0007750: Make Ardour Accessible for Screen Reader users - MantisBT

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0007750	ardour	features	public	2019-04-09 07:44	2019-04-09 07:44

Reporter	winman3000	Assigned To
Priority	normal	Severity	minor	Reproducibility	N/A
Status	new	Resolution	open
Platform	Windows 10	OS	Windows	OS Version	10
Product Version	5.12

Summary	0007750: Make Ardour Accessible for Screen Reader users
Description	To enable blind and visually impaired people to use the Windows operating system, a screen reader is used. There are many blind people working on music or audio. Unfortunately, there are not any programs in the professional field that can be used by blind people. Most DAWs, which are reasonably accessible, have to be adapted with great effort using a scripting language or an additional plugin. Such adapttation may be very expensive. Regrettably, I found out that Ardour is not accessible for screen reader users. This has several reasons. One of them are that the program interface of Ardour is based on GTK, which is not accessible on Windows. In order to guarantee accessibility, the program interface must first be ported to another accessible program library such as WX Widgets or QT (latest Version). With WX Widgets or QT, it is possible to develop accessible software using it's accessibility possibilities. In addition, controls such as e.g. Buttons, sliders, Dropdown Lists, etc. should be made accessible using various interfaces such as MSAA and UIA. If possible, the standard classes of Windows should be used. However, there is also the possibility to tell the screen reader by different roles, what kind of control it is. I am well aware that this can not be realized for version 6.0. However, this should be tackled for the next major version, wich will be 7.0. If you have any further questions about accessibility, feel free to contact me. I help where I can.
Steps To Reproduce	N/A
Additional Information	If you want to test the accessibility of Ardour, you can use the free and open source screen reader NVDA.
Tags	Accessibility, GUI

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2019-04-09 07:44	winman3000	New Issue
2019-04-09 07:44	winman3000	Tag Attached: Accessibility
2019-04-09 07:44	winman3000	Tag Attached: GUI