macos S2 Controller still not accessible

M
Userlevel 2
Badge +6

I recently upgraded to S2 at last and was disappointed to find that the S2 Controller for the Mac is still not remotely accessible.  There was a discussion about this on S1 years ago and I think that thread is Locke now.

Most of the buttons aren’t labelled, so when you use it you just hear “button, button, button, button” as you move through items.  Then it seems impossible to give all the import bits focus.  I can’t navigate to the choose rooms button (although the dialog that appears does work with VO if I can somehow get lucky with the mouse), and neither the queue or browse panes seem to be usable at all.

I’m really disappointed how little Sonos seem to regard the Mac app.  By way of contrast, the iPhone app is really great.  But if it worked, it would be much faster and more convenient for me to use the Mac in most cases.

 

Is there any way of this ever getting any attention?  I feel that a lot of the issues are very likely to be trivial to fix. 

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3 replies

Airgetlam

Sonos has long since deprioritized both the MacOS and Windows OS applications, in favor of mobile versions. You’re unlikely to see any further development on either platform, other than simple maintenance. 

Bruce
M
Userlevel 2
Badge +6

Thanks for the reply - I totally missed it until now.  That’s pretty much what I thought.  I would like to see Sonos treat accessibility failures as “maintenance” though.  The really frustrating thing is how little effort it would take to at least bring about a positive impact.

Adding a label to a button takes a second.  The resources will already be translated for the other apps.

The dialog to select rooms is nicely accessible, but the button to open it is not.  It shouldn’t take much effort to make the room boxes focusable.

If the two above things were done, then I can at least use the system in some primitive way.

This isn’t really asking for a new feature, but asking for a bug to be fixed.  It’s similar to if a security exploit was found, or if the next macOS totally broke the controller for sighted people, Sonos would surely fix it.

I love my Sonos system on the whole and have had it for many years now, and replaced much of it for S2.  So it’s not like I’m freeloading or anything.  It’s frustrating that it doesn’t really seem possible to have the conversation with Sonos themselves, so I’ve got no idea if they genuinely don’t care about accessibility or if they just aren’t getting the message at all.

I know Sonos would never do this, but if they really don’t care about the macOS app any more then they should open-source it and maybe someone in the community might be able to fix it.

M
Userlevel 2
Badge +6

One thing that can help with the controller a tiny bit is to use VO+/ on the Mac when an unlabelled button has focus.  It will allow you to add in a label, so if you can figure out what the button does then you can add labels for some of them.  I’ve got quite a big delay between a button name and its help being read out, but for me if I wait a little bit it is sometimes possible to figure out what a button is.  E.g. “button” then a few seconds later “crossfade is off”, so I can label the button crossfade.

I still can’t access the rooms list, queue or browse or search for songs, so it makes the controller an incredibly bloated way of doing very basic things - play, pause, change group volume (but not the volume of individual rooms).

Just thought I’d mention it in case it does help anyone else, but it still doesn’t excuse how rubbish this app is.

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