bad accessibility for screen readers

[Gregorykonz]

Program has several critical accessibility bugs. This bugs dowsn't allow to use program with screen reader comfortable.
1. Not all parameters accessible in tab order.
Tab order can focus only search field, table with tracks and tree view with categories tracks, autoDJ and ETC.
I suggest to make parameters accessible with tab shift tab and use tabs as category of parameters. Tabs must switch by pressing control+tab or shift+control+tab.
How I suggest categorize parameters^
1 deck tab, 2 deck tab etc.
Tab and shift tab must switch focus between parameters inside selected tab.
arrows must move faders or scroll through the list.
2. Headphone Cue (Pre-fader listen) and other parameters, which have on and off states, this states must be reported by screen reader.
3. fader values must speak by screen readers. Screen readers detects this faders as groups.
For example^ screen readers detects faders but without values^ группа Raise Pitch
Left-click: Sets the pitch higher.
Right-click: Sets the pitch higher in small steps.
Change the step-size in the Preferences -> Interface menu.

Shortcut: F6
Shortcut: Shift+F6
P. S. It's amazing, but this program though bad accessible, but accessible despite that has wrotten in QT. Thanks for your work, developers!

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

For me is unclear what are the tasks we can do to improve the situation.
Can you file separate bugs foe each issue?
What happens and what should happen instead?
Which Screenreader do you use on which Os?

[ronso0 (ronso0)]

Yes, the screen reader accessibility of the GUI and the preferences definitely needs to be improved.
Some helpful additions coming to mind would be to add controls to read out the track title/artist of a particular deck, or read out the relative play poistion of a deck (or elapsed/remaining time).

To me the suggested solution sounds like all GUI controls should be focusable and navigation is supposed to work with Tab key. This is quite the contrary we tried to achieve for the controller and keyboard use case for users without sight impairment.
Also, with a basic regular 2 decks + mixer layout there are roughly 70-80 controls (only in the top section). IMO it's insane to navigate those with Tab in a rather time-critical DJ context.
Thus I don't consider the suggested approach feasible and an actual improvement.

Most blind / sight-impaired users use optimized keyboard layouts, for example
https://mixxx.discourse.group/t/this-is-a-mixx-keyboard-for-mixing-without-a-controller-or-mouse/23257/5
https://mixxx.discourse.group/t/custom-keyboard-mapping-for-blind-users/18067

[Gregorykonz (grishakonzalaev)]

I think that needs to make a shortcut to change focus for groups of deck management elements. For example alt+1 go to the first deck's management elements such as FX, equalizer ETC. alt+2 go to the second deck's management elements. It needs to make accessible values of equalizer's and FX faders.

[Owen Williams (ywwg)]

100% agree that we need to improve this. I have had more than one sight-impaired user ask me about better screen reader support in Mixxx. This problem is large enough that we will probably have to approach it incrementally. What is the low hanging fruit -- what are the easy fixes that will make things a lot better? There is a big opportunity here for a new contributor to make important changes!

[Swiftb0y (swiftb0y)]

Mixxx now uses GitHub for bug tracking. This bug has been migrated to:
https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/issues/10789