BBC iPlayer Radio is dead

I am sorry to announce that the BBC iPlayer Radio program no longer works and will not work again ever.

It was probably the most popular WebbIE program: you could run it and get a plain-text list of programmes from the last seven days, and press return, and it would play it, and you could press keys to jump around the program. Super-accessible to screenreader users – a nice, simple, keyboard-based native Windows application.

The program showing how simple it was: one list for stations, one for all the programmes available with dates, a few big clear buttons or you can just use keys.

Sadly, commercial concerns have shut it off permanently. Licensing, rights, money, regional limitations – all conspire against the free and open BBC of twenty years ago. As the official BBC FAQ states:

We also must ensure that third parties are able to meet BBC requirements including prominence, which helps listeners to find content we’ve made for them, and sharing of data, which helps us understand what people are listening to, which in turn helps us improve our content and services. At the same time, it’s important we make sure that third parties do not use our streams without permission in non-compliant ways, like serving advertisements around our on demand content, for example.

So you have to use the BBC Sounds website where you can be denied access if you come from outside the UK and your usage can be tracked and, most importantly, you have to use the complicated web interface instead of just cursoring around. Sorry!

A bit of history. I first did a BBC radio program back in about 2004, when streaming media was just getting started. Back then it was all RealPlayer, running in Internet Explorer, which was easy enough to control and put an accessible user interface on. After a year or two I started getting help from the BBC: an engineer or manager would appear, announce some new paperwork or title or policy, give me some new URLs, and then go away again for a couple of years. Thanks to all those BBC employees who helped blind people and screenreader users find their way to all the great BBC radio programmes over their years, and thanks for all the kind words!

“The BBC site is accessible enough but it is a bit of a faff to use.”

“You get my vote, BBC is a  pain, demanding far too much technical and manual dexterity.”

“Your program is unbeatable when accessing particular segments of programmes accurately and quickly.  As far as I know, this can’t be done using Sounds.”

“Have used your software  for years, thanks a lot… I am visually impaired and use NVDA for my access.”

“It is a joy to use the simple interface.”

“I would like to thank you for such good programs.”

“Thanks so much, it’s my top Xmas present.”

BBC iPlayer Radio 11 Released

The latest version of BBC iPlayer Radio is now available. If you have a previous version installed then it should automatically update. If not, here is the link:

This fixes the problems of the last month, since the BBC changed their servers. Big thanks to Kay at the BBC in London for getting my access back so promptly.

However, you will notice you can no longer download radio programmes. This is a condition of how the BBC allows the WebbIE program to access their servers, so that’s not up to me. You can still get access to the listings, and start, stop and control programmes easily.

Another change is that to handle more modern Internet security I’ve had to update the program to need the .Net Framework 4.8. This should have no impact on the vast majority of you, but if you are still on Windows XP or Vista then I’m afraid the program will no longer work for you.

There are a few bugs that I will try to get to over the holidays, but otherwise Merry Christmas!

BBC iPlayer 10 currently broken

The BBC Radio iPlayer program is broken at present: you’ll get an error message including “410 Gone”.

You will be unsurprised to hear that this is the BBC server that has gone missing. However, I’ve contacted them and they have been helpful so far, so I’m hoping that, first, they’ll update me on what I need to change in the code to work with whatever their new set-up is, and second, I can get it done.

Wish me luck!

BBC iPlayer TV 10

Hello Facebook! Does this work?

I’ve updated the BBC iPlayer TV program to work again. It should update to the latest version, or you can download it from the WebbIE website.

You might ask why it broke! Well, since the BBC broke all their metadata, a nice automated and readable index to the programmes, I have to visit the website and extract the programmes from there. It’s called “screen scraping” and it breaks whenever the BBC updates their website. Sorry about that.

WebbIE Web Browser 5

An unannounced update to the actual WebbIE Web Browser over Christmas: Version 5 fixes problems with the web search feature not working.

This is a super-simple feature: you press Control and W, then type your search term, and hit return. Wait a bit and the Google results appear in a list – you just cursor up and down. Hit return when you get one you want and WebbIE opens it. So much faster and less frustrating than trying to, you know, use Google…

It’s Version 5 despite not being a big update because (1) the fashion is to ramp up the main version number (2) it’s way way easier to ask “what version?” and get back “5” or “4” or “6” than “4.1.23”!

