2018-06-14 05:16:50 (edited by Orko 2018-06-14 17:16:23)

Before I lost my vision, one of those must have programs I always had around was CCleaner. But after I started having to use a screen reader to continue my love affair with computers, I was disappointed to find that the check box in a buttons CCleaner uses in it setting screens weren't accessible, or more accurately, their status wasn't accessible. So I reluctantly decided to do without it.

After almost five years, I finally decided that I just had to have CCleaner or something similar, so these past several days, I've been searching high and low for an alternate. I've looked at quite a few programs, some free, some not, and the only one that came close hasn't been updated for about twelve years, prior to Vista and the UAC. I passed on that one thinking that a program that old would likely do more harm than good.

Then while searching around I found an article that said that if you use JAWS, which I do, you can expose those check boxes in buttons by using the Change Window Class facility in JAWS to treat all the buttons in CCleaner as check boxes. So I tried it, after first learning how to use the feature, and it works! Yay! CCleaner is back! Though it has a lot of check boxes and no buttons! (wink)

I just spent the last couple of hours going through the almost 600 cookies on my system choosing the ones I want to keep, when I was done the list of cookies to keep had only about 40 cookies in it! So now I could turn on having it delete cookies along with the other things I have it do when Windows starts.

So, if there any other JAWS users using CCleaner out there, any tips you might have to make working with it a bit easier and simpler, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks!

2018-06-14 06:14:54

I used to use this but I found it deleted to much stuff and tended to mess up things.

Kingdom of Loathing name JB77

2018-06-14 06:17:25

Funny Orko, I can't speak for Jaws, but I've been using C cleaner first with Supernova, now with NVDA for god knows how many years and have never had an issue with the buttons. I started using it when AVG's Pc tuneup when the same way as all of AVg's other products, namely going from very accessible to very inaccessible, and found C cleaner a major improvement, faster, more efficient etc.

The cookies are easy, since there are two lists, a basic list of everything and a keep list, and all you need to do to keep a cookie is go up and down with the arrows, use the applications key and hit k. Its rather the same process as when clearing out browser add ons, removing programs or aps from the computer etc.

In general I've always been very happy with C cleaner's accessibility, indeed so happy I bought the full version and have it now installed on three different machines, my desktop, my laptop and my lady's laptop.
Admittedly, I don't think you get a lot for the commercial version other than auto updates and automatic tracking of things like memory usage, but I'm happy to support the program as its done a lot of good for me over the years.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-06-14 06:42:52

Yeah same here, no accessibility problems, been using it for years.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2018-06-14 11:52:46

I believe you can also tell it to use an ini file and edit the settings by editing said file.

2018-06-14 13:08:15 (edited by Orko 2018-06-14 14:39:30)

That's very possible, I've noticed that JAWS often stops looking at the first control, so the check box inside a button gets missed unless you tell JAWS to look for it using the Window classes feature, where NVDA may continue to drill down until there are no more controls so the check box doesn't get missed.

Update: I just tried it and I have to admit that in this case NVDA does a better job than JAWS out of the box, but once you configure JAWS to treat CCleaner's buttons as check boxes,, they are pretty much equal.

Yeah, I've always checked to have it store its settings in an ini file, not for accessibility, but because its the easiest way to have a record of the cookies I want to keep.

And, choosing which cookies to keep wasn't the problem, remember I've used this program before, it was just the sheer quantity of them that made it a challenge.

As far as deleting too much and screwing things up, I believe that's on the user because you can configure the program so that it deletes only what you're comfortable with. For example I turn off all the application cleaning, and I don't have it emptying out the recycle bin either, in fact, most of what it can "clean" I have turned off. I believe I only have about a half a dozen things actually turned on for regular cleaning at startup.

I do not use its registry cleaner, I've never believed that automatic cleaning of the system registry was a particularly good idea. Microsoft apparently agrees, with all the registry cleaners out there, the one company that knows more about it than anyone else has chosen not to create one of their own. There has to be a reason.

If I decide to give Piriform any money, I'll just donate to the free version because the pro version being a subscription service sounds more like greedware to me, especially when they tell you all about how you can have your subscription automatically renewed each year, but never bother to tell you what they mean by the program being a subscription service. Besides, I don't need any of the added features of the pro version anyway.

2018-06-14 14:43:23

Oddly enough I noticed I was getting a lot fewer freezes and crashes once I started cleaning the registry, but then again  I am also getting less freezes and crashes on windows 10 generally.

