Update to BBC iPlayer TV 7.3.5

Details of the 10 Jan 2015 7.3.5 update to BBC iPlayer TV

The BBC iPlayer TV application broke in December: programmes would no longer start playing. I’ve now fixed this. The problem is that a Microsoft security update for Internet Explorer 11 stops my program talking to the web page to start the programme. People with Internet Explorer 10 were unaffected. People with Internet Explorer 11 would have to start programmes themselves. This is now fixed, and programmes should always start themselves correctly.

However, the security update prevents the skip and pause functions working: if you have Internet Explorer 11, you’ll find that these controls all disable after the programme loads and starts, and do not work with key presses. Sorry about that!

Technical notes on the problem.

WebbIE 4.5.0 now available

I’ve updated WebbIE 4 today, with some minor changes and bugfixes.

WebbIE 4 has supported the new HTML5 AUDIO and VIDEO elements for a couple of years, playing then in the page where they are found with a dedicated player control to make it easier for screenreader users – just play and stop, but that’s usually just what you need. I’ve now added ability to download and/or open the content of these VIDEO and AUDIO HTML5 elements directly in your default media player: the user just has to hit the Open button in the media player, and it will be opened in whatever is the default media handler is for your system. Note that this doesn’t work for embedded data URI elements! There are also new shortcut keys for the media player: Ctrl+P to play, Ctrl+O to open, and Space to stop.

Refresh in WebbIE re-parses the page, effectively, but doesn’t go and get the page anew. You can now press Shift and Control and R to perform a “proper” page refresh, reloading it from the server.

You can now open saved MHT files from File > Open, and I’ve added a TeamViewer download link to the Help menu for support purposes.

Finally, WebbIE no longer changes the case of URLs you type into the address bar, so if you are trying to access a web page on a case-sensitive server – like a Unix server – you’ll now be able to reach it.

Update to BBC iPlayer TV 7.3 restores Audio Described category

New BBC iPlayer TV version 7.3. At the beginning of November 2014 the BBC removed various data feeds from their website, including the one that gave the list of TV programmes available through BBC iPlayer with Audio Description. This meant that all the categories in the WebbIE BBC iPlayer TV programme broke overnight.

There’s no sign of the BBC restoring them, so I’ve removed all the categories in BBC iPlayer TV except for Audio Described. For Audio Described, since it’s so popular, I’ve hacked some code to pull the available programmes: it takes a little while to load, and you don’t get as much detail, but it works.

Other minor changes: I’ve added a Flash item to the Help menu that links straight to the Adobe site so it’s easier test/install Flash: Flash is the number 1 problem for users in using iPlayer TV. I’ve also added a TeamViewer menu item for easy technical support, simplified the UI for screenreader users tabbing around, and fixed turning off the voice that announces what is going on.

Updated BBC iPlayer Radio and Live Radio

I’ve updated the BBC iPlayer Radio application. Nothing major: you now get the BBC West Midlands radio station, and you can do copy (Control and C) when in the programme list to copy the name of the programme, for whatever reason.

More importantly, I’ve tweaked the user interface – the controls and their arrangement on the main window. This means that it should work better with your screenreader: it had a cool SplitContainer, which lets sighted people drag the centre dividing line of the program to resize the Station and Programme list. Sadly, testing indicated that this got in the way of screenreader usage, so I’ve removed it. This kind of careful UI design is necessary in producing software that isn’t just accessible, but is also usable, and that’s the idea of the WebbIE programs.

Minor tweaks to the Live Radio application too: I’ve fixed the BBC Radio 5 Live, World Service and Classic FM stations. Sadly, the BBC Arabic and Russian appear to be gone, so I’ve removed them.

The other item is that I’ve made it easy in BBC iPlayer Radio to launch the TeamViewer remote support program. This lets me connect to a user’s PC and see what they are doing, and try to fix things. I used to ship this with WebbIE 3, and I’ve missed it in the WebbIE 4 range of programs, so it’s now available under the Help menu: just select it and it will download and run. I’ll gradually roll this out to the other WebbIE programs.

