Hi,
2014-08-26 21:45 GMT+02:00 Benjamin Blatter <b.blatter@xxxxxxxxxx>:
I hope I'm at the right place here and someone can help me. The thing is:
I'm blind and need a screen reader like NVDA or Jaws for windows which can
read the contents of a screen to me. Sadly GPodder isn't very accessible.
The installation process is no problem, but I have as good as no chance to
navigate the GUI. I discovered a few shortkeys by luck: ctrl+l for adding a
new podcast, ctrl+o to import from OPML and ctrl+p for preferences. But the
preferences par example aren't read to me. blind people rely heavily on
keyboard navigation. Lists or options should be reached with the tab and
cursor keys. If there is a menu like file, edit, view, etc. this should be
accessible by pressing the alt key and the letters.
The installer app is based on Inno Setup, which probably uses native
UI elements that work well with screen readers. For the gPodder GUI,
we use GTK+ (version 2), which apparently doesn't support
accessibility features under Windows:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2012-April/msg00023.html
Apparently around the same time, someone might have written some
support for it, but it might have been a problem due to licensing:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2012-April/msg00032.html
Would it be possible to make GPodder accessible for screen readers?
With the current GUI toolkit (GTK+2) we use under Windows, probably
not easily. From what I've heard from other blind users using Linux,
it works with e.g. GNOME's screen readers - possibly because GTK+ just
has that support under Linux, but nobody implemented it for Windows
(probably not a trivial task). So it's mostly a matter of us using a
GUI toolkit that's not up to the task :/
However, for the longer term, there are some ideas floating around for
doing a Qt-based Desktop GUI for gPodder 4 that might very well work
out-of-the-box on Windows (but that's really in a very early stage and
nowhere near as feature-complete as gPodder 3's GUI is, and might
never be):
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/accessible.html
This by the way doesn't only affect accessibility features. On
touchscreen Windows devices, Qt supports scrolling lists with fingers
(e.g. Windows detects that a finger is used instead of the mouse
pointer, and scrolls the view instead of selecting text, etc..),
whereas GTK+ isn't aware of that.
I know there is a CLI optionally. but I'm not sure if I can do everything I
want there. I'd like to subscribe to a lot of youtube channels and let
GPodder check for new episodes and download every hour automatically. Can
anyone please tell me if this is possible by using only the CLI? Which
commands would I need to use for this? I wrote help but couldn'd really find
a way, even to add a url ... I grew up with MS-DOS when I was a kid, but I
never was good in writing codes ;-)
I'm still using Win XP, soon 7.
If the CLI works for you in Windows, you should be able to do those things:
1.) For subscribing, you can use the command "subscribe yt:username",
where username is replaced with the channel
2.) For checking for new episodes, you can use "update" and then
"download" to download newly-found episodes
3.) If you want to automate it hourly, you would have to add some
task scheduler entry that runs "gpo update" (where gpo is "gpo.exe",
probably needs the full path) and then "gpo download"
For 3.), there has been a thread recently on this mailing list:
//www.freelists.org/post/gpodder/Wake-PC-and-automatically-download-podcasts,4
It's relatively easy to customize and improve the CLI for blind users
and/or our use case than it is to try to get accessibilty features
working on GTK+2 on Windows (which is a technical shortcoming).
HTH :)
Thomas