Folks, The announcement yesterday was just as much a surprise to me as it was to most people. Frankly, it seemed to take most beta testers by surprise as well. As this is a public list, I'm sort of bending the NDA rules just a bit but, under the circumstances, I think it's OK, given the unique nature of accessibility concerns.
I've been on the Pro Tools beta team on and off since 2003. For a time, when OS X was inaccessible, there seemed to be no point. During the years when we were waiting to here about whether Digidesign was going to finally do something, there was nothing to test. This time around, we knew there would be a cycle with an opportunity to look at accessibility. I was also asked to assemble a few people to submit observations to me and I would filter them and submit reports. We've gone through that process for a while now. Thing is, the initial cycle was based on 10.3.x. I'm not sure if this was supposed to be a cycle of final fixes for version 10 or something but, it seemed to be not really different at all from what we already saw in version 10. Well, suddenly, along came what was truly meant to be version 11. As always, good news and bad news. Also, as usual, bad news first. Just as we saw from version 9 to version 10, there are more things broken. More specifically, certain controls have lost some accessibility, probably because of changes to frameworks. For example, when clicking on an input source, a list pops up but it's not possible to navigate the menu. It's not possible to test this against Lion because the minimum requirement is a 64-bit machine running Mountain Lion. Now, all of this realization happened just a few days ago when the PT 11 beta became available for the first time to the team. I immediately contacted some key people and expressed concern over what had happened. As we know, Pro Tools has been undergoing a complete re-write but it's not accurate to say that version 11 alone is a complete rewrite from the ground up. In fact, it was already beginning to be rewritten as far back as 2006. At any rate, it appears that a number of things have, in fact, changed in this upcoming version and, as a result, the way VoiceOver sees it, a bunch of stuff is unrecognizable or at least doesn't behave as you'd expect. As you all know, we had gotten the support of then CEO Gary Greenfield at the end of last year and that mandate still stands. Rich Holmes recently assured me that he and the company are still 100% committed to making Pro Tools accessible. Given how many things are currently broken, it might make the most sense to take the approach we took last time and have somebody purely focus on accessibility. the ultimate goal is to make it all part of the process of programming and in-house testing. This time around, with such a major update, that proved to be more than they could handle, given the timeframe. Oh, even though I did sort of start with the good news in Rich's quick reply, the other thing to consider is that, much of the UI is, at least on the face of it, recognizable. Just as under Mountain Lion, for example, record and mute buttons in the Mix window are still visible but, just as with Mountain Lion, the state of buttons is not readable. In other words, the accessibility is much like that in Mountain Lion but with pop-up menus not working properly. So, rather than starting from square one with no accessibility whatsoever, we've taken a step back, if anything but I do believe we'll take two steps forward in the near future. Undoubtedly, many of you will be disappointed and some of you will be very disappointed. How everybody handles this news has very much to do with everybody's individual personality. While I'm personally frustrated with this setback, I'm confident that we'll have some results in the near future. Please don't ask me about any more details regarding the beta. I've technically said too much already but felt that it was time to at least say something, given yesterday's announcement. Naturally, if I hear anything worth passing along, this is the place to tune in so, as they say, stay tuned. Best, Slau -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pro Tools Accessibility" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