One Switch Mouse

Today we can make available a program for people with significant physical impairments, such as muscular dystrophy. One Switch Mouse was developed by Claro Software in 2010 and has generously been made available by them for free download from the WebbIE site.

Most of the WebbIE software has been based around screenreader users – typically visually-impaired or blind people. However, there are switch users of the WebbIE programs, and a few of the programs have been specially customised to work with switch access: using a dedicated single-clicking device instead of a mouse or keyboard, like a joystick or customised button.

Switch users typically have very limited movement. Progressive muscle wasting conditions like Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS – also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) can leave people only able to make very limited, very weak movements – perhaps only a head move, or finger, or toe, or mouth puff.

However, many of these conditions leave the user’s cognitive functions intact – you’re as smart and aware as ever, you just can’t move, or talk, or write. This is incredibly frustrating, of course.

One Switch Mouse tries to help. The mouse is controlled by using one switch, and timing how long you hold it down to control direction of movement and mouse clicking. You can move the mouse around the screen and left-click, right-click, double-clicking, and even hold down and select. In conjunction with an on-screen keyboard for typing you therefore have complete control of a standard Windows computer – and all using one switch. It even works on the Windows login screen and the secure desktop!

One Switch Mouse is free: if you or someone you know or support might benefit, do please download it and try it out.

Creating switch-accessible menus

The One Switch site, dedicated to creating accessible games for switch users, has written an article about how to create a switch-accessible menu.

A particularly interesting tip is “start one-switch scanning, then switch to two-switch scanning if the user operates a second switch”. This makes your program one- or two-switch agnostic – you are handling both use cases with a simple detection of a feature, rather than requiring another setting screen.

Of course, some of the tips might be detrimental for screenreader users (such as the typical WebbIE users). For example, many switch users benefit from menus or lists that loop – when you go off the bottom of the list you start again at the top. But screenreader users generally like to know when they are at the end of a list (WebbIE programs tend to play a sound to help identify the beginning or end) because it provides orientation, since they can’t see the screen, and jumping up and down the list is easier for them (usually by pressing the initial key for a menu item – which is a reason to alphabetically-order your lists). The key thing is to identify your audience.

Markdown

 

Many people with visual impairments (i.e. screenreader users) find it hard to use WYSIWYG word processors like Microsoft Word. One slip of the finger and SUDDENLY YOU’RE TYPING ALL IN CAPS OR ITALICS OR WORSE.

Sure, screenreaders can announce boldness and font and italics as you go, but given every character can have dozens of attributes and you need to get on with your writing – that is, you want to work on the actual text, not what it looks like – that quickly becomes unfeasible. But you want to work with more than plain text: you want to use font and bold and other rich text formatting, because people expect that and it can help with understanding for sighted users.

A better solution for at least one blind user is Markdown. This is a plain-text way of writing formatted text: you write in plain text, but you use a special subset of HTML to add formatting like tables to your text. Then it converts from your Markdown to valid full HTML documents, which look great in Word or can be easily converted to another format.

It’s not for everyone: many users would probably be better with some way of restricting the formatting they can apply so that they can’t go wrong. But for technical screenreader users it might be a way to create attractive formatted text far more easily.

WebbIE 4.3 – some HTML5 fun

New WebbIE 4 – more support for HTML5 and WAI-ARIA

WebbIE 4.3 has some cool new features based on the latest HTML5 and WAI-ARIA technology.

