Hi Mike,
The problem of VoiceOver's not being able to navigate to, or detect, a
third-party icon that is place on the status menu bar is an
accessibility issue that's come up before. The issue is, the standard
way that Apple gives third-party developers to insert status menu
icons via “NSStatusItem” does not expose those icons to VoiceOver.
Apple's own proprietary coding, using “menuExtra”, does allow such
icons to be exposed. For some programs, not having access to the
status bar menu icon is not an issue. For other programs, you can
open the Contents bundle and check whether there are hooks to
AppleScript the functions. I described how to do that in a reply to
one user who wanted to run a program that kept his laptop from going
to sleep. This tack was also used by another VO user who had to
install a VPN client that supported Open VPN used at his University.
For some apps, like Dropbox and JustNotes (which I no longer use now
that Notational Velocity support for Simplenot is available), you can
use window chooser menu in Finder (VO-F2 twice) and select "-
untitled-" to navigate to the status menu icon on the menu bar.
(Don't ask me what's going on there, but when using both Dropbox and
JustNotes you had two instances of "-untitiled-" appearing.) Rogue
Amoeba used to install a haxie for their Sound Source freebie (a quick
way to switch audio input and output sources from the menu bar and to
control their volume), but finally gave up doing this for the
transition to Snow Leopard. As a consequence, Rogue Amoeba's Sound
Source freebie was accessible from the status menu bar in Leopard, but
is no longer so in Snow Leopard. You can read more about this,
including the detailed comments about the problem in the link to the
Rogue Amoeba blog, in my archived post on "Accessible Status Menu Bar
Icons and VoiceOver":
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg09249.html
I'll also link a more recent post called "VPN revisited" from the
person who had to use the AppleScript work-around to get his VPN
client working, since that refers to his consultations with the author
of one of the software packages, and statements about the awareness on
the part of developers that this situation with the "NSStatusItem"
argument that they are supposed to use causes problems:
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg10735.html
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Jun 27, 2010, Mike Arrigo wrote:
Hi everyone. Has anyone seen programs that, when they run, place an
icon in the status menu, I'm assuming this is the area on the top
right of the desktop? I've tried 2 different programs, one to
control the minimum fan speed, and a java application, both of these
claim that they place themselves in the status menu area, yet, using
the mac keyboard command, control f8, or using the voiceover menu
command does not allow me to access the status menus of these
programs. Do they use nonstandard menus, and is there any way to
access these?
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