Thank you Slau, I shared this with the mag as well because so many of the users over there struggle with the same issue. ----- Original Message ----- From: Slau Halatyn To: ptaccess@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, January 10, 2014 11:04 AM Subject: PACE Anti-Piracy's response regarding iLok License Manager accessibility
I was recently put in touch with the president and vice-president at PACE anti-Piracy, the makers of the iLok key and the iLok License Manager software. Since i made it clear that I wished to share their response with this community, I'm pasting it below. In fact, I'm including my original message as well. I'd normally not send as lengthy an email to a developer but, under the circumstances and, given it's impact, I wanted to give it a little more weight. You'll notice that the vice-president has responded and they're clearly aware of the issue and have indicated their intention to resolve the problem. You'll notice that in my response I tried to suggest that the project would surely not take as much work as Mr. Kirk has estimated but, even if their estimate turns out to be correct, the fact that they're still willing to fix it is good news. Still, I think they'll ultimately find that it won't be as complicated as it might appear. I do also suspect that the scope of the work as described by Mr. Kirk also includes the necessary work it'll take to migrate to a newer development platform. That was something that Avid experienced as well and is one of the reasons it took so long to get to the point where Avid could begin work on Pro Tools accessibility. Anyway, you'll find the initial message and subsequent responses below. Best, Slau On Jan 6, 2014, at 8:49 AM, Slau Halatyn <s...@besharpstudios.com> wrote: Dear Mr. Cronce, My name is Slau Halatyn and I've been an iLok user since 2002 when I made the switch from an analog multitrack to Pro Tools HD. I'm a blind studio owner and trained audio engineer in New York City. When I witnessed the iLok system at work, I was impressed and, at the same time, relieved to not have to deal with challenge/response and registration code nightmares. Everything went quite swimmingly until the iLok License Manager. Please allow me to digress just a bit… I've been working with many people at avid including Rich Holmes and ed Gray among others regarding the accessibility of Pro Tools. Actually, that work started years before when David Gibbons was still at Digidesign. There were various obstacles to overcome while the company transitioned through several technologies but, with the new release of Pro Tools 11.1, we've seen incredible strides in improved accessibility for blind users. With this comes many new blind users ranging from students all the way to professional audio engineers and studio owners. For a time, while Pro Tools was improving in accessibility from version 8 through 10, the use of PACE's iLok.com site was very straight-forward and quite accessible since it was based on html which, if standards were followed, was very easy to use. Unfortunately for blind users, the introduction of the new iLok License Manager saw this accessibility completely wiped out. The application is completely unusable for blind users trying to access the program's features with the built-in screen reader in OS X known as VoiceOver. there is no work-around for the problem and the only way one can deal with licenses is to have a sighted individual perform the tasks instead. With the advent of new Pro Tools accessibility and upgrading to new HDX systems and plug-ins, this affects people like me on a daily basis. I know that others in our community have written for support and have been told that PACE is aware of the issue and I would imagine that it has possibly been brought to your attention. I'm writing to you to ask that this issue be addressed and resolved as soon as your resources allow. To blind users of iLoks, not having access to the iLok License Manager is the equivalent of sighted users suddenly not having access to their licenses and I'm sure you're no stranger to user complaints when things go wrong. The recent problems that PACE experienced was, I'm sure, stressful and you're probably relieved to have that behind you. Stress, however, is what blind users are experiencing every time a demo license or upgrade comes up. The disappointment at the current state of iLok License Manager accessibility is evident every time a new blind user learns of the issue. I offer you a fairly simple solution: Apple has some basic programming guidelines for making applications accessible with VoiceOver. Largely, it's a matter of simply defining UI elements. If UI elements are undefined or unlabeled, the user sees nothing in the application apart from the menu bar. If a button is defined as a button, the user sees the button. If that button is unlabeled, well, that's not so great. However, if it's defined as a button and also labeled, the user can perform the default action, interact in whichever way is appropriate and use the UI controls as intended. In most cases, it's a matter of typing a few words per control. Often, Apple's underlying framework takes over at that point and browsing dialogs is already accessible by default. Combo