Yep, that sounds like just what i would need if it wasn't for the fact that sighted assistance is nowhere to be found for me. I have home help, but their time is very, very limited since they have others to visit, so i guess the search continues. Qnap anyone? /Krister
> 27 aug 2014 kl. 02:02 skrev Jonathan Mosen <jmo...@mosen.org>: > > Hi Krister, if you have access to sighted assistance for the initial set-up, > I can recommend the Synology products highly. Their iOS apps are wonderful. > So for day to day use, it's really good. Administration is right now a > dreadful business, unless you don't mind the command line. I will paste below > a post from my blog at: > http://mosen.org/index.php/my-new-synology-nas-great-product-nasty-accessibility/ > > <http://mosen.org/index.php/my-new-synology-nas-great-product-nasty-accessibility/> > While I am constrained in what I can say, I will say that since this post was > published, I have had extremely productive dialogue with Synology and I am > confident the access issues are temporary. > My new Synology NAS. Great product, NASty accessibility > 30/05/2014 by Jonathan Mosen <http://mosen.org/index.php/author/jmosen/> > A chance remark by a friend of mine a few weeks ago saw me embarking on quite > a journey. He asked me if I had one of the Synology NAS (network attached > storage) devices. When I indicated that not only did I not have one, but I > wasn't familiar with that manufacturer, he launched into quite a soliloquy > about how incredible they were, and how having one was like having your own > Linux-based server in your house. My friend Gordon knows his tech, so I > decided to bring myself up to speed. > Coincidentally, we had this conversation just as the idea of the Mosen > Channel <http://mosenexplosion.com/> was crystallising. I've kept a lot of my > terrestrial and Internet radio shows over the years, mainly so I can pass > them on to subsequent generations of my family. As I was going through the > extensive archives, I was reminded about a glaring flaw in my backup > strategy. I take backing up very seriously, but one area where my approach > fell short was that there was no off-site backup. If my main network drive > failed, I have copies of my irreplaceable data in other locations, but all > those locations were in my house. Having a backup elsewhere would guard > against data loss in the case of some sort of disaster. I'm not so concerned > with music I could get again, but it's the personal mementos, not just radio > stuff but home recordings of my kids, that I really care about. > When researching this question, I finally found a few back-up services that > would allow you to back up network attached storage to the cloud. Not many > do, and quite a few that do charge a premium for the feature. These services > varied widely in their accessibility, and I didn't like having the > application running in the background all the time. Some of them impacted > quite markedly on system performance. They also demonstrated just how easy it > was for the NAS I was using, the Western Digital MyBook Live, to get bogged > down. The processor in it is on the old side now, and if a couple of Time > Machine backups and another cloud backup package were writing to the drive, > it was affecting data access. > The Synology Disk Station products are powered by their own operating system, > Disk Station Manager (DSM for short). When I started to research the feature > set of DSM, I was delighted to learn that by installing a number of packages, > which effectively are apps for the OS, Synology Disk Stations can be backed > up to a number of cloud services, including Amazon Glacier. Glacier is an > extremely cheap form of mass-storage, designed for occasional retrieval, so > it's ideal for making a cheap backup of last resort. > I was impressed to read glowing reviews of Synology Disk Stations by almost > everybody. Many IT people I trust said Synology make the best NAS products on > the market, period. > Looking at the wide range of models of Disk Station available, it reminded me > a bit of Nokia's Symbian days. There are quite a few models with subtle > differences and models full of numbers and letters. Synology offers a handy > feature on their site where you can indicate what features are important to > you, and you get a narrowed down list of products based on your > specifications. > Having done some reading, I placed my order for my first Synology product > last week, and promptly cancelled it. My usual rule of thumb is that after > researching a product range and determining what I'll buy, I make the > purchase online, and busy myself reading the user guide and doing whatever > research I can until the product arrives. > Right after placing the order, I stumbled upon a very helpful feature on the > Synology website. You can actually log in to one of their NAS devices, and > experience the user interface for yourself. > To do this, visit http://demo.synology.com:5000 > <http://demo.synology.com:5000/>. The username is admin, and the password is > synology. You're then working in a real drive, with a few of the functions > disabled for security reasons. > After logging in, I was confronted with what I can only nicely call the > significant accessibility challenges of the DSM user interface. With a bit of > JAWS cursor work and some judicious pressing of Enter on clickable elements, > quite a bit can be done. It seems to