BBC iPlayer TV 8.0.0

If you’ve tried to use the BBC iPlayer TV 7 program recently you’ll know that it is completely broken. A few months ago all the channels went except for Audio Described, and more recently that disappeared too.

Over the years (fifteen, I think, though that may be Radio) I’ve taken many approaches to delivering BBC TV programmes to blind users, from RealPlayer days to now. In version 7 I received some help from the BBC: a nice, fast way to get programme listings. So I put that into the software, and all was well.

You would think I would learn! This handy mechanism disappeared this year, I think without warning, and the channel listings with it. However, Audio Described lasted a bit longer because it didn’t use the approved BBC mechanism, and on examination it only took a tweak to make it work again. I’ve therefore done the work to make the other channels use the Audio Described mechanism, so we have a new BBC iPlayer TV 8, and you once again have Audio Described, channels including One, Two, Four and News, and a new Signed channel listing too. The listings will all take longer to load, but that’s just how it has to work now.

Generally every couple of years there is a burst of enthusiasm at the BBC and someone will reach out to me with great plans and proposals: a year or two later they disappear with their technical help. Individuals have been kind and supportive, but the BBC faces great commercial and political pressure, so I can’t blame them. Anyway, for the geeks: we’re back to screen-scraping, which is slow but I can patch it up when the website changes and doesn’t rely on flaky BBC cooperation.

Finally, I observe that we now have more hoops to jump through before programmes play – like a BBC logon. You should only have to get this set up and working once, and it will work smoothly after that. But you might well need sighted help to get you through these steps: I have fitfully automate these steps, but it was just too much for me to keep up with changes, so I’m afraid you’re on your own. More reliable, though, which is nice.

BBC iPlayer Radio 9.3.5

A new version of the BBC iPlayer Radio program. This should, I hope, solve any problems you have been experiencing with “skipping” during programmes.

A quick explanation: the BBC provides their radio programmes as AAC files. These play on Windows 8 and later, in theory. But I was having lots of reports of programmes skipping. I thought this might have been the code that downloads the AAC files, but I discovered that the AAC files skipped in Windows Media Player as well as in my program (which uses Windows Media Player internally), and my program successfully downloaded exactly the same file each time. Finally, converting the AAC file to another file type fixed the program just fine.

BBC iPlayer Radio therefore has a “conversion” step after downloading a programme where it is converted into a format that will play without skipping.

New text-to-speech voices in Windows 10 Creators Update

This update to Windows 10 has arrived, and it has more text-to-speech voices.

First, these are again Windows Mobile voices, not SAPI5, so your screenreader or other application may not be able to see or use them.

Second, there appear to be no additional languages, but there are reported to be “more than ten” new voices (e.g. male voices where before there were only female). I’ve identified two new accents or language variants that are new: Australian English and Canadian English.

I believe the full list of Windows Mobile voices as they stand now for Windows 10 Creators Update in 2017 is given in this Microsoft Support article: TTS voices. 

Sorry, they deleted that page too. Here’s a PDF of the latest support page for Narrator, which has text-to-speech voices in Narrator – Windows Mobile and SAPI5. Appendix A Supported languages and voices in Narrator in Windows 10 – Windows Help

New text-to-speech options in Amazon Kindle App

eBooks have always been a problem for blind screenreader users. Legal eBooks are kept heavily protected to stop you copying or sharing them, which means it’s hard for assistive technology to get into them and read them back. Governments have been lobbied to clamp down on file-sharing sites where you can get eBooks that read easily. And anything complex in layout, like a textbook, usually has shoddy text-to-speech support.

There are ways to do it, like using iBooks on iPad or getting books from Bookshare and other organisations. But that’s not every book, and that means an additional process that sighted users don’t have to follow.

Good news, then, that Amazon has updated its Kindle Apps. This lets you get text-to-speech to read out loads more books, and you can still change the content (colour, font size) to make it easier to read if you have some sight. This includes Amazon Kindle for Windows PC.

All taken from this great write-up at the CALL Scotland blog, which I recommend you go read: Giving your Kindle App a voice.

New Text-to-Speech voices in Windows 10 Anniversary Update

Windows has always come with free text-to-speech voices. Windows 10 Anniversary Update, shipped August 2016, comes with new voices too. Hooray!

But there’s a catch: these are all Windows Mobile voices, not SAPI5 voices. So desktop Windows applications that use SAPI5 cannot use them: Universal Windows Apps (Windows Store apps, or Metro apps) that you get from the Windows Store can use them, and MSDN suggests that developers of desktop Windows applications (e.g. screenreaders) can now use them, but they need to write some code – they can’t use SAPI5. See my previous blog post explaining the difference between SAPI5 and Windows Mobile voices.

