. However, I encountered several frustrations with this approach (and this applies to any notes or text app really): When you’re not editing, Simplenote shows the note such that each line is an item for VoiceOver; i.e. you flick right to read the next…