BBC Live Radio: local stations updated

I’ve now switched the all the BBC stations, national and local, to their new Audio Factory streams. Everything is working fine on my Windows 8.1 machine, but some points:

  • There are lots of different streams to choose from. UK or non-UK, and different bitrates (48,000 to 339,200), and different encodings (HE-AAC and AAC-LC).
  • I’ve chosen the non-UK streams because I have overseas users, although I understand that these streams will go quiet if the station is broadcasting something for which the BBC does not have international rights (e.g. sporting events). So I should probably do some detection, or provide an option, in the future.
  • This also means that I’m using the HE-AAC streams, for good or for ill, at a bitrate of 101,760. This might annoy some audiophiles, but I’m not one, so I’ll wait until someone complains.
  • Everything might be fine on my Windows 8.1 machine, but older Windows might not support the HE-AAC stream without installing a codec or other component. If you find nothing will play, do get in touch at support@webbie.org.uk.

Meanwhile, the BBC iPlayer Radio 8 is completely broken. Over the last week all the Windows Media streams that it used have been shut off. The good news is that lots of people complained to the BBC, so they’ve got in touch with me and promised to help. So far I’ve got the program to display the new catalogue, which means that you can still see programmes, but none of them play yet – and I don’t know why. I hope to get a fix sometime next week if they get back to me! (I can get the URL of the stream to play, but it doesn’t play in VLC or Windows Media Player).

BBC Live Radio stations fixed (BBC turning off Windows Media streams)

This week the BBC turned off their Windows Media streams. In English this means that the particular way the BBC provided their live radio stations over the Internet changed. This broke the BBC Live Radio 2 program.

However, the BBC provide a different way to access the radio stations, so this weekend I’ve switched the BBC Live Radio program to using this new mechanism for the stations that broke, and it all seems to work. This doesn’t require a new version of the program, since which stream to use is controlled from the WebbIE site.

It also means that you gain BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra and the World Service is working again, which is good.

I notice that the local stations kept working, so I’ve left them alone: it’s entirely likely they’ll break at some point and I’ll have to amend them. But there you go. It would be great if the BBC told me about changes, so do lobby them! Mail the BBC Trust.

Update to BBC iPlayer TV 7.3.5

Details of the 10 Jan 2015 7.3.5 update to BBC iPlayer TV

The BBC iPlayer TV application broke in December: programmes would no longer start playing. I’ve now fixed this. The problem is that a Microsoft security update for Internet Explorer 11 stops my program talking to the web page to start the programme. People with Internet Explorer 10 were unaffected. People with Internet Explorer 11 would have to start programmes themselves. This is now fixed, and programmes should always start themselves correctly.

However, the security update prevents the skip and pause functions working: if you have Internet Explorer 11, you’ll find that these controls all disable after the programme loads and starts, and do not work with key presses. Sorry about that!

Technical notes on the problem.

WebbIE 4.5.0 now available

I’ve updated WebbIE 4 today, with some minor changes and bugfixes.

WebbIE 4 has supported the new HTML5 AUDIO and VIDEO elements for a couple of years, playing then in the page where they are found with a dedicated player control to make it easier for screenreader users – just play and stop, but that’s usually just what you need. I’ve now added ability to download and/or open the content of these VIDEO and AUDIO HTML5 elements directly in your default media player: the user just has to hit the Open button in the media player, and it will be opened in whatever is the default media handler is for your system. Note that this doesn’t work for embedded data URI elements! There are also new shortcut keys for the media player: Ctrl+P to play, Ctrl+O to open, and Space to stop.

Refresh in WebbIE re-parses the page, effectively, but doesn’t go and get the page anew. You can now press Shift and Control and R to perform a “proper” page refresh, reloading it from the server.

You can now open saved MHT files from File > Open, and I’ve added a TeamViewer download link to the Help menu for support purposes.

Finally, WebbIE no longer changes the case of URLs you type into the address bar, so if you are trying to access a web page on a case-sensitive server – like a Unix server – you’ll now be able to reach it.

