screen reader accessibility of WFView

Hey All: totally new to the forum and WFView, but just wanted to say that as a windows screen reader user, I really like what I see! I bought an IC-705 before realizing it had a touch screen, and have been on a relentless quest to figure out how to control this rig via software and I have to say that out of all the offerings I’ve found, WFView seems to have the most screen reader interoperability and potential. I’m going to be slowly learning how to use WFView over the coming months, so expect lots of questions and feedback from me. :slight_smile: Is there any beta functionality yet re: memory management on the IC-705? The ICom programming software is absolutely useless and since I can’t enter frequencies on the front pannel of the radio, I’d love to be able to program memories into the thing.

Hi Rylan,

Screen reader compatibility has been a “requirement” from day 1 with wfview, and I hope we’ve got everything labeled correctly. We’ve even talked about ways to maybe do the s-meter (besides what Icom provides within the radio).

Have you seen the full list of key commands? These can make operation a lot easier:
https://wfview.org/wfview-user-manual/keystrokes/

As for memory management, this is something we have kind of walked back on. The program chirp seems to do a pretty good job where I have tried it though. We’ve not dived into the memory because there are simply so many things to do in order to make it really nice and to work with the many radios we support. So for now, chirp is the recommended solution. wfview does have a rudimentary 99 channel memory built-in, but it is not really sufficient for the 705 as it doesn’t support PL tones and offsets and things of that nature.

Let us know what questions you have,

–E
de W6EL

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Thanks for the reply! Re: memory management, alas Chirp on windows is completely inaccessible to screen reader users :frowning: I’ve managed to spin it up on a *nix distro and had limited success as *nix screen reader support is lacking. With respect to SMeter, perhaps an audio tone triggered by a key press? Is there any timeline or thoughts with respect to WFView supporting things like PL tones? An unrelated question: when I connect WFView to my IC-705, dial in a frequency, and then try to use the radio’s tuning nob to move up and down the band, the nob doesn’t seem to respond. Am I missing something? (my use case is using a surface go tablet to control my rig during off-grid QRP situations.

Hi Rylan,

The S-Meter readout is something we’ve thought about adding as a speakable item, so that the meter level would be spoken. A tone is a neat idea though. Hmm. Which would you think the best? I think speech is actually easier since so many operating systems have it built-in these days.

wfview does have repeater tone support, although I cannot remember if it works on the IC-705 (I don’t have one). I can tell you it works fine on the IC-9700 though. The “Repeater” button on the main View tab should open a new window which has the repeater tone setup functions, as well as offset direction.

As for Chirp, you might want to ask the developer, Dan Smith (KK7DS), if he knows why the windows version won’t screen read properly. Perhaps there’s a way to make it go. I’m not opposed to having memory operations in wfview, it’s just a bit more than we can get done right now.

With regards to the tuning knob, wfview does not lock the tuning knob on the radio, and in fact, wfview should respond immediately if you touch the knob. It’s one of the things I Really like about wfview, because it interprets the “CI-V transceive” traffic immediately. I wonder if somehow CI-V Transceive got turned off on your radio… That could cause wfview to not notice the frequency change right away. But regardless, the radio should frequency change when you spin the dial, we do not have a locking function in wfview.

Do some experimenting on the tuning dial issue, that seems odd.

Thanks,

–E
de W6EL