Folks, One of the features for which I've been campaigning on the accessibility with on the Pro Tools front has been the nudge value field. In earlier versions of Pro Tools, it was not specifically accessible but one could at least press the button, type a value, press Return and at least the custom field was entered and one could go about their business with the new nudge value. Now, if you don't know why a custom nudge value is important, never mind for now and trust me when I say that it'll save your ass at some point, guaranteed.
well, in Pro Tools 11, the interface changed a bit and now at least we could see the Nudge Controls button which popped up the format selection and default values. Thing is, now we couldn't enter the custom value. I submitted a bug report and nothing seemed to change because other items like the MIDI Event List took precedence, understandably. Well, only yesterday, I stumbled upon what I can only call a discovery, for lack of a better word because it was truly hidden. Unfortunately, a bit of a misnomer was incorporated when one of the programmers worked on the nudge and grid controls. In the edit window, there is a Grid/Nudge cluster. That naming convention was inherited from the initial work of PT accessibility in version 8. When interacting, you find 3 items labeled "Show Grid Lines" (which is either selected or not), "Grid Controls button" and "Nudge Controls button" Clicking on the first button toggles its state of either showing or not showing grid lines in the timeline. Clicking either of the two remaining buttons pops up a list of formats and default values as mentioned earlier. Yesterday, as I was making a macro to double-click on the nudge value field to at least be able to once again enter custom nudge values, I needed to quickly navigate to the Nudge Control button and so I brought up the Item Chooser list and typed n u d g e. Surprisingly, the list contained several items rather than just the one I was expecting. It contained a text field labeled "Nudge" and a numeric field labeled "Nudge value." I had never seen this before and was stunned. To my astonishment, having selected the nudge value field, I purposely stopped interacting with the control to see where it was nested. To my surprise, it was nested in the "Nudge Controls button." Well, of course, a VoiceOver user would never think to interact with a button because that's not the function of a button. In fact, upon retrying with another session, simply navigating to the Nudge Controls button and interacting with it simply interacts with the title of the button itself rather than its alleged contents. Bringing up the Item Chooser, however, indeed exposes the hidden controls. Further, once accessed, interacting and exiting interaction with the button seems to traverse the levels repeatedly. Bottom line is, if you need to type a custom nudge value, and I promise you, you will at some point, use the Item Chooser to get to the Nudge Value numeric field, click once and type the custom value, hit Return and be on your way. This is an issue of nomenclature mostly but also the non-standard manner in which a control was defined. It's really not a button but a group of controls or a cluster, if you will. So, it's confusing until you know what it truly is. I'm explaining this so that, when others ask, more people on the list know about this quirk. That said, I'm relieved that the issue of access to the nudge value was addressed, albeit in a non-standard way, because it's truly one of the quality-of-life issues that kept me from moving to Pro Tools 11 full time. For me, this was a big one. There are a few others that are being addressed in beta that will be resolved soon, I'm sure. Anyway, just sharing the info. 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/d/optout.
