If you have the mouse pointer set to follow VoiceOver focus, then you will probably be able to trigger and access one of these fly-outs for each menu. These are triggered when you mouse over certain areas on the main dropdown menu. The worst example of this is on the page where you configure the combined dropdown, making this menu impossible to setup.Īs for the menus themselves, most of these use fly-out panels to display additional information. When configuring the menus, there are a number of places where VoiceOver will tell you that there are empty scrollbars, but in fact these are where you can set what appears in some of the menus and reorder items. There are additional problems with iStats which haven't been mentioned here yet. For Network, again nothing is read except 2 unlabeled buttons that don't seem to do much. For some of the widgets, like CPU or disk, nothing is read at all as in addition to the not reading the menu extras, pressing on them just opens a window with what I'm guessing is a graph. The menu extra itself just says iStatMenus battery, so I can't read my percentage or time remaining, but all the extended information like Voltages is perfectly accessible. But all the additional information which you get by pressing one of these status icons, like the wind speed, is perfectly accessible. So I can't actually read the temperature. With VoiceOver, all I get is "iStat menus status, iStatMenus Weather menu extra". So taking the Weather as an example, the current temperature is displayed on the menu extra itself. Problem is, the actual stats don't read for me, at least what's displayed on the menu extra doesn't. I can toggle the various options on and off, and access the registration screen if I decide to buy it. But anyway I grabbed iStatMenus 6, opened it up, and this part of the UI works great. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, or running into a demo limitation. I have both apps, but find iStat Menus provides a bit more info. I think he may be working on a new version, which I know will be accessible. With all that said, Fabrice has done a great job with his apps to include MenuBar Stats. I'll give it a 7 since there has been a considerable effort to take something that started off as inaccessible to a point where it is very usable. Overall, on a scale of 1 - 10, iStat Menus falls about 7 for accessibility. I won't post an exhaustive list here, but some key areas is inability to interact with data to read character by character etc. Most of the accessibility issues are more annoying than limiting to use of the app. I encourage anyone who decides to try iStat Menus to reach out via Twitter and provide feedback. I also contacted them frequently via email and Twitter to push for accessibility. There are still a few areas that need some work however, Bjango has made significant strides in improving overall accessibility of the app. I can report that iStat Menus version 6 is pretty accessible. I really like MenuBar Stats and it provides all the information I was lookng for. Fabrice also plans to make accessibility enhancements to his other apps. Please be aware the accessible version is not in the App store yet. He has created a version that is compatible with Voiceover, and the plan is to merge the VOiceOver accessibility changes with the next major release of MenuBar Stats. Please note that for now he has two versions of MenuBar Stats. Here is a blog post he wrote about his experience. I reached out to Fabrice, the developer of MenuBar Stats and within hours he had made the app pretty accessible. I downloaded the trial of MenuBar Stats and found it was not accessible. I learned about MenuBar Stats, from listening to the Mac Geek Gab podcast. I had tried several times to request the developer of iStat Menus consider accessibility without any success. I had ben looking for an accessible app that would allow me to monitor information about my system such as fan speed, temperature, CPU load, etc.
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