requesting increased keyboard access and screen reader support

[mehgcap]

I work at a company where an iSeries is the main computer. We use other servers, and I work on those, but the keys to what we do are on an iSeries, and I am unable to help maintain the system. I'm visually impaired, and rely on screen reading software to translate the print on my screen into spoken and brailled text I can read. This isn't a problem for most of the parts of my job, but it is a huge stumbling block for my starting to learn how to code for the iSeries. Until I found ILEditor, no IDE for RPG was accessible in the slightest. ILEditor has problems, but it's much better than RDI and the others I've tried, and I think the problems I've run into on it will be relatively easy for you (the maintainers) to fix. I'm not a Windows developer and am not set up with Visual Studio or any other tools, or I'd try it myself. I'll outline the problems I've found below.

• There is no way to move around the different parts of the UI, such as going from the currently opened member's text, to the toolbar, to the list of other options. I'm likely not explaining this well, but I can only go off the information I can find with my screen reader. The point is, most applications support f6, cttrl-f7, or some other keystroke to move from area to area. Open Chrome or Firefox and hit f6; you should move between your webpage, address bar, and anything else you have open in the browser window, such as a downloads area. If ILEditor could do the same, it would immediately become a great deal more usable.

• The dropdown menus aren't identified as menus, and submenu items aren't identified as such. Alt moves to the menu bar, and arrows navigate the menus, it's just that NVDA (my screen reader) doesn't think the items it's moving over are menu items.

• Menu items that have hotkeys (i.e. ctrl-o for Open) don't show their hotkeys to NVDA. I can read the menu item's label, just not its hotkey.

• There is no way to select most items in the UI with the keyboard; you must double click instead. Responding to a press of enter or space would fix this. In the list of 9 items, ending in Connection Settings, you can't press space or enter on any items to activate them. Likewise, switching back to the member text is impossible without double clicking the file, jumping to the menu bar, then hitting escape to force focus back to the text field.

• I can't find a way to get from the tree view of errors back to the editor (the first point in this list will likely help that). I'm wondering if there might be a way to arrow to an error in the list, and use a hotkey to jump to the associated line in the member?

I've only spent a short time with ILEditor, so there may be more I'm missing. Those are the problems that jumped out at me, though. Again, my hope is that these will be simple to fix, as the behavior I'm looking for tends to be standard across Windows applications. If I can provide more specific examples, let me know. Thank you for your time.

[connorholyday]

Hey Alex, this is really interesting thanks for the write up.

We're currently in the trenches building a new version of ILEditor, when it's ready would you be happy for us to get in touch about testing the screen reader support? We're looking to make things as accessible as possible so this feedback has been invaluable.

[mehgcap]

Sure, I'd be happy to give it a run-through. Thanks for supporting accessibility!

[connorholyday]

That's great! Would you mind popping me an email at [---]?