work far better in Firefox than it does > in IE. However, one of the most significant issues is that checkboxes and > radio buttons are non-standard, and do not appear to screen readers as the > controls they are. In practical terms, what this means is that you might go > into a screen where you have the option to enable a feature. The control > behaves like a checkbox, but a screen reader will see an unlabelled button. > You have no way of knowing if that option is checked or not, so a lot of > trial and error is involved. With a patient sighted person's help, you can > get a lot more done by using the JAWS features allowing you to assign names > to buttons and elements on the web. > When you access the device from Safari in iOS, you get a stripped down, > different interface, and in some ways it's more friendly for completing some > tasks without help, using the VoiceOver screen reader built into iOS. So > that's worth a shot. > So, much as I liked the feature set of the Synology Disk Stations, I > cancelled my order to give myself a chance to rethink. > When I googled the matter of the accessibility problems with the OS, I was > disappointed to read that Synology had been made well aware > <http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=49222> of the problems > screen reader users are having, but to date have done nothing about them. > This didn't fill me with confidence. > It is very hard to match the performance and feature set of the Synology > products, but I was able to try the web UI of a couple of other NAS products. > They really weren't much better. The Twitter exchanges I've had on this topic > over the last couple of weeks would suggest there is a serious overall > problem with access to quality NAS products by screen reader users. For those > of us using products like this as I am, at home and for my small business, > it's a bit of an inconvenience and work-arounds of a sort exist. More about > those in a moment. But the real concern for me is that for blind people who > are perfectly competent network administrators, it can create serious > problems when a company they work for deploys these products that are > inaccessible. It's hard enough for blind people to get jobs as it is, without > these tough interfaces making it harder. > After realising that I was unlikely to find anything that did what I wanted > that would be accessible, I went back and ordered another Synology product, > the DS214Play. This is a two-bay NAS, and I put a Western Digital Red 4TB > drive in both bays, running Raid for redundancy. > I chose the 214Play because it has a good processor speed, ample RAM, and is > designed for multimedia work. I'll talk more about some of the slick things > it can do when I look at the accessibility of the iOS apps, but here's a > comprehensive review > <http://www.storagereview.com/synology_diskstation_ds214play_review> of the > DS214Play. > When setting up the NAS, I found the only viable option was to enlist the > help of one of my kids as a human screen reader. Notwithstanding the > inaccessibility, the set-up of the drives, the opening of appropriate ports > of your router for external services such as Telnet, SSH, FTP and more, and > the installing of various packages to expand the drive's functionality is an > effortless and friendly experience if you can see the screen. > The set-up process also takes you through obtaining a quick connect ID. This > makes it easy to connect your DiskStation via the free mobile apps, and is > particularly useful if you have a dynamic IP address. For services like FTP, > you can obtain a free dynamic DNS from Synology. > You can even use this device to run your own mail server, Drupal, WordPress > and much more. I wonder if anyone has managed to get Icecast or Shoutcast > working on it? > If you're not afraid of getting your hands dirty with the command line, you > can get a human screen reader to enable Telnet and SSH for you. The drive can > then be controlled via the command line interface, which of course may not be > the friendliest thing out there but is 100% accessible. > You can also create users and groups by carefully putting together a > tab-delimited text file in Notepad, and running it through the importer in > DSM. The Synology is a really good FTP server, so if you want to set up an > FTP server and add people, the text file is a good way to get that job done. > Most people will want to migrate data from an old NAS or other storage device > to their new one, and there are a couple of ways of getting this done. You > can mount both the old and new volume on your computer and copy across that > way, but a faster way if you have sighted assistance is to use File Station, > a feature of DSM. File Station lets you mount an external drive as a volume > on the Synology NAS. What this means is that you can then use the web UI to > copy all the data from the old volume to the new one. The process all takes > place in the background. No computer is involved, and if both devices are > hard-wired to the router with good cabling, it goes like a rocket, even while > DSM is verifying volumes after the installation of new drives. > Having to depend so much on sighted assistance for a computer task in 2014 > does not sit well with me in the slightest. But it was a necessary evil given > that I couldn't find anything accessible to do what I wanted as well as the > Synology does. Now that I have it