WebbIE

What you want in WebbIE

Everyone has their own ideas about what WebbIE and the Accessible programs should do, and everyone has their own preferences about how they should do it. All ideas are good ones, but they may not work for a variety of reasons - they can't be done technically, or time does not allow them to be done, or they don't "fit in" well enough and they might confuse other, possibly less able people.

Still, we welcome suggestions and comments, and we'll put them on this page when you send them to us (with your permission) along with our reponse and any plans to use them in future releases. Feel free to comment on our reasoning (or lack of it) and the suggestions and comments on here.

Finally, if a suggestion is adopted, I'll remove its entry from this page and thank the individual. It might be nice to show that I do update applications on user suggestions, but if this page gets too long it'll be hard for anyone to use, so I'll keep it short by removing old suggestions. (If you're really curious, look at the page source - I've left them in!)

All applications

Icon on the desktop
It might be helpful if the installation process put an icon on the desktop, to avoid a beginner having to launch it from the program menu or to learn how to create a desktop icon for themselves.
DH, January 2005
Alasdair: you can run WebbIE from the Start menu or by typing "webbie" in the Run box. Other applications must be started from the Start menu. Putting an icon on the desktop is something every application thinks it has the right to do, but isn't best practice. It might be offered as an option during installation, defaulting to "add icon." I could also add "rss" and "podcatcher" as entries for the Run box.
Status: Intended for next release
Icons in program groups
As not everyone will be using Webbie, could the programs go into their own group in the program menu rather than the WebbIE one?
DH April 2005
Alasdair: Yes, this is a better arrangement. I bundled the programs together for WebbIE 3.0 so people could have one download and get all the programs. This is tricky to manage. In future I'll put them in separately.
Status: Intended for next release.
System tray icons
There might be some advantage in having the players (particularly RSS) in the Sys tray rather than the Task bar, if this is possible. It might be convenient to leave one of them running whilst working in other applications, but not have them coming up when alt tabbing between running applications.
DH April 2005
Alasdair: Good idea. Some users might find this confusing so it would have to be an option to turn on.
Status: Intended for next release.

Accessible Radio

Radio favourites
With the Radio Player most people probably listen mainly to a small number of BBC stations and cursoring through the list to find a particular item can be time consuming, particularly for some of the local radio. I wonder whether it would be possible to provide the facility to have a number of presets, or perhaps to put a few of one's favourite items at the top of the list?
DH April 2005
Alasdair: Good idea! I'll provde a bookmarks menu.
Status: Intended for next release.

WebbIE

WebbIE should reflect what happens in Internet Explorer
When in a Webbie session IE has also been launched via the View menu and in the IE screen the user has navigated to a position well down the page, it appears that on alt tabbing back to Webbie the focus is at the top of the page. I think it might be helpful if it could go to the position reached in the IE page, if this is possible. Beginners can benefit by comparing the IE and Webbie views but having to find the corresponding position again may discourage the use of this facility.
DH January 2005
Alasdair: Tracking the IE opened by WebbIE would be possible, but technically quite difficult. Users can switch between the web view and text view inside WebbIE to observe how changes in one affects the other. I will leave launching IE as a "one-way" option that allows users to try a site in IE when necessary.
Status: no plans to implement.
Change text of links, forms and other objects.
It should be nice for braille display users to include the possibility to change the texts of objects like links, buttons, text areas etc.
PV February 2005
Alasdair: Technically, a user could edit the language.xml file in their WebbIE program directory (usually C:\Program Files\WebbIE3) and find and change the entries for LINK: and so on. This is probably beyond most people. I could provide an interface to this function, but I suspect that the number of Braille-using WebbIE users is tiny, so I will not do this unless there is a bigger demand. If you'd like this feature, do contact me.
Status: no plans to implement.
Multiple links on a line
An option to show more links on one line should be nice. On a page with a lot of links at the top it takes a long times to find the start of the contents.
PV, February 2005.
Alasdair: This would be technically difficult because of the way WebbIE works and certainly make it more complicated for users. I think that the problem of many many links is best addressed by the crop page and skip links functions, not making the text display more complicated.
Status: no plans to implement.
Alert users when you change the page
Using the Crop function doesn't alert the users anything has happened.
WG, April 2005
Alasdair: You're right, this can be confusing. I'll put in an alert sound to let users know what's happened.
Status: implement in next release

Accessible RSS

Announce feed name
Currently when moving from feed to feed (ctrl up/down) the name of the current feed is not announced, although I can establish what it is by interogating my screen reader for the current window title. I would be happier if I were given this info automaticly when moving to a feed.
AH April 2005
Alasdair: Well, it's a good point, but this means redesigning the user interface to show the current feed somewhere, such as adding a text box or label, which will complicate the interface. I will keep this in mind but not do anything on it yet.
Status: no plans to implement.
Delete multiple stories
If I haven't read a particular feed for a few days there might be a significant backlog of stories, particularly from news or discussion based sites and I may want to quickly clear these so I can concentrate only on current stories, currently I have to delete each story individually, I can't perform the windows standard keystroke ctrl a to highlight all and hit delete to remove all the stories in the current feed.
AH April 2005
Alasdair: It's only standard on lists where you can select more than one item, and Accessible RSS doesn't let you do that because it assumes you can only read one item at a time. I'll bear this in mind but I won't plan to do it at present because it complicates the code.
Status: no plans to implement
Open in default browser
One feature I would really like to see would be an option which would allow you to decide which browser you would like to use for viewing full articles. I have Webbie installed on this system as it's extremely useful for showing people how text browsers work and for group browsing so that my sighted friends and colleagues can see where I am on the screen. I also have JAWS for Windows and prefer to use this with Internet Explorer for general browsing. I would like to be able to set up Accessible RSS to use Internet Explorer without removing webbie. One approach might be to just use the system default browser if possible.
JO April 2005
Alasdair: As of Accessible RSS 1.7 stories open in your default system browser (Firefox, IE etc.) unless you have WebbIE 2 or 3 installed, in which case the story opens in WebbIE. This is to make it easy for WebbIE users, but is a pain for people who want to have WebbIE installed but not as their default browser. Providing the option of opening in different browsers means more options for users in Accessible RSS to understand. A better solution might be to allow WebbIE to become the default browser if desired and have Accessible RSS open the default web browser whatever it might be: this is consistent with how Windows handles other hyperlinks. This has been attempted before but has proven difficult. Any comments welcome.
Status: under investigation.

Accessible Podcatcher

Automatic updates
Perhaps some sort of auto-scheduler so, a person could download Podcasts on a user-defined or APC defined schedule...
RC April 2005
Alasdair: Yes, some kind of automated process would be good. It'll take a bit of designing: a timed schedule is one thing, but I think it should also work on updating when an MP3 player is detected. Perhaps a daily update? There is also the question of whether to run in the background, or whether to require user startup.
Status: under investigation