I don't mind going through cookies personally, especially when I'm trying out incremental games,  and generally I want C cleaner to empty the recycle bin since generally if I delete something I want to delete it, however the one and only issue I've ever had with C cleaner was it deleting of the flash temporary settings files which stored my save game for corruption of champions. In fairness I should've known this, but a combination of the button in game to save to file not working properly, and me forgetting what  cleaner does  my save game go bye bye, but never mind.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-06-14 14:50:24

Oh I've seen the improvements you can get with registry cleaning. Now, that was like an older system on XP etc. The thing though is unless you're having problems, no real reason to do it. somewhere over 2,000 found issues, yeah, and that computer went from barely working to decent again.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2018-06-14 15:48:21 (edited by Orko 2018-06-14 17:15:39)

I didn't say I don't clean the registry, I said that I don't let automatic cleaners do it. I wrote my own registry cleaner that does it the way I feel it should be done, both in the analysis stage and the repair stage, it does the analysis automatically and builds a database of entries that need attention, along with what it recommends should be done, but there is no option to apply all the changes and be done. Instead it presents each one with its recommendation and asks the user to choose what to do, and if the user decides to make a change, the original entry is backed up so that the change can be undone if needed. Yeah, it takes longer, but in the end you don't brick your computer because some cleaning program made an unwise decision, and the user didn't bother to make a backup.

2018-06-14 18:56:27

Hmmm, never had any registry breaking issues from C Cleaner personally, though then again other than one rather irritation occasion when my xp machine was running with no loaded user accounts at startup I generally kept out of the registry since I was too worried about buggering something up by mistake and my knolidge of computing has always been on the basis of "I want to do X, how do I do X" rather than anything seriously practical or concrete big_smile.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-06-14 19:01:48

Where can I get your reg cleaner. Is it open source?

2018-06-14 20:38:56

Hello. Any ideas about getting the status of the check boxes to work with nvda? I have written to the company and they say they will look into it but this was months ago.  Also narrator does not read the status of the check boxes either. I'm not switching back to JFW just for that part of it.

2018-06-14 20:52:11

Though I did call it a cleaner, it's more accurate to call it a registry advisor than a cleaner because it does nothing but analyze the registry, a user has to actually direct it to make a change and it only changes the entry being looked at. I wrote it for my own use so there was never a need to make it open source or to release it to anybody so it has never been available online or anywhere else.

@Dark

The reason I don't trust registry cleaners is because I've seen too many of them make stupid or lazy mistakes, sometimes with the potential for catastrophic results.

Agood example is one rather highly touted and pricey cleaner would search for missing files the registry refers to, which is a common repair that many cleaners do, but this one assumed that the reference had only the file name and no command line parameters, so instead of looking for drive:\path\filename.ext, it would look for drive:\path\filename.ext /x /y /z, which it would obviously not find, so it would delete the reference, which had nothing wrong with it, except for  the potential to seriously break something if it is deleted.

2018-06-14 21:04:29

I use the portable version of CCleaner now, because otherwise it installs Avast by default, and it's very difficult if not impossible to uncheck that offer if you're using a screen reader. This is unacceptable. At least when they were bundling Chrome, that was a useful program. Also, you could uncheck it if you really didn't want it there. But giving people no choice but to install an antivirus is a dangerous practice. I would be willing to bet that even a lot of sighted people get it by accident, not knowing what it is, or, at the very least, not understanding that having two antivirus programs running is never a good idea. Sure, if you use Windows Defender, that becomes a non-issue since it will get disabled, but what if you're using another third party solution? That can have very bad results.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2018-06-14 22:29:57

Interesting!

When I installed it yesterday, the options to install Chrome and the Google IE toolbar where there but there was no sign of the Avast option, and no Avast was installed.

Maybe they got enough complaints about it that they pulled it out.

It's funny though, if they recommend using Chrome, what is the point of offering the Google IE toolbar other than the few pennies they make for packaging it  in their installer.

I'd be tempted to switch to the portable version too to avoid having to deal with their polluted installer, but I believe that while I used it to try out the window class solution, I noted that the option to save the settings to an ini file wasn't there but there was a cfg file that I assume is the portable version's ini file. I didn't inspect it so I don't know if it is as editable as the ini file is.

2018-06-14 23:29:21

When I switched to the portable version, I took the ini file I had previously, and stuck it in the folder once it had been extracted. The portable version then respected the settings I had used.

