Hi all, There's been some discussion about applications which put icons on the Status Menu bar that VoiceOver cannot navigate to. Some examples include the early versions of ExpanDrive (the GUI-based FTP/SFTP/ Amazon S3 etc. file sharing tool), Caffeine (a program that allows you to override when your Mac will automatically go to sleep), Tunnelblick and Viscosity (two GUI-based interfaces for open VPN), and DropBox (the cross-platform file sharing app with a partially accessible status menu icon -- not found the normal way with VO-M twice or Control-F8, but by bringing up Window chooser menu (VO-F2 twice) and looking for "Untitled").
While trying to check on the updated status of Audio Hijack Pro, I came across an interesting post in the latest entry on the Rogue Amoeba blog at: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/ ("SoundSource 2.5 and a Story About the Menubar") The direct URL address to this article is rather long, but I'll insert it here in case it is usable for future reference: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2009/08/27/soundsource-2-5-and-a-story-about-the-menubar/ According to this article, there are two ways to implement menu bar icons: via a “menuExtra” and using “NSStatusItem”. The first method, via a "menuExtra" is the way that all OS X's built-in menubar items that Apple provides are coded. The second method is the officially supported way for third-party software developers. Up until the latest release of SoundSource, Rogue Amoeba used "Menu Extra Enabler" to code SoundSource using "menuExtra", which supplies additional coding features that are described in the blog post. SoundSource is one of the software products whose status bar icon could always be found with VoiceOver. (This is a free tool from Rogue Amoeba that provides an easy way to monitor and adjust the volume settings for your Output, Input, and System source sounds in one place, and to access the Sound Preferences menu of System Preferences, in the form of a menu on your status menu bar). As of the new updated version of SoundSource for Snow Leopard, they have decided to go back to using the less flexible "NSStatusItem", because of the need to rewrite the "menuExtra" software code each time "Menu Extra Enabler" breaks with a new system upgrade or release. Rogue Amoeba's statement: <begin quote> As of SoundSource v2.5.0 and Mac OS X 10.6, we’ve finally given in, and converted SoundSource to be an NSStatusItem running as its own standalone application. The reason is primarily one of defeat. With every new release of MacOS X, MenuExtra Enabler breaks and requires updating. We simply no longer care to fight Apple on this front. When it was relatively easy to improve SoundSource’s user experience by making it a menuExtra, we did so. We now also believe that providing a good user experience in this area is Apple’s job and not ours: NSStatusItems should simply behave as menuExtras do, and if they don’t, the burden of fixing that is on Apple. <end quote> My comment: "Menu Extra Enabler" appears to be Unsanity's product, which is a haxie, meaning that it is using unsupported features and breaks each time there is a new OS release. I think this is the source URL: http://unsanity.com/mee While the issue of whether developers should be able to use the menuExtras features or not is a separate issue, it does seem to be the case that difficulties in implementing NSStatusItems as currently supported in the Apple API framework is hampering the accessibility of applications with VoiceOver. I can think of a couple of iPhone apps with Desktop software components that have this same problem with the status menu icon not being accessible (Balmuda Design's "NumberKey Connect" desktop component to their "NumberKey" and "NumberKey Free" apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch is one of these -- the app lets you run a numeric keypad on the face of your iPhone or iPod Touch -- and the keys even work with NumPad Commander; I'm not sure the keys are labeled on the iPhone app side, though). In some cases lack of access to the menu icon is not critical, or the apps (like Caffeine and Viscosity are Apple Scriptable), but this does seem a shortcoming that might be brought to Apple's attention with some feedback. The problem of supplying status bar menu icons that are accessible to VoiceOver has been brought up on the Apple Developer forums, e.g. this post on "Status Bar Item Accessibility" from one of the ExpanDrive software team members: http://lists.apple.com/archives/accessibility-dev/2009/Apr/msg00007.html And, if any of you use SoundSource, the new version, while only works for OS X 10.5 and above, is available from the freebies section of Rogue Amoeba: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/freebies/ Cheers, Esther --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