In simple English: Windows may have these voices, but it does not mean your Windows screenreader will be able to use them. They won’t show up. Contact the developer.

One application that CAN use them is Windows Narrator! Narrator can use both traditional SAPI5 voices and also the new Windows Mobile voices. So there is now (for example) a free Arabic screenreader!

On to the list. Windows 10 Anniversary Update provides the following new voices according to the MSDN Accessiblity blog and I’ve tested a few out:

  • Arabic (Egypt)
  • Catalan (Spain)
  • Danish (Denmark)
  • Dutch (Belgium)
  • Dutch (Netherlands)
  • Finnish (Finland)
  • French (Canada)
  • Norwegian (Norway)
  • Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Portuguese (Portugal)
  • Spanish (Mexico)
  • Swedish (Sweden)
  • Turkish (Turkey)

You can access these from Start > Settings > Time & Language > Region & Language > Language section. This lets you add more languages to Windows and shows the languages you already have installed.
Click on Add to add a new language to Windows and add the language for the voice you want to use.
Click on any installed voice and an Options button appears. Clicking this displays an Options button, which lets you download the Voice if you haven’t already.

Finally, for completeness here are the Windows 8 and 10 SAPI5 voices you can get through Control Panel > Clock, Language and Region > Language, and listed on MSDN:

  • English (US) David
  • English (UK) Hazel
  • English (US) Zira
  • English (India) Heera
  • Korean Heami
  • Spanish (Spain) Helena
  • Spanish (Mexico) Sabina
  • French Hortense
  • German Hedda
  • Japanese Haruka
  • Chinese (simplified) Hanhan and Huihui
  • Chinese (traditional) Tracy
  • Italian Elsa
  • Polish Paulina
  • Portuguese (Brazil) Maria
  • Russian Irina

WebbIE Web Browser 4.5.2

I’ve updated the WebbIE Web Browser. No new features, but significant plumbing improvements I hope. Non-technical readers can stop here!

One of the big problems that WebbIE has is when to update the text view it generates for each web page. Back when WebbIE started off in 2001 this was pretty easy, though HTML frames were a bit tricky: you waited until a page loaded, parsed it, and the user was good to go until the next web page transition.

You don’t see HTML frames much nowadays in 2016, but many more web pages dynamically load and amend their content using JavaScript and talking to servers in the background but without loading a new page. Worse, much of this is either useless junk (loading advertisements) or a distraction for the user (an auto-updating chat sidebar when the user is trying to fill in a form).

WebbIE therefore tries to update only when (1) it knows there is a new page transition or (2) the user does something that plausibly would result in a page transition, like clicking a button. In the second case WebbIE simply waits a bit, then triggers a refresh if there has not been a page transition. So really the problem is “have we had a new page transition?”

WebbIE uses Internet Explorer through COM, so how do we detect Internet Explorer doing a page transition? Here are some things I’ve used:

  • Watching the status bar text to see if it says “Done”. This was surprisingly effective! Would need to internationalise the phrase to check for non-English users.
  • Using the DocumentComplete event fired by Internet Explorer. This isn’t trivial, because it fires for a page, saying it is done (.ReadyState is COMPLETE), but ALSO fires for any FRAME elements BEFORE the actual page (FRAMESET), and ALSO then fires for any later IFRAMEs loaded by the page – and until the page is finished you can’t know how many IFRAMEs will be loaded. I do use this as a fallback for the JavaScript onload event, though.
  • Hooking the onload JavaScript event. This is what we’re doing in WebbIE now. Essentially it’s outsourcing the problem of knowing when the page is loaded to the agent with the best chance of knowing – the web browser itself.

And here are some to try out in the future!

  • WAI-ARIA events – good for later versions of Internet Explorer, so a plausible approach in the future as more Windows machines get updated.
  • UIA events – the accessibility interface is getting some more tender loving care from Microsoft in the last few years, probably trying to catch up with the perception that Apple is better on accessibility.

BBC iPlayer Radio 9.3.2

A small update to BBC iPlayer Radio. I’ve been having some reports that the program is having problems connecting to the Internet. I can’t replicate the problems here, sadly. But I’ve made the error message provide more information, so hopefully I’ll be able to get to the bottom of it!

A couple of other little bugfixes, including a fix for Windows 7 machines without .Net 4, and removing some Windows Firewall code that I now realise is redundant (and who knows, might be causing the connection problems!)

  • BBC iPlayer Radio 9.3.2 Installer

BBC iPlayer TV 7.5.0

I’ve updated BBC iPlayer TV to 7.5.0. For 7.3 and 7.4 I was using a JavaScript interface, but the new “Have you got a BBC TV Licence?” dialogue and other changes appears to have broken it (again!)

