Hi Robbie,
thanks for giving the feedback - hope that the course went well.
Just to explain the motivation for the current structure of the metadata
editor. The first column is the tag name and the second column is its
value. There are some predefined tags present, such as Track Artist, Track
title, and so on, and the user can also add additional tags, and so the
cells in the first column below the predefined tags are editable.
How screen readers read the cells is very verbose and it's not very helpful
having things read like edit unavailable all the time. This problem arises
because of a problem with Jaws. Some time ago, the role of the cells in the
accessibility interface was set to cell, and both Jaws and NVDA read the
contents of the table with far less distracting verbosity. But then when a
new version of Jaws was bought out, it wouldn't read the contents of the
cells if its role was set to cell. So the role had to changed to text, and
that resulted in all the verbosity.
Although it might in theory be possible to restructure the editor so that
there is only on element for each tag, in practice, due to the amount of
work involved, and the small number of active developers, this is unlikely
to happen.
However, how screen readers read the table may be able to be improved.
For example, in File Explorer in Windows, if you are in details view, and
you arrow across the read the details, and then arrow down, it reads the
name of the file in the new row, and then the value of the detail for that
file.
In may be possible at some time to look into doing something similar in the
metadata editor: that is, if you're in the second column and you arrow
down, it reads the tag name and then it's value.
Again, thanks for the feedback, and do provide more when you have it,
David.
On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 8:28 AM, Robbie <tickleberryfun@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi!
Recently I gave a course on Audacity for screen reader users. When
explaining the metadata editor, some users were at first uncertain
regarding the use of labels and edit fields. As you tab through the
dialogue, each tag has what I presume to be a label, saying for instance
"Tag Artist Name". However, JAWS as well as NVDA say "Edit Field not
available". One more Tab focusses the actual edit field, where the screen
reader will say "Value Empty" without naming the associated label. So, that
field's purpose is only implied by the fact that it's next in line in the
Tab cycle.
Up to now I sort of took it in stride and didn't give much thought to it.
But in my course, there was some confusion over this. Why would some edit
fields be not available and others have no apparent role assigned.
Once explained, the use of the editor doesn't present a difficulty, but it
does seem untidy come to think of it. Really, there should only be one
element for each tag, giving the field label and allowing text to be
entered. This would also halve the number of Tabs required to go through
the editor.
Can this be done?
Cheers! Robbie
