The authorize screen is not accessible to a screen reader

Hello,
I have been playing around with odrive and I must say it is amazing!
One problem that was rather off putting when I first installed Odrive was the first screen I was given was not accessible to my screen reader. I could not click the button to authorize my account. I tried OCRing the text and all that came out was random letters and numbers. So currently there is no way for a blind user to independently authorize or deauthorize their account.
This is really sad because this is a really amazing app and first impressions go a very long way in forming the user’s opinion of the app. I was super close to uninstalling odrive and giving it a horrible review to my friends, but then I showed one of my sighted friends and they were able to click some invisible button which brought up the html page to authorize an account.
If all the dialogues could be on the HTML page, it would be perfect! Otherwise is there another native widget or something using Java access Bridge (I think it is in Java) that will tell the screen reader to hit enter to authorize or deauthorize?
If not, change the title of the window to say “Hit enter to authorize or deauthorize your account” and allow the user to hit enter and open up the html page.
Other than this, ODrive seems to be perfect!
Thanks,

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Thanks for notifying us about this @brandonkeithbiggs. We’ll take a look at it.

Glad to hear everything else is working well for you!

Hey @brandonkeithbiggs,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We’d definitely like to solve this problem, so I’d like to try and reproduce what you’re experiencing. Could you tell us what screenreader you’re using? This will help us step through the entire process and fix stuff where it might be missing.

Hello,
I use:

NVDA, a free open source screen reader. It has a mode for sighted developers. Just install it, then once it is installed, press insert+n to open up the NVDA menu, go down to tools, then to speech viewer. That will open a little box that shows what NVDA reads. You can turn off speech by pressing insert+s.

I would love to test any little concepts you have for making an accessible screen.

Also, as I mentioned in another thread, the send diagnostics screen is not accessible either.
If you let me know what library and language you use to program the screens, I may be able to help find how to make the widgets accessible.
Thanks!

Awesome. Thanks @brandonkeithbiggs! I’m going to get this installed and familiarize myself with it a bit. I will definitely keep you in the loop & I really appreciate your willingness to help! There’s a good chance I’ll have some questions. Thanks :slight_smile:

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Hey @brandonkeithbiggs,

Tony and I were able to reproduce the issue you were experiencing and we’re going get an engineer on it for a fix. Right now, I’ve only tested it on Windows - NVDA was Windows only. So I’m going to make sure everything is all good on Mac as well.

Do you have any recommendations for Screen readers on Mac? I know they have Accessibility Settings that do text/screen to voice, is that what a Mac user would rely on in this case?

Thanks again for letting us know and please feel free to let us know any other times or places in the app or web this happens - this is really important to us. I’ll keep you posted as to when this makes it into the app.

PS. I’m a fellow/former Pioneer myself! :slight_smile: I got my masters from East Bay in Multimedia Design back in 2012. Small world :slight_smile:

Voice Over is the only screen reader on Mac and you get it by going into accessibility settings yes.
On Linux Orca is the screen reader and you can download it from the package repo for your distro.
But if your controls are registered as native controls, then all screen readers can read them, no matter what platform you use.

You guys were super smart and used Windows explorer and webpages for everything which makes life much easier accessibility wise.

That is soooo cool you are a Pioneer as well! You left right before I came in, so we share professors, but we probably never met. Ian keeps asking me to do the multimedia masters! LOL

Have you experienced problems with Native Windows apps or tools being hard for the screen reader to read? To me, it seemed to recognize scroll overs as I moved around in the tray menu and navigated between desktop, and I tried a few other apps with success. We’d like to eventually move all those intro screens into the Native Windows UI, it just hasn’t made it to the top of the priority list. But, if it made accessibility better, that could definitely elevate its importance.

As for Mac, when I was using it, it wasn’t as easy-to-use or navigate around as it was with the NVDA screen reader on my Surface. It just wasn’t precise and didn’t have any scroll over recognition like the NVDA - I had to use my mouse to make a selection in order for it to read - which is just a much more difficult interaction. If there is a better one, I’d like to use it, test it, and recommend it for folks with visual impairments. I’ll keep playing with Mac and see what else I can glean.

