Com Port

1

Hello,

Just wondering, is serial port supported or do I need to use a usb connection?

Just to let you know, I am using a screenreader and so far, it all seems promising on the windows version, hoping for similar results on linux.

Also, what support, if any is available for the ic-910h?

As most of the new icom radios are not that accessible your software could be a major breakthrough for blind amateurs.

Thanks for what you are doing.

Keith
gw4nby

2

Hi Keith.

A “hardware” serial port should work but you may need to specify the baud rate as this isn’t available within the user interface (it isn’t really required on USB). This can be done by manually editing the preferences within the [Radio] section, SerialPortBaud. The default is 115,200 which may not be available on your radio? Instructions for each supported platform are here https://wfview.org/wfview-user-manual/preferences-file/

We haven’t tried IC910H but limited rig control should be available and it should be auto-detected as an “Unknown” rig if CIV-Transceive is available and enabled (I don’t know if the radio supports this function though?). If CIV-Transceive isn’t available, you can try manually specifying the CI-V address by setting the RigCIVuInt in the [Radio] section of the preferences file.

We are keen to explore what can be done regarding accessibility and there are already a number of keyboard shortcuts available.

73 Phil M0VSE

3

Hi Keith,

I appreciate the remarks! One of our design goals is to make this software as friendly to visually-impaired operators as possible. To that end, most of the basic functions have key commands, so that you can operate and tune around without needing a mouse. Here’s a link to the key commands, if you haven’t seen them yet. As our program has grown considerably with functions, I haven’t put key commands on everything yet, plus we now have dialog boxes that can come out over the main window, and I’m not sure how well that will work with the key shortcuts.

I would really value your feedback and advice on making this program as useful as possible. Let me throw a few questions your way, tell me what you think:

  1. What screenreader programs do you use for Windows and Linux? How well does it work with wfview?
  2. Do the screenreaders show you the printed text in the window?
  3. Do the screenreaders read back the “tool tip” text?
  4. We have a key command, F12, that causes the rig to speak the current frequency and S meter (for rigs that have this technology built-in). How do you think the utility of that would compare with using the computer to generate the speech audio? I know linux has festival TTS, and Windows and Mac certainly have text to speech options. Using the computer’s TTS, we could speak other things that the rig doesn’t currently support.
  5. Initial setup: If a user plugs in a USB cord for a “modern” Icom rig, there’s a good change the linux version will “just work” (assuming the user has port permissions). But for the cases where it doesn’t, how challenging is it for a visually-impared user to issue terminal commands and/or edit text files? How about operating drop-down “combo box” menus?
  6. Would it be useful to have an option to “lock out” some controls so they aren’t bumped accidentally?
  7. Any other ideas?

I think it would be really fantastic to enable these wonderful modern rigs for folks that can’t operate the touch screen, so let’s keep this going. I don’t have any experience designing for accessibility, but I’d like to start.

Thanks,

–E
de W6EL

4

Hi Keith,

I added some code for the IC-910h. I haven’t tested it though, and the command dictionary, as provided by Icom, is very sparse (and apparently off-by-one sometimes) compared to the other rigs. So I can’t guarantee much beyond tuning and squelch and PTT. I’ll put the code into the repository, and whenever we do our next pull and build, it’ll go in.

73,

–E
de W6EL

5

Hi Keith,

I added the accessibility names to all the UI elements, and have pushed that code to the ui-enhance branch on gitlab.

However, I tried orca to see if they worked. And I wasn’t really sure. Orca seemed to have a lot of trouble keeping up with what was on the screen. It definitely said “combo box” followed by the name of whatever was selected. But my intention was for it to say the accessible name. Now, it may be that if you hit the right orca key command it will say it – it seems like orca has a lot of hotkeys for commanding what exactly it’s doing. I’m honestly a bit out of my element here.

If you can, please give it a try. You can checkout the ui-enhance branch of the code using “-b ui-enhance” on the git clone command. Or wait a day or two and we’ll have new binaries posted.

Thanks for your patients – I do really want to get this working,

–E
de W6EL

6

Hi Keith,

On any supported platform, you can just install the newest version and it will override.

I’m not sure if my changes made it into the latest compiled releases (they should in a day or two though), so you might want to try it in Linux by following the install directions, substituting the “git clone…” command in step 2 with:

“git clone https://gitlab.com/eliggett/wfview.git -b ui-enhance”

This will get you to the latest bleeding edge on linux that I am working from.

Let me know how it goes!

–E
de W6EL

7

Hi both,

No I haven’t done a new build yet today.

73 Phil

8

I did, can push it eventually.

I think most people. will benefit from the prebuilt stuff instead of the pain compiling themselves.
I’d say – only do if you need it.

Give me 10 minutes and the 2021-05-10 dist is there.