set up the way I want, it really is > impressive. It's very fast, it can do a bunch of intensive tasks without > breaking a sweat, and as I write this, it's happily backing itself up to > Amazon Glacier with no discernible impact on anything else I need to do. > Apart from the peace of mind of having my data backed up to the cloud without > me having to worry about it, and all the seamless support for various ways of > accessing content including a virtual private network, I'm very impressed > with the Synology AudioStation iOS app. This is like a super-sized iTunes > Match, and indeed I'm now considering not renewing my iTunes Match > subscription for another year. One of the problems with iTunes Match is the > paltry 25000 tracks you're allowed to upload to it. This is a fraction of my > music collection, and it means I need to maintain two iTunes libraries, one > for iTunes Match and a general one. AudioStation gives me access to my entire > audio collection, anywhere I have an Internet connection. I've now set up the > indexing so that not only my music, but also the spoken word content I have > such as old time radio and audio described movies is all available through > this app. > And this is where a feature of the DS214Play comes in very handy. Quite a bit > of the spoken word audio I have is encoded in OGG Vorbis, which the default > Music app in iOS doesn't play. The DS214Play has a transcoder built in. > Behind the scenes, without you needing to even worry about the fact that this > is going on, the NAS takes an OGG file, re-encodes it on the fly, and sends > it to the iPhone in MP3 so it can be played. It will also do this with a raft > of other audio and video formats. Genius! So now that it's set up, I can > truly play absolutely anything, anywhere, all from my phone. > When you first install the current version of the AudioStation iOS app, > there's one accessibility issue that can be fixed. When you flick through the > list of albums, VoiceOver speaks nothing. This was seriously limiting my use > of the app, until I discovered that the problem can be fixed by going into > the app's Settings, and changing the view to "List". Voila, albums now speak. > Some of the buttons are labelled in a bit of a verbose way, but there's > nothing that prevents use of this remarkable app. This gives you all the > benefits of the iOS experience, but frees you from the walled garden of > Apple's limited format support and small iTunes Match size. > The NAS itself is DLAN and Airplay-aware, so you can, for example, send > content directly from the NAS to an Apple TV, without having to get your iOS > device involved at all. AudioStation for iOS really does have that "wow" > factor. It is brilliant. > There are similar apps for video, downloading, photos, file management and > more, and they are all useable. > In summary, the Synology DS214Play is a welcome addition to our network here > at home that is quite the game changer. Setting it up is needlessly > challenging. It occurs to me that there might be a bit of money to be made by > a coder who could make an accessible GUI wrapper for the command line > interface. And since most NAS manufacturers offer a command line interface > with a common feature set, a product like this which takes user input from a > GUI and sends it to the command line could be used on a wide range of drives. > If any blind person fancies having a go at this, I'd love to test. > But I hope we might be able to use this post to somehow start a conversation > with Synology about solving the accessibility issues once and for all. > > Jonathan Mosen > Mosen Consulting > Blindness technology eBooks, tutorials and training > http://Mosen.org <http://mosen.org/> > On 26/08/2014, at 6:59 am, Krister Ekstrom <kris...@kristersplace.com > <mailto:kris...@kristersplace.com>> wrote: > >> Hi, I'm thinking about switching my NAS from a Readynas that i have now to >> something else, mainly because i think the web interface of the Readynas is >> a bit complicated and i never could get the hang of the ITunes server and/or >> how to make playing songs from the ITunes library that i have on my Nas >> easy. The latter may just be me not being used to the whole Nas concept. I >> wonder what people use and what you think about that from an accessibility >> point of view? I heard of a NAS called Qnap it had among other features some >> kine of sync that looked a bit like Dropbox and i wonder if their >> configuration apps are accessible both on the mac an the IOs? Any other >> recommendations? >> /Krister >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "MacVisionaries" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com >> <mailto:macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. >> To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com >> <mailto:macvisionaries@googlegroups.com>. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries >> <http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries>. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout >> <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > <mailto:macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com > <mailto:macvisionaries@googlegroups.com>. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries > <http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout > <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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