Update to BBC iPlayer TV 7.3 restores Audio Described category

New BBC iPlayer TV version 7.3. At the beginning of November 2014 the BBC removed various data feeds from their website, including the one that gave the list of TV programmes available through BBC iPlayer with Audio Description. This meant that all the categories in the WebbIE BBC iPlayer TV programme broke overnight.

There’s no sign of the BBC restoring them, so I’ve removed all the categories in BBC iPlayer TV except for Audio Described. For Audio Described, since it’s so popular, I’ve hacked some code to pull the available programmes: it takes a little while to load, and you don’t get as much detail, but it works.

Other minor changes: I’ve added a Flash item to the Help menu that links straight to the Adobe site so it’s easier test/install Flash: Flash is the number 1 problem for users in using iPlayer TV. I’ve also added a TeamViewer menu item for easy technical support, simplified the UI for screenreader users tabbing around, and fixed turning off the voice that announces what is going on.

Updated BBC iPlayer Radio and Live Radio

I’ve updated the BBC iPlayer Radio application. Nothing major: you now get the BBC West Midlands radio station, and you can do copy (Control and C) when in the programme list to copy the name of the programme, for whatever reason.

More importantly, I’ve tweaked the user interface – the controls and their arrangement on the main window. This means that it should work better with your screenreader: it had a cool SplitContainer, which lets sighted people drag the centre dividing line of the program to resize the Station and Programme list. Sadly, testing indicated that this got in the way of screenreader usage, so I’ve removed it. This kind of careful UI design is necessary in producing software that isn’t just accessible, but is also usable, and that’s the idea of the WebbIE programs.

Minor tweaks to the Live Radio application too: I’ve fixed the BBC Radio 5 Live, World Service and Classic FM stations. Sadly, the BBC Arabic and Russian appear to be gone, so I’ve removed them.

The other item is that I’ve made it easy in BBC iPlayer Radio to launch the TeamViewer remote support program. This lets me connect to a user’s PC and see what they are doing, and try to fix things. I used to ship this with WebbIE 3, and I’ve missed it in the WebbIE 4 range of programs, so it’s now available under the Help menu: just select it and it will download and run. I’ll gradually roll this out to the other WebbIE programs.

One Switch Mouse

Today we can make available a program for people with significant physical impairments, such as muscular dystrophy. One Switch Mouse was developed by Claro Software in 2010 and has generously been made available by them for free download from the WebbIE site.

Most of the WebbIE software has been based around screenreader users – typically visually-impaired or blind people. However, there are switch users of the WebbIE programs, and a few of the programs have been specially customised to work with switch access: using a dedicated single-clicking device instead of a mouse or keyboard, like a joystick or customised button.

Switch users typically have very limited movement. Progressive muscle wasting conditions like Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS – also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) can leave people only able to make very limited, very weak movements – perhaps only a head move, or finger, or toe, or mouth puff.

However, many of these conditions leave the user’s cognitive functions intact – you’re as smart and aware as ever, you just can’t move, or talk, or write. This is incredibly frustrating, of course.

One Switch Mouse tries to help. The mouse is controlled by using one switch, and timing how long you hold it down to control direction of movement and mouse clicking. You can move the mouse around the screen and left-click, right-click, double-clicking, and even hold down and select. In conjunction with an on-screen keyboard for typing you therefore have complete control of a standard Windows computer – and all using one switch. It even works on the Windows login screen and the secure desktop!

One Switch Mouse is free: if you or someone you know or support might benefit, do please download it and try it out.

Creating switch-accessible menus

The One Switch site, dedicated to creating accessible games for switch users, has written an article about how to create a switch-accessible menu.

A particularly interesting tip is “start one-switch scanning, then switch to two-switch scanning if the user operates a second switch”. This makes your program one- or two-switch agnostic – you are handling both use cases with a simple detection of a feature, rather than requiring another setting screen.

Of course, some of the tips might be detrimental for screenreader users (such as the typical WebbIE users). For example, many switch users benefit from menus or lists that loop – when you go off the bottom of the list you start again at the top. But screenreader users generally like to know when they are at the end of a list (WebbIE programs tend to play a sound to help identify the beginning or end) because it provides orientation, since they can’t see the screen, and jumping up and down the list is easier for them (usually by pressing the initial key for a menu item – which is a reason to alphabetically-order your lists). The key thing is to identify your audience.