As for Avast no longer being offered, that would be a relief if that's the case, because as recently as a month or two ago this was definitely happening. I also hope people screamed from the rooftops about that, because as I said, I think it was a really crappy thing to do.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2018-06-15 00:32:09

Hmm.. Maybe it looks for the ini file and if it finds it, uses it, but if it doesn't, it uses a cfg file instead, it's also possible that the setting was there and I missed it because I didn't go over it while browsing the user interface.

A feature or option I'd like to see is an option to hide all the stuff that is only applicable to the pro version as I have zero intention of ever buying that version, it doesn't have anything I want or need.

2018-06-15 02:34:28

I was able to uncheck the avast offer box with NVDA using object nav actually...

2018-06-15 02:55:41

I did the same as defender as regards Avast with nvda or Supernova, though its worth noting that C cleaner itself is quite good at removing avast anyway not to mention other components you don't want should you install them by accident , and unlike say Avg which is impossible to remove without sighted assistance C cleaner can uninstall avast no problem (makes you wonder about its worth as an antivirus).

One miner advantage of course in actually having the pro version is that you don't get bothered by that sort of thing during updates since C cleaner updates itself.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-06-15 04:12:31

Curiosity is a dangerous thing. I got curious about this packaging of Avast with CCleaner, so I reran the installer to see if I could find the Avast option or verify that it was no longer there.

Unfortunately, the installer detects that CCleaner is already installed, so it didn't offer up any of the packaged options of Chrome or the Google IE toolbar.

When I first installed CCleaner, I was already aware of their polluted installer, so I was very careful to be sure all unwanted crap was unchecked before continuing, so if Avast had been there, I'd have seen it, but it wasn't. I suspect that the court of public opinion convinced them that adding Avast to an already polluted installer wasn't a good idea, so they withdrew it.

I won't do it now, but when they release their next version or update, I'm going to follow Turtlepower17's example and switch to the portable version and skip their polluted installer altogether.

@austingrace

There must be something going on with your NVDA install, I have a very vanilla install of NVDA on my system for those rare instances where JAWS gets cranky and it reads CCleaner's check box buttons with no trouble.

There is an issue with CCleaner's other check boxes though, in that the status of the check box doesn't appear to be available to the screen reader until it's been toggled, but since these are all two state check boxes, just tap on it twice to expose its status. This is an issue with both JAWS and NVDA.

2018-06-15 04:50:20

When I installed a new version of CCleaner a couple of months ago, I was also able to uncheck the box to install Avast initially. However, the first time I launched the program, it went and installed Avast by itself, which was quite worrying. I wasn't even sure it was the real thing, I was convinced it was some sort of malware masquerading as Avast until I thoroughly checked my system.

I didn't have the experience of being able to get rid of Avast so easily, either. I needed to download their uninstall tool, which thankfully ran from within Windows without an issue even though it says it needs to be ran in safe mode. Perhaps running it as an administrator did the trick. Anyway, it's a shame, because years ago, Avast was quite a respectable and accessible antivirus.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2018-06-15 04:53:40

I was put off avast when I bought a reconditioned laptop which came with avast preinstalled (this was in the xp days when windows didn't come with its own antivirus), and it was utterly inaccessible.

For me at least the checkboxes in C cleaner with nvda say "Partially selected checkbox" and even then, its only the check boxes in the alerts which do that, mostly you can deal with whatever they do through settings anyway.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-06-15 04:58:54

Funny, I used to run Avast on XP back in 2009 or so, and it was very accessible in those days. Also, that siren that played when it detected a threat was priceless. I've never seen anything like it since. Accessibility did completely go down the crapper about a year or so later, and it never recovered.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2018-06-15 05:02:00

Yeah Avast was the best from like 09 to 2011 maybe? I forget but 1 update killed it saddly. It used to be very accessible though!

Kingdom of Loathing name JB77

2018-06-15 06:34:23

If I remember correctly, I got that xp laptop in 2012 which was presumably post Avast's exploration of the depths of the nethermost crapper as far as accessibility went big_smile.

Ironically, AVG started to get inaccessabler (which is a totally cromulant word), in version 2013, then by 2015 it was positively unusable, even impossible to uninstall thanks to their stupid custom messages for perfectly normal windows things like installers.

That's actually one thing I really like about Windows defender, that since its part of windows, it has a standard interface.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)