Greetings. I’ve stumbled across FxSound today and decided to give it a shot. I really like it, though, there are some things that prevent me from using it for now. I’m blind, and therefore, use a screenreader. While parts of the app are accessible, there are sections that aren’t. I can’t even say what isn’t there, but from reading various bits of information, I’ve inferred that there’s a hamburger button to access the menu.
While some controls show up in the tab order, others, like this button, do not. An alternative means of figuring out what’s in an app is optical character recognition (OCR). The problem being that it’s meant to pick up text, not graphics, so it totally skips over this button.
Given that parts of the app are accessible, I think improvements could be made. For instance, the settings section is not at all accessible. I managed to get there via right clicking on the system tray icon. That context menu is also inaccessible.
Running OCR on that screen tells me there are hotkeys already set up, which is nice, but I don’t have a way of configuring them at this time, and there is one that conflicts with a voice chat app I regularly use that prevents me from muting / unmuting the mic.
Apart from this, I had a less than stellar experience during the installation process. The installer itself was perfectly fine; however, once completed, I lost all sound. Now, part of this could be my unorthodox setup. I’m using a Zoom H1 Essential as a sort of poor man’s low latency audio interface that both runs my audio but also gives me a mic in the same device. I also am using an app called Sound Switch that gives me a hotkey to switch audio devices and plays a chime on the device it switched to.
The two in conjunction made a pretty bad pairing, as I wasn’t understanding at the time, that FxSound created a virtual device to route sound through, so i was trying to switch devices with my hotkey that Sound Switch provides, and naturally, that didn’t work. As I’m pretty adept with technology, and Windows in general, I was able to recover from this. Though a less technically savvy blind user might not have been able to, and may have been out a computer until they could get some sighted assistance.
I wonder if FxSound could query the OS for what the default playback device is, and just after taking over the sound, set its playback device to mirror what the user had selected.
If these things could be resolved, I’d definitely go back to using FxSound, because, as I’ve said, I do very much like the enhancements it makes. I’m also glad a shortcut key exists to switch it on and off, because, as a sound designer, I can’t have programs coloring the sounds produced by synthesizers and the like which would influence my own EQing.
Thank you for reading this. I really enjoy the app and I hope some improvements for accessibility can be made. If things do improve, I’d definitely recommend FxSound to others.