Get WebbIE 5 Now: https://www.webbie.org.uk/webbrowser

A political history of Windows accessibility standards

I see around the Internet articles about accessibility APIs and standards like MSAA and IAccessible2, and I don’t think they reflect the history of the technology as much as the politics of the technology. This is a quick note of my memory and take on it from my experience working in screenreaders and AT.

Microsoft comes up with the first accessibility API in the late 90s, MSAA. It’s fine for buttons and textboxes and checkboxes, but richer user interfaces are too much for it – the document area in Word, or web pages.

So Microsoft comes up with UI Automation (UIA), which is a richer accessibility API that addresses the shortcomings of MSAA. This was in 2005.

But no-one picks it up properly: within Microsoft, Office doesn’t, I assume because of the usual Office versus Windows internal politics. Internet Explorer doesn’t, because Microsoft has stopped developing Internet Explorer. And outside Microsoft, all the screenreader guys have already written their code to “slurp” the contents of Internet Explorer and Office, so they don’t care that UIA doesn’t become the new standard. (And if UIA fails, so much more value for their products, which cost lots of money and so can support developers to write custom code for each and every program that fails to support accessibility standards…)

Outside Microsoft UIA adoption is even worse: Sun and IBM actually go to the trouble of creating a competing accessibility API, IAccessible2, and foist that on Java and OpenOffice to aid their competition with Microsoft and prevent Microsoft owning the accessibility API on Windows like Microsoft owns the document format standard (Word) and the web page standard (IE). (Disabled users have a history of being used to further other agendas, whether they know it or not…) Of course, nerds rally round and also foist it on Firefox, then the only Internet Explorer alternative, because hey everyone hates Micro$oft, right?

But, it’s important to understand, at this point in history – mid 00s – things are kind of OK. JAWS and NVDA and other screenreaders write special code (accessing some kind of application-specific API like the Word DOM) to talk to really really important applications, like Internet Explorer and Office, and use the MSAA accessibility API to talk to everything else. We all argue about the price of screenreaders and whether videos should autoplay but everything is stable. If you want to use more applications with your screenreader you pay more for a screenreader with more special code – JAWS is the standard, of course.

Then it all changes. The web and mobile explodes, by which we mean HTML5 and Chrome and iOS breaking the Internet Explorer/Windows dominance, and websites becoming applications in their own right like Google Docs or Facebook. Internet Explorer is dead, the mainstream declares, which means the sophisticated support screenreaders have developed to talk to its application-specific APIs is all useless: at the same time the websites are getting more and more complex. MSAA isn’t going to cut it, and there is no application-specific API for Chrome, the new dominant browser (there is a chrome.automation in development – how nice!) And here we are in 2018, and it’s much harder to use a web app than a desktop application. (Of course, you’ve probably jumped ship to iOS and an iPad with VoiceOver, or you are using a restricted set of desktop applications…)

Hey, maybe UI Automation’s time has come! Everyone knows VoiceOver is super-accessible and great and built into macOS, and so Microsoft needs a better AT story round Office and Windows, so the newly-invigorated Microsoft builds UIA into Office and Edge and here we go! At least until Edge is killed off too…

(The usual caveats and apologies about focusing mainly on blind people apply: showing my history in that area.)

BBC iPlayer Radio 10

After a good few weeks I have the BBC iPlayer Radio application working again! You should find that the previous version 9 force-updates to the new version 10 when you start it. If not you can use this link for the installer: BBC iPlayer Radio MSI Installer

As usual, it was broken by changes to the BBC system. I’ve had help from some kind BBC staff and I’ve got it working again: it now downloads without needed to convert as well, so it’s a little faster in operation. I’ve also improved the metadata in the files saved to disk for those that use them directly. “Version 10” indicates that I’m following the modern convention of updating the version number by a whole point when you do a release – like Google Chrome – not that there is anything very special and new. Sorry! Smile.

BBC iPlayer Radio working again

Changes at the BBC end broke the BBC iPlayer Radio program for a couple of weeks. The BBC were kind enough to help when I got round to asking, and it should all now be working again.

However, you now get thirty days of radio programmes, not just seven days, so my program takes a while to process all the programmes and display them. Be patient and it should get there.

Thanks to everyone who alerted me to the problem, and the BBC staff for helping out!

BBC iPlayer Radio 9.4

A small change the BBC iPlayer Radio program. It downloads BBC programmes and then converts them to MP3 to play them. Previously it’s used a moderate quality (bitrate) but some users got in touch and pointed out that many radio programmes would benefit from a better quality, especially Radio 3. So BBC iPlayer Radio now uses 192kbps MP3 files.