Ian is right, the program is pretty awesome - especially for music folks. Hdez was my mentor when I was there and that’s really how I got into development and design stuff like I’m doing now at odrive. Definitely worth checking out if new tech and nerdy stuff like that is your jam :slight_smile:

Hey @brandonkeithbiggs - just wanted to update you because its been a while. So we did some testing around with the NVDA software and found a few other holes that we have since fixed up. But we found that the initial onboarding issue you raised is a tricky one to fix because of how we have things implemented. That being said, we know how to fix the problem and will do so, just can’t give you an exact date of when it will make it to the top of the engineering list. Raising this issue has definitely bumped it up higher. So thanks for raising it. I’ll try to update you when we are able to get it all shored up.

Good morning,

I am in a similar position re: authorizing the program. Fresh install on a new laptop. I use JAWS, which is a similar screen reader to NVDA. There is no spoken text in the window.

in hopes of making things work, I looked in the usual config places (program files, user settings and registry, but cannot find any configs to manually edit. Is a manual config possible, or does one need to edit the config within the authorization window?

Many thanks,

Todd

Hi Todd,
This is still an outstanding item for us, but you should be able to just hit enter on the initial setup screen that pops-up. That will open a browser window to login.

Can you give that a shot?

Hi Tony,

That worked. Interestingly, I had to refresh the page by pressing 55 before the links to the different sign in providers became active. Had to do this twice before receiving the confirmation from the sign in provider.

cudos to you an the team for putting this product out there. It is a great add in to my toolbox.

Hmm. I’ll have to look into that. Thanks for the update! Glad you are back in business.

Hello,
I’m having difficulties deleting items in my trash and I’m not sure if it is accessibility related.
I open up the Odrive menu and choose “trash menu” and press right arrow. I then hit enter on “empty trash and sink all deletes” and nothing happens. If I then press left or right arrow, I then hear NVDA say “unknown” Pressing up and down arrows just says what’s in my trash.
I wonder if having whole top-level accounts in my trash is the problem. I connected my Amazon S3 cloud and my school Google Drive account to Odrive, but neither worked, so I deleted them on the desktop (I could not figure out how to delete them in the web view (there should be some way, but “delete” was not on any page I could find)).

I also can’t figure out how to sink all items in a folder. I would like all my files in Google drive to sink to my computer, but I can’t figure out how. On the desktop I right-click on the folder I want sinked and click “sink”. Then a screen pops up that says “sink” It is not readable, so I just hit enter. Nothing happens, so I exit out of it.
I tried OCRing the “sink” screen and I couldn’t figure out what it said. It just gave me a list of some folders I had in my %user% folder.

Is there some way to sink and delete?
My business just got Google Drive, so I want to start having both personal and business files in the same place. I also wonder if it will help transferring some business files I had in Google Drive to my business account?
Thanks,

Hi @brandonkeithbiggs,
We still have some gaps in this area in our Windows UI. I created a couple of work-arounds to better support folks who are visually impaired here:

I need to look into the trash issue and see why you are having difficulty there.

Thanks! this is awesome! When will it make it into the normal release? :slight_smile:
I found out what the problem is on the web client:
In the table there is an unlabled graphic that just shows up as a blank cell with NVDA. Could some text please be placed in that

tag saying “options” and be clickable with the enter key? What would probably be better is if there were just two small buttons that were in the tag that said: “unlink” and “edit”. This would save some clicking. Also, something that is a little nicer than having a menu pop up above the table asking if I’m sure I want to remove is an alert of some kind that pops up. I think there is some role attribute you can have that will make what you currently have an alert for me and not change the look. Because I click remove and it’s still there. I have to guess that there is something else on the screen. Also, role events for errors when you click on a file would be nice, because I wonder what’s going on when my files don’t show up in the table. Sometimes it takes a while to load, especially if there is an error.
Thanks,

Hello,
One more thing, Where can I see what percentage of sink Odrive is at?
Dropbox says the percentage right in the system tray. Could Odrive please do the same? (Or say how many files it still has to sink or delete?)
Thanks,

Thanks for the feedback! I have added it to our dev ticket tracking this issue.

As for sync status, we have a few feature requests for this, but nothing planned at the moment:
https://forum.odrive.com/t/show-overall-sync-status/207
https://forum.odrive.com/t/sync-progress-indicator-and-graphs/1219