Hi Mary,
What's happened is that you've actually lost the Wi-Fi connection, and
need to act as though you're joining the network again for the first
time. The DHCP information about the IP Address, etc. only gets
assigned once the Wi-Fi connection is successfully made. If you lose
the connection because of the dropped reception, the information is no
longer in the text fields. There's actually an accessibility issue in
the fact that under the DHCP setting only three of the five fields get
announced, and under the Static setting none of the five fields get
announced. If there is no text entry in the five fields (because of
making a successful connection), you won't hear anything. These five
settings for IP Address, Subnet Mask, Router, DNS, and Search Domains
are part of the normal network setup that you would do if you had to
set up a network connection under Unix or Linux from the terminal
command line. I didn't examine these fields until Bernard, whose home
network is set up with Static IP Address assignments, was trying to
set up his iPhone back in March. That was the first time I noticed
that none of these fields is announced under the Static setting, and
only the first three fields are announced under the DHCP setting.
Normally, once you join a DHCP network, you don't worry about or even
read these five fields. If a connection is successfully made, the
network assigns the IP Address, etc. Usually, the only entry that
will change is the IP address. Most home networks will either use:
192.168.1.1 for the Router and Domain Name Server fields; some will
use 10.0.1.1 for these fields. The IP Address will generally be
192.168.1.n where the final "n" is a number assigned by the network,
or 10.0.1.n. I think that linksys uses 192.168. for the prefix by
default. I'd guess that your Subnet Mask will be 255.255.255.0 but it
might have a "255" for the final place instead of "0". If the
connection breaks, these five fields will be unpopulated. Because
VoiceOver only announces the first three fields under DHCP, you'll
only be aware of three text fields when the connection is not in
place. The 5 vs 3 fields is an accessibility issue for the DHCP
setting. The 5 vs 0 fields under the Static key setting is another
accessibility issue for VoiceOver. VoiceOver is just not announcing
the labels for all these five fields, so unless the text areas are
populated, or you have previous experience setting up network
connections, or read additional documentation, you won't know what
these fields correspond to.
HTH. If you can connect to your network again, which will require
typing in the network password, putting in these changes should fix
your connection. You might want to wait for sighted assistance simply
because making the changes relatively quickly helps to maintain your
connection. Because I had the WiFiTrak app (before WiFi stumbler apps
were banished from the app store in March), I could reconnect by just
selecting my network from that app instead of using the Settings menu
-- the app would remember the password that I typed in, and just
reconnect without my having to type it in again. Only if the app
failed to reconnect after 30 seconds would I get reprompted to enter a
network password. If reconnecting took that long, the chances are
that the network itself was down, and that I'd have to recycle power
on the modem.
Let us know whether this works for you. (Or, I can tell you how to
stream radio tracks in background with ooTunes or Wunder Radio to
maintain your connection <grin>.)
Cheers,
Esther
Mary Otten wrote:
Hi Esther,
Thanks for this detailed description. I've been into that dialogue
with the unlabeled fields that you described, and as you note, I am
set for dhcp. What isn't clear to me, and forgive the question is,
where am I suppose to find these 5 entries that I am to copy into
the fields under static? I'm seeing 3 fields, not 5, and none seems
to have text in it. No text is announced when I flick to each field
in turn. Perhaps sighted help will shed further light here, but the
5 versus 3 fields is quite mystifying.
mary
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