HTML5 is the latest update to how web pages work. It has a number of things that are helpful for screenreader users:

  • A web page can have a MAIN element. This is good for the Crop function in WebbIE, which will use this to help decide what to crop and what not.
  • Forms have a bit more definition, so email input boxes, sliders and progress bars have appeared. This is good for WebbIE because when you try to set one of these inputs you can get a special custom experience that works with your screenreader. For email address inputs, WebbIE will check that you have typed a correct email address and explain what is wrong. This is useful since it can be hard to correctly type and then fix email addresses with a screenreader, letter by letter. For sliders, WebbIE puts up a pop-up window containing a standard slider with the values all correctly set so your screenreader should recognise and operate it perfectly. WebbIE also presents progress bars sensibly in the text view.
  • WebbIE 4 has always supported the AUDIO and VIDEO elements, so you can play and control music and video in web pages easily.

WAI-ARIA is a mechanism to help screenreader users use complex web pages like Facebook. Facebook uses special WAI-ARIA code to label parts of its page with information – the small flags and images that mouse users can click on.

  • WebbIE supports the aria-label and aria-labelledby attributes, so more elements on a web page will have correct names and text – fewer “link: config.php” type entries.

Of course, this all pre-supposes that web pages use these elements correctly – which as we know is often not the case. Still, where a website has taken the effort, WebbIE will support these features and produce a better experience.

There are other HTML5 elements, but I’ve decided to add support to WebbIE as and when these elements are supported in Internet Explorer. That way WebbIE will be more reliable and perform better. This will be a problem for Windows XP users, who can’t update Internet Explorer past version 8, but I’m afraid that I have to advance WebbIE to keep it relevant so they will have to stay on WebbIE 3 or find that some features do not work as advertised. I’ll always keep WebbIE 3 around, just like I still do WebbIE for Windows ’98 – I just won’t support it any more.

Finally, there are many performance improvements.

  • WebbIE loads much, much faster.
  • Lots of bugfixes: also, WebbIE will no longer report any problems but will soldier on as best it can.
  • Improved support for the HTML “LABEL” element, so more form elements (e.g. input boxes) will have meaningful labels in the text and useful prompts when you try to use them.
  • WebbIE now supports “localhost” as a URL.
  • WebbIE once again defaults to showing the Internet Explorer homepage. People generally expect web browsers to go to a home page on the Internet: loading your Favourites might well be a better mechanism – and it is still there – but it took people by surprise and caused confusion. This only applies to new WebbIE installations: people running WebbIE 4 already will have to change their settings to suit.

Do try out the latest WebbIE and let me know what you think.

WebbIE 4.2 – response to feedback

I’ve had some great feedback on WebbIE 4 – thank you all. This has resulted in two things:

First, it turns out that the USB stick versions of WebbIE have some strong supporters who use them in various teaching and support environments. I had anticipated the death of versions of WebbIE designed to run solely from a USB stick for what I thought were good reasons:

  • Microsoft Windows has made it increasingly hard to run software from a USB stick. It used to be that you could write some simple code and a program would launch just by inserting the USB drive. Now you’re likely to see nothing at all, and have to navigate to the drive – if you can find it – and launch the program by hand from Windows Explorer. There are excellent security reasons for this downgrading of the experience, but I perceived that it made the USB sticks significantly less usable and hence useful.
  • More generally, corporate and institutional security is getting better, so being able to walk up to a random computer, shove in a USB stick, and run a program off it is surely something of the past.
  • Having people run USB versions means that when a user runs into trouble I can’t be sure that they have the latest, bugfixed, working version. Sure, that’s fine for savvy technophiles. But often people with USB stick versions are the least technical: the system has been set up with the USB stick versions by a friend or support worker. The user has no chance of updating the USB version, and I have no way to trigger an update, even if I can identify that they need one. Very messy.
  • The new rewrite of WebbIE into the .Net programming language means that I can’t guarantee, as I could with Visual Basic, that the programs will run on any Windows machine as a user. You have to be an administrator to install the necessary .Net Framework. So the development of the WebbIE USB versions are stuck at version 3, so it will be increasingly hard to support them.

However, I’ve had various messages from people asking for the USB stick version, and making a reasonable case. They say that they use it for independent access, for (indeed) walking up to machines, especially in libraries and running WebbIE and for distributing easily around organisations. My worries about support are still valid. But if people find it useful, that’s great.

