2018-05-15 01:31:15 (edited by flackers 2018-05-15 02:07:01)

I've been messing with polyrhythms lately as part of my on-going struggle to get my limbs to do different things without disrupting each other. In an effort to get a better sense of how common polyrhythms should sound, I came across this metronome that plays them. It's very good, and the dev has obviously gone to a lot of trouble with accessibility, both on the website and with the program itself. From the stuff on the site, he/she clearly views accessibility as an important feature of the software. So kudos for that, but my God is it a tough piece of software to navigate. The dev asks for accessibility feedback, but it's so messy to me, I honestly don't know where to begin.
I just wondered if anyone else had used it, or would like to try it and say what they think because I find it a pretty dizzying piece of software to navigate. It's hard to even explain what's wrong with it. It's just so busy and overly verbose with the strangest keyboard shortcuts and dialog/window behaviour, to the point of being bizarre. Don't yet know what it's like with NVDA. A lot of the overwhelming verbosity was what jaws calls tutor messages, and I don't know how NVDA processes that sort of verbosity, and if it's any different to the way jaws does. Here's the link if you want to check it out, there's a 30 day full feature trial. I'd love to hear what others think of this.
http://bouncemetronome.com/

2018-05-15 10:27:23 (edited by flackers 2018-05-15 18:17:36)

Part of the problem with this software is that I think the mous is unnecessarily being automatically directed to wherever the focus is, and help balloons are being read out every time the focus shifts by tabbing or opening menus etc. Turning off help balloons in screen reader settings for this app really helps a lot to tone down the ridiculous verbosity level. It's still a messy thing to navigate though, but a bit more manageable now. Also I'm noticing that when you tab, it tabs to static text, which is confusing when you first start because you're used to screen readers only tabbing to controllable items, with the associated static text being read out as part of the control. Learning all the key commands is going to be essential if I'm to use this metronome just as a simple click as well as a way to hear complex rhythms. This is definitely an app where the developer needs some feedback to make it work in a more suitable way for screen readers. It's like they've tried really hard to make everything accessible, but it's ended up a bit of a mess.