Many years ago, I set out to make my Mac crossword app, Black Ink, accessible to VoiceOver users. I failed. The assistive technology on macOS at the time simply did not seem up to the task for mapping the complex, two-dimensional, nested hierarchy of a crossword puzzle into a form that could be meaningfully conveyed over VoiceOver.

Now, as I look forward to finishing up Black Ink 2.0, I am encouraged to give it another try. VoiceOver has improved dramatically and I am optimistic that I’ll be able to ship this major update of the app with features that make it accessible to all.

I can’t do this alone. I need to know how the ideal accessible crossword app would behave, and to know that, I need advice from experienced VoiceOver users. If you or somebody you know is a Mac VoiceOver user who would enjoy helping me design the accessible interface to Black Ink, please consider joining the Red Sweater Slack so we can collaborate on this:

Join the Red Sweater Slack Community

I have some vague ideas of how to accomplish this but I’m looking forward to hearing from folks who are keenly aware of just how such an app should behave. After you join the Slack, please join me in the #accessibility channel. Thanks!

Some MarsEdit customers may have run across a problem where posts that were published as “Draft” posts to WordPress end up getting stuck with the original draft publish date as the actual publish date when the post is changed to Published.

I took on the task of identifying the source of this problem and fixing it in the open-source WordPress project. That was 7 months ago. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been integrated yet. Here’s my post about the situation:

Unloved Patches

MarsEdit’s functionality is often limited by the capabilities of the blogs to which it publishes. WordPress is unusual in that it is open source, so anybody can contribute improvements to the platform. If those improvements are never accepted, however, it may as well not be open source.

Michael Tsai wrote today about the accessibility challenges presented by Mac toolbars that do not have text labels. These are an unfortunate consequence of opting for macOS’s “no titlebar” style appearance, which has become increasingly popular in recent years. As Michael points out, MarsEdit is among the apps that has embraced it. This is how it looks by default:

The good news, for folks who don’t prefer this style, is MarsEdit supports a “secret preference” to change back to the more traditional style with a title for the window, and with the option to show or hide text labels. If you’re comfortable setting defaults from the command line, you can run this from Terminal to enable the labels:

defaults write com.red-sweater.marsedit4 ShowMainWindowTitleBar YES

If you’d rather avoid the command line, MarsEdit should apply the setting for you if you click this link:

Show MarsEdit’s Main Window Titlebar

Now, quit and relaunch MarsEdit. If the toolbar icon labels are not visible, select View > Customize Toolbar from the menu bar, and select the option to show “Icon & Text”. Here’s how it looks:

And if you decide to switch back, this link should do the trick:

Hide MarsEdit’s Main Window Titlebar

Ideally Apple would fix this mode so that some kind of appropriate compromise could be made to support the streamlined title-bar-free mode, while also supporting the display of labels. I’m not holding my breath on that, though. Hopefully this workaround will give those of you who either prefer, or outright depend upon the labels for accessibility reasons, something to tide you over.

MarsEdit 4.3.2 is now available at the MarsEdit home page and on the Mac App Store.

This update primarily addresses a problem that snuck in to the app recently, causing the icons for some blogs to appear blurry in the main window side panel, and in the Preferences list. It also includes a couple other small bug fixes.

Complete list of changes for this release:

• Fix a problem that caused some icons to appear fuzzy or too large in the blog list
• Fix an issue that caused the built-in crash reporter to fail to launch for some users
• Refine the error message when uploading an image to Blogger fails because of their disabled API

If you enjoy MarsEdit, please consider writing a review or rating the app on the Mac App Store, spreading the word on Facebook or Twitter, and of course, writing about the app on your own blog! Thanks for your support.