Markdown

 

Many people with visual impairments (i.e. screenreader users) find it hard to use WYSIWYG word processors like Microsoft Word. One slip of the finger and SUDDENLY YOU’RE TYPING ALL IN CAPS OR ITALICS OR WORSE.

Sure, screenreaders can announce boldness and font and italics as you go, but given every character can have dozens of attributes and you need to get on with your writing – that is, you want to work on the actual text, not what it looks like – that quickly becomes unfeasible. But you want to work with more than plain text: you want to use font and bold and other rich text formatting, because people expect that and it can help with understanding for sighted users.

A better solution for at least one blind user is Markdown. This is a plain-text way of writing formatted text: you write in plain text, but you use a special subset of HTML to add formatting like tables to your text. Then it converts from your Markdown to valid full HTML documents, which look great in Word or can be easily converted to another format.

It’s not for everyone: many users would probably be better with some way of restricting the formatting they can apply so that they can’t go wrong. But for technical screenreader users it might be a way to create attractive formatted text far more easily.

WebbIE 4.3 – some HTML5 fun

New WebbIE 4 – more support for HTML5 and WAI-ARIA

WebbIE 4.3 has some cool new features based on the latest HTML5 and WAI-ARIA technology.

HTML5 is the latest update to how web pages work. It has a number of things that are helpful for screenreader users:

  • A web page can have a MAIN element. This is good for the Crop function in WebbIE, which will use this to help decide what to crop and what not.
  • Forms have a bit more definition, so email input boxes, sliders and progress bars have appeared. This is good for WebbIE because when you try to set one of these inputs you can get a special custom experience that works with your screenreader. For email address inputs, WebbIE will check that you have typed a correct email address and explain what is wrong. This is useful since it can be hard to correctly type and then fix email addresses with a screenreader, letter by letter. For sliders, WebbIE puts up a pop-up window containing a standard slider with the values all correctly set so your screenreader should recognise and operate it perfectly. WebbIE also presents progress bars sensibly in the text view.
  • WebbIE 4 has always supported the AUDIO and VIDEO elements, so you can play and control music and video in web pages easily.

WAI-ARIA is a mechanism to help screenreader users use complex web pages like Facebook. Facebook uses special WAI-ARIA code to label parts of its page with information – the small flags and images that mouse users can click on.

  • WebbIE supports the aria-label and aria-labelledby attributes, so more elements on a web page will have correct names and text – fewer “link: config.php” type entries.

Of course, this all pre-supposes that web pages use these elements correctly – which as we know is often not the case. Still, where a website has taken the effort, WebbIE will support these features and produce a better experience.

There are other HTML5 elements, but I’ve decided to add support to WebbIE as and when these elements are supported in Internet Explorer. That way WebbIE will be more reliable and perform better. This will be a problem for Windows XP users, who can’t update Internet Explorer past version 8, but I’m afraid that I have to advance WebbIE to keep it relevant so they will have to stay on WebbIE 3 or find that some features do not work as advertised. I’ll always keep WebbIE 3 around, just like I still do WebbIE for Windows ’98 – I just won’t support it any more.

Finally, there are many performance improvements.

  • WebbIE loads much, much faster.
  • Lots of bugfixes: also, WebbIE will no longer report any problems but will soldier on as best it can.
  • Improved support for the HTML “LABEL” element, so more form elements (e.g. input boxes) will have meaningful labels in the text and useful prompts when you try to use them.
  • WebbIE now supports “localhost” as a URL.
  • WebbIE once again defaults to showing the Internet Explorer homepage. People generally expect web browsers to go to a home page on the Internet: loading your Favourites might well be a better mechanism – and it is still there – but it took people by surprise and caused confusion. This only applies to new WebbIE installations: people running WebbIE 4 already will have to change their settings to suit.

Do try out the latest WebbIE and let me know what you think.