box lists are navigable just as they are anywhere else in the OS. I assure you that a program such as Pro Tools, with its thousands of custom UI elements, is far more complex to make accessible than the iLok License Manager. I've sat at an office in Daly City while a programmer typed a few words, recompiled a Pro Tools beta and, within moments, a new UI element was made accessible. This is not a complicated process by any means and I'm sure that the License Manager could be made accessible within a short amount of time. Apple's guidelines can be found on their developer site here: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Accessibility/Conceptual/AccessibilityMacOSX/OSXAXModel/OSXAXmodel.html There's a pdf document there which spells out the procedure. This is the only document used by Avid and others when making applications accessible. I urge you to have your programmer(s) take a look at these guidelines and make a plan to incorporate the necessary descriptions into the code of the iLok License Manager so that blind users can access the software alongside our sighted counterparts. Please feel free to discuss this issue with Rich and Ed. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to help in any way I can. When you do have a chance to look into it and reply, I'd love to share your response with our community online through our email lists as well as the PT Access blog. Thanks for taking the time to address this issue which means so much to so many people. It would be greatly appreciated when it can be resolved. best regards, Slau Halatyn BeSharp Audio recording & Music Production 30-80 33rd Street Astoria NY 11102 718-932-3660 On Jan 9, 2014, at 7:59 PM, Andrew Kirk <and...@paceap.com> wrote: Hi Slau, Thank you for your email. I wanted to let you know that we have received your emails and understand the situation. We too are frustrated that the development tools we are working with do not fully support these things out of the box. We had our engineering spend time to research this last Autumn and it is going to be a big project to upgrade all of the tools and deal with. Unfortunately it would break some key components by moving forward to that version and cause us to have to rewrite more code. If it was a few days or a week - it would have been done already but it will be at least a few months of work (when it can be scheduled) and a complete regressive test of the application and all features. I hope you understand that iLok.com as it was could not be supported. The weekly, sometimes daily, changes in browsers made it nearly impossible for us to keep up. In addition there features and security issues that could not be solved in the browser, hence we moved to the client side model. Largely feedback has been extremely positive. For a site that is free to users our resources are, unfortunately, somewhat limited. We will be looking to when we can move to the newest version of the tools and then take advantage of the features that allow better access. The code is not and Xcode project it is a cross platform development toolset that is used worldwide. This topic is discussed at all meetings about iLok License Manager and when we can make such improvements. Once we are able to make such improvements we will certainly contact you so that you can assist us in being sure that these features fit your needs. Again, thank you for your email. Very Best Regards, Andrew -- Andrew Kirk Vice President PACE Anti-Piracy, Inc 1860 South Bascom Avenue Campbell, CA 95008 Voice: (408) 377-9774 Ext 653 web: www.paceap.com and iLok.com On Jan 10, 2014, at 10:03 AM, Slau Halatyn <s...@besharpstudios.com> wrote: Hi Andrew, Thanks for your response. It's good to know that the issue is on your radar. Being that the license manager is cross-platform, you face very much the same situation Avid did. I look forward to assisting with testing when you do eventually get to that point. Frankly, I believe that the estimate of "months" of work is grossly miscalculated and I hope that doesn't deter your team too long. I'm confident that, once the work does begin, you'll find that it's not at all as complex as you might think. I've witnessed it myself with Avid and I'm sure your experience will be much the same. Thanks again for taking the time to reply and I look forward to working with you. Best, Slau Slau Halatyn On January 10, 2014, Andrew Kirk wrote: Hi Slau, iLok License Manager is made with a tool called Qt (http://qt-project.org) and we must switch to a newer version that came out just when we went to release ILM. There have been some major changes so this is not just one feature but effects the entire application. I think 2 months is actually an aggressive estimate. We already spent a man week just looking at it and trying to get a short cut similar to your initial suggestion for allowing voiceover etc.. In our case this is not just using Xcode and Visual Studio - if that were the case - this would be already done. This is high on our list and we will be in touch. I appreciate your support. Thank you. Andrew -- 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 ptaccess+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 ptaccess+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