I’ve therefore linked directly to a zip file containing the WebbIE USB stick version on the front page of the website. This is WebbIE 3 and all its associated programs. I hope that’s useful for people.

The second thing is an update to WebbIE, now to 4.2. I’ve done lots of bugfixing, and tried to address the perennial problem of recognising when the page is loaded so it can be processed and the ticking noise turned off. More interestingly, I’ve made some changes again based on user feedback:

  • Print has always been in WebbIE, but I’ve never been quite sure what to print out when the user hits it: the text view, in large print and little decoration, so it can be read by someone with limited vision? Or the web view, so it looks like the web page as seen in Internet Explorer and can be shown to ticket inspectors and filed away as bank statements and the like? In WebbIE 3 I tried to print whatever the current view was, web or text. In WebbIE 4 I decided on printing the text view, but after user feedback it now prints the web view. This lets you get a perfect printed copy of the page for reference. Users can print the main text view by copying and pasting in Word or Wordpad, which saves me having to write code and keeps the number of printing applications down to keep things simple.
  • Favorites or Bookmarks have always been an important feature of WebbIE. These are shared with Internet Explorer. In WebbIE 3 they would appear if you opened the Favorites menu (Alt and A) and you could cursor down them. In WebbIE 4 I created a new “favorites homepage” that shows quick links to main WebbIE functions, like “open a web page” or “search the web”, followed by the favorites. The idea here was that you could just start WebbIE and cursor down to hear your favorites, without having to do an Alt key combination to get a menu up. That’s been very popular with some people, especially novice users. However, people usually expect web browsers to go to their online home page. Also, you can’t type letters to select favorites in a text area, because it isn’t a list: many screenreader users know to start typing the list entry they are looking for and it will be selected, which means they need some sort of list control. I’ve therefore allowed the user to select whether the home page is my favorites WebbIE page, or the Internet Explorer web page. I don’t like adding new options, but this is a generally known and understood one, and there are important different use cases. I’ve also added a new function, Show Favorites, on Control + B (for Bookmarks) that brings up a new window with the favorites in a list (actually a treeview to cope with folders) so a user can press B (in QuickKeys mode) and they cursor or type to get their favourite with ease. I hope the hybrid approach suits most people effectively: new users can use the WebbIE home page, more advanced users can use their familiar page and the bookmarks list.

Finally, a new beta version of R.S.S. News Reader is also up on the site, so do try it out and let me know how you get on! Soon I’ll be able to write new programs again, which will be fun.

Switch to WebbIE 4

I’ve had various reports of problems with users of Windows XP with ASDL modems that WebbIE 3 doesn’t start up. Also, Google search is broken. I’ve seized the opportunity to tell people who’ve mailed me to use the new WebbIE 4 instead, and that’s confirmed to me (after a bit of bugfixing) that it’s working and pretty much there.

I’ve therefore decided to push ahead with the official release of WebbIE 4, and with it the other new .Net-version programs – PDF Reader, BBC iPlayer Radio, and BBC Live Radio. I’ve removed all of these from the WebbIE MSI installer file that used to contain every program. I’ll continue to distribute this so the people can get the remaining programs, until I either convert then to .Net or build separate installers.

The front page of WebbIE therefore lists separate installers for the new .Net programs – WebbIE, PDF Reader, BBC iPlayer Radio and BBC Live Radio – and links to the updated MSI that still contains Podcatcher, Clock, Calendar, and RSS News Reader. I’ve also left the old WebbIE 3 installer still on the page.

A reminder of the advantages of the new .Net programs:

  • Per-user installation (ClickOnce or MSI) with automatic updates. Not having the latest version is the Number 1 reason for mailing me with a support query.
  • Working modern code that will keep working for another eleven years.
  • Better support for screenreaders through MSAA/UIA support.

It’s a bit of a journey, but I think it’s the right direction! Thank to everyone for feedback.