Hi everyone I hope your all keeping safe during these troubled times. I’m trying to return to sonic-pi after along time away. I’m Mac OS Catalina with the voice over screen reeder. I tried to run sonic-pi version 3.2.2 on Catalina but when I open it voice over doesn’t reed any of the controls to me. Does anyone know why this could be and how to fix this problem?
Your help with this would be most welcome, kind regards trey.
Sorry you’re having issues. We’ve worked very hard on improving the accessibility of Sonic Pi and are surprised to hear that things aren’t working for you. Can the screen reader observe nothing in the app? For example, we now have a standard application menu with “focus” shortcuts for placing focus on various parts of the app. Is this something you can access?
We also had reports from @abletec that the screen reader support was working. Perhaps this is on a different platform though? @abletec, which platform are you working with? Did you happen to have any thoughts on this?
@soundwarrior - could you try v3.2.0? Does that work for you?
http://sonic-pi.net/files/releases/v3.2.0/sonic-pi-for-mac-v3.2.0.zip
After further experiments, there does appear to be a difference in what Voice Over can access between v3.2.0 and v3.2.2.
It would be great to hear back to see if v3.2.0 works as you expect. If so, then I’m pretty sure I can fix things for the next version 
Hi sam, thanks for all your help. Version 3.2.0 does work with Catalina, how ever I have noticed that voice over still speaks when the code stops running.
Also from my memory the open button in the load code dialogue is dimmed for no apparent reason. I hope this helps respect from trey.
Hi @soundwarrior,
that’s positive to hear, thanks for trying v3.2.0!
It seems that recent versions of one of the framework we use to build Sonic Pi is having issues with Voice Over. If I use an older version of the framework, then it seems to work fine.
You said
“I have noticed that voice over still speaks when the code stops running.”
Is there any chance you could expand on what you mean by this? Could you give a little more detail - perhaps explaining what you expected to happen and what actually does?
Also you said:
“the open button in the load code dialogue is dimmed”
Unless I’m misunderstanding - this is expected behaviour. The Open button is only illuminated when you’ve selected a file to load. Until you select something it stays dim. Did you mean something else?
hi sam, sorry for the late reply. when the code stops running voice over still speeks the log output it should stop speeking when i stop running code. even a file is selected the load button is still dimmed. also 3.2.0 runs verry slugishly with voice over.
Hey @soundwarrior,
I’m really, really sorry but I still don’t quite understand what you mean here. Could you explain in a bit more detail what you’re doing and how it’s working.
How is the voice over system reading the log output? Do you highlight it and get it to read everything? Does it do this automatically? Is it just the case that the log output is just too large and there’s too much text for the voice reader to keep up with? It’s certainly the case that for anything beyond super trivial and slow code, the log prints out too fast to read, so it just flows past quickly like a river of text.
How might we get the voice over system to stop speaking? What do other systems with long fast flowing log systems do? Do you have any advice on what we could specifically do to make things better when working with a screen reader with respect to the logs?
I’m unable to reproduce this here. Visually the button is dimmed until a file is selected, then it becomes activated. How might I reproduce this with a screen reader?
This is unfortunately out of my control. The voice over functionality is provided by the GUI system (Qt) and so it’s not something I have any real ability to fix. Has it always been sluggish with voice over or did a previous version work fine? If so, could you point me to which version worked well?
I should also add that I just got the beta compiling against the recently released Qt 5.15 which looks to have fixed the voice over issues (5.14 didn’t seem to work for some reason which was the version used for the release of Sonic Pi v3.2.2).
So, hopefully the Sonic Pi v3.3 beta will bring back support for voice over on macOS and it will be interesting to know if it has fixed any of these issues.
btw I tried out ORCA screen reader (supplied with Raspberry Pi OS) but unfortunately it doesn’t work with jackd (and hence at present with Sonic Pi on Raspberry Pi). If it is running Sonic PI wont start, and if Sonic Pi is running it wont connect to audio. I think in principal it is possible to fix such things if you are a real jack guru. I 've looked briefly at some of the stuff on line, but I think it’s quite a task.