I’ve therefore gone to using the venerable Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) interface to hunt down and press the correct buttons on the iPlayer page. This is a bit slow, and you’ve lost the mechanism for pause or skipping. I could put that in another time, but for now it works, and that’s the main thing. You’ve also sadly lost the switching interface, but I suspect no-one was using it!

Reading View/Mode in your browser

This is a tip for users with some sight.

The Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox browsers come with a built-in Reading View or Reader Mode (for Google Chrome there is an extension, see below).

Reading View takes the webpage you are looking at, with all its adverts and pretty columns, and rips out the actual text you want to read and fills the browser with it. You can even make this text nice and big, and zooming doesn’t lose anything off the side of the page so you don’t have to scroll left and right. This is great for reading larger web pages online.

You have to switch to Reading View for new every page you visit, though. It doesn’t happen automatically.

In both Edge and Firefox you look for an icon of a book that appears on some pages to the right of the webpage address (i.e. the white box at the very top where you see google.com). If this icon appears and/or lights up, you can click on it and go into Reading Mode.

Click the book icon in the address bar to turn on reading mode.

For Google Chrome you have to install the free Readability extension from the Chrome Web Store to do roughly the same thing. You get a permanent button at the top right of the window, and you have to click it and select “Read Now” to go into Reading View.

Making your (Windows) computer easier to use with a sight problem

This is a set of suggestions and tips for helping you or someone you know with problems with sight to use their Windows computer. It’s probably most useful for a technically-minded person looking to help someone with sight loss but still some vision. Age-related sight loss, for example. If you are completely blind you will need a screenreader and more specialist training.

The focus is on changing Windows settings and free and low-cost software. It’s basically the things I would do if I was round your house trying to get your PC set up to be useful for you.

I’m assuming you’re on Windows 10, which has better accessibility features than previous versions. Windows 8 is just about as good, and Windows 7 is okay, but earlier than that and you really should upgrade.

I start, though, with a couple of hardware suggestions.

Get a big TV or monitor

If you have an HDMI output from your computer (most computers do nowadays) you can plug it into a big television or a big monitor to give you a bigger brighter display. A relatively inexpensive 22″ TV will work fine. You can try plugging your TV in to see how it works!

Get a high-visibility physical keyboard

You can buy keyboards with bright big yellow-on-black keys. This will help you find all the key combinations you’re going to be using. For example, from the RNIB Shop:

Black-on-yellow keys and big letters and numbers make this keyboard easier to see and use.

Now on to changing your Windows settings.

Change your display scaling and/or screen resolution

This is surprisingly tricky because there are two settings in Windows that interact.

You can change the screen scaling or DPI (dots per inch). This is in “Start”, “Settings”, “System”, “Display”, “Change the size of text, apps and other items”. Drag the slider left to make things smaller and right to make them bigger.

The Settings, Display dialog that lets you change text size. The slider makes text and anything else on the screen bigger and smaller.

You’ll have to sign out and sign in to see the full effects. You might not be able to drag the slider to make things bigger if you have a low-resolution screen: see “Get a big TV or monitor” above or read on.

Changing the screen scaling or DPI used to work very badly: lots of applications would not display correctly, with overlapping text and missing buttons. Nowadays things work much better. Note that older Windows machines (e.g. Windows 7) won’t let you scale much here so you’re better off with Windows 10.

The alternative to changing the screen scaling or DPI is to change the screen resolution. This is a cruder option, but means every application continues to display correctly. It won’t look pretty to people with good vision, but you probably don’t care about that. This is in “Start”, “Settings”, “System”, “Display”, scroll to the bottom and follow the “Advanced display settings” link, and change the value in the “Resolution” box. The smaller the resolution – the lower the numbers – the bigger everything will get. ScreenResolutionSettingsWindows10

Again, sign out and in to check the full effects.

Finally, things get trickier if you have multiple monitors – like a really big screen plugged into your laptop. You may find some resolutions or scaling levels are unavailable. You could try restricting Windows’ output to just the big monitor you want to use by pressing the Windows key and P together to bring up the Project options, then selecting “Second screen only”. There is more complexity over choosing monitors that I won’t go into here, but “Display” is where you’ll find settings if you look.

Whichever way you do it, some things won’t fit on the screen if you make everything really big. Not much you can do about that.

Make the mouse pointer bigger

“Start”, “Control Panel”, “Hardware and Sound”, and under “Devices and Printers” you’ll see a link for “Mouse”. Go to the “Pointers” tab and select the drop-down in the “Schema” section. There you will find several schemes labelled “extra-large” that make the mouse pointer bigger and easier to see.

