Hi Chris,
Chris Moore wrote:
Jeez you are so knowledgeable, are you some sort of Apple
consultant? You are very thorough, I am so impressed.
No, not guilty <smile>, and I'm not an IT or computer person either,
just another user. However, I've become practiced at running Google
searches since I got my first Mac, which was actually over five years
ago, and it helps to have lists that maintain archives so you can read
up on other people's comments. And in the early days of VoiceOver
with Tiger, everyone got a lot of practice trying to find out new
things. In this case, I came across the statements in the Rogue
Amoeba blog on the problems with the status menu items. But thanks
for your comments.
Cheers,
Esther
On 27 Jun 2010, at 22:20, Esther wrote:
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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