Cakewalk and screen reader accessibility

[Keith Wessel]

Hi,

 

I'm blind and use Cakewalk with a screen reader -- specifically NVDA. I've always been very pleased with how easy most functions in Cakewalk are for a blind user to use. Lately, though, it seems like the developers are using some new custom Windows UI controls that don't play well with screen readers. For instance, I used to be able to click on a track to add effects to it. No, when I do that, the screen reader simply says "menu", and I can't select anything in it. I can sometimes randomly guess with the arrow and enter keys, but I usually end up getting sighted assistance. That started happening a couple months ago. Then more recently, the file -> export option stopped displaying a standard dialogue box that the screen reader could read. It now tells me I'm in export audio, but I can't read any of the controls.

 

I'd like to know if there are any other screen reader users out there who have encountered these issues and, more importantly, if there's a way to change this behavior so that these menus work with my screen reader again. I found a very old item in the Sonar knowledge base:

 

https://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/2007013303/Accessibility-in-SONAR-X2a

 

That article explains a registry hack that can be used to enable accessibility functions in Cakewalk. But I don't know if that registry key is still used by Cakewalk, and even if it was, it doesn't sound like it addresses the issues I'm encountering.

 

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

[msmcleod]

@Keith Wessel - we've done some work on the Audio Export dialog to support accessibility / screen readers. 

We've also removed the default binding of the Tab key to "Move to Next Transient Marker", so that the tab key is available for general control navigation.  Of course users are free to manually re-bind this key within Keyboard Shortcuts.

This will be available in the next release.