Combobox "Scheme" lets you select a different mouse cursor size. Choose "Extra-large"

Switch to a High-Contrast Theme

These make Windows use more contrasting colours for things like window edges and title bars so you can see them more clearly. You can also make the colour scheme yellow or white on black, which might be easier on your eyes.

You can find the High-Contrast themes in “Start”, “Control Panel”, “Appearance and Personalisation”, “Personalisation”. Under “Change the visuals and sounds on your computer” you’ll find four themes labelled “High Contrast”. Pick one of those to try it.

Click/select one of the themes and you get the results instantly.

You will find that signing out and signing in again is needed for the full effect of the themes to be observed.

Make some text in Windows bigger and bolder

If you go to “Start”, “Control Panel”, “Hardware and Sound”, “Display”, you will find a “Change the text size only” section. This lets you make various bits of text in Windows bigger: not that many, sadly, but still some.

Use the comboboxes to change text (font) size for items in Windows.

“Icons” does the icons on the Desktop, which is good and bad: bigger text is easier to read, but there isn’t much space for icon text on the Desktop so you will quickly find it gets truncated. Go to the Desktop itself, right-click the mouse to bring up the context menu, select “View” and “Large Icons” to help.

You may find that you have to sign out and sign in to see the changes. You might also have to select a High Contrast theme (see above) to have the changes take effect.

Try using Windows Narrator (Windows 8 and later)

Windows Narrator is the Microsoft free, built-in screenreader. A screenreader is software that reads out the screen. It wasn’t very powerful before Windows 8, but it’s pretty good now, and the voices it uses for reading are better, and it even works in Microsoft Word. You can start Narrator from “Start” like any program, but you can also set it to start when you start the computer.

A particularly useful function for someone who still has some sight is that you can make it speak whatever you point the mouse at. In the Narrator settings, select “Navigation” and check “Read and interact with the screen using the mouse”.

Windows Narrator settings showing how to turn on "read whatever I point at with the mouse"

This will let you point the mouse at text and hear aloud what it says. Turn off the other speech options and that will stop it chattering when other things happen so you are not confused. Press the Control key at any time to stop Narrator speaking immediately.

You can also easily use Narrator to read a Word document out loud to you. Click in the Word document to choose where to start. Then press the Capslock key and the M key together. Narrator will read and scroll through the document. Again, Control key stops reading.

Try using Windows Magnifier (Windows 8 and later)

Magnifiers make part of the screen bigger, which sounds like a totally perfect solution until you try it and realise that you get completely lost on the screen really easily. You may find that this is therefore too hard to use: try changing the screen scaling or resolution instead (see above).

You can press the Windows key and tap the Plus key or Minus key to turn on and adjust the Magnifier any time you want, so you could use it for some quick magnification to check something out then zoom back out to 100% so you don’t get lost.

Magnifier does have one additional feature that might be useful: you can set magnification to 100% (i.e. no magnification) and turn on “Turn on colour inversion” to make your screen yellow-on-black instead of the normal black-on-white. This has the advantage, or disadvantage, of affecting absolutely everything on the screen. Selecting a High Contrast theme does not – things like videos in web pages and icons and some applications will retain their normal colours. You will almost certainly not need both High Contrast and colour inversion.

Try using NVDA

Non-Visual Desktop Access is a fully-featured free screenreader for completely blind people. It has loads of features and is completely free with a strong volunteer community. However, it’s a “proper” program for blind people, so it’s focused on being powerful but will require some work to learn it – notably the shortcut keys you use to get around.

Try using WindowEyes

This is not a free piece of software. However, Microsoft has done a deal with the makers of WindowEyes, Ai Squared, and if you have a copy of Microsoft Office you can get a free copy of WindowEyes.

WindowEyes is a fully-featured professional screenreader and magnifier, so is more powerful and have more features than Narrator or Magnifier:

I hope these suggestions are helpful! Let me know if I’ve missed anything obvious out.

Additional Notes

  • If changing the screen scaling or DPI works for you but you want things a bit bigger than the slider allows, there is a second place to set the screen scaling or DPI. “Start”, “Control Panel”, “Hardware and Sound”, “Display” has a “Change size of items” section. In there is a link to “set a custom scaling level”, which has a drop-down combo box with more scaling options than you get from the Settings option. This is more likely still to break older applications, but do try it out. On my machine, I can go up to 500% here but only 300% on the Settings option.
  • You can also check the box “Enable pointer shadow” in the Mouse settings to give your mouse pointer a tail as you move it, which again makes it easier to find on the screen: just wiggle it and spot its tail.
  • You can also buy stick-on large bright letters and numbers for your existing keyboard if you prefer not to buy a high-visibility one.