Slight Perception

Software Solutions for Screen Reader Users.

Internet radio

How it works

A radio station is an item type, like a website or an application. Turn to it and press, and the station starts playing. Press the same station again and the radio turns off. Turn to a different station and press, and it switches over without you having to stop the first one.

Pressing a station twice quickly means the sleep timer instead: it sets one, or cancels one already running. It does not start a station that is silent, because starting things is what the single press is for.

Because of that, a press on a station is held back for a third of a second, long enough to see whether a second one is coming. You hear a short tick the moment you press, so you know it registered. The same applies to most other item types, each of which has its own second action.

Playback happens inside NVDA, so there is no browser window to manage, nothing to alt-tab to, and nothing that steals your focus. You hear "Tuning to" and the station name, then the audio starts, usually in well under a second.

The Radio category

New installations get a Radio category holding twenty popular UK stations. If you are upgrading, your existing categories are untouched, so add stations yourself using the steps below.

Adding stations

There is one route, and it adds one station or twenty with the same keystrokes:

  1. Open NVDA Settings and go to Dial
  2. Press Enter on the category you want the stations in, which shows that category's items
  3. Press Add item and set Item type to Radio station
  4. Press Pick from list
  5. Narrow the list using the Country, Group or Filter by name boxes
  6. Move through the Stations list and press space on each one you want, which ticks it
  7. Change Country, Group or Filter and tick more, as many times as you like
  8. Press OK, and every station you ticked is added

OK on the station list finishes the job. There is no second dialog to confirm: you land back on the item list with your stations in it.

Your ticks are kept when you narrow the list a different way, so one visit can gather stations from several countries. The Stations list says how many you have ticked so far, so tab to it if you lose count. A station already in the category is marked "already added" and ticking it again adds nothing.

Stations added this way take their own names from the catalogue. To give one a name of your own, find it in the item list afterwards and press F2.

Stations from other countries

The station list holds over 250 stations from eleven countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy.

The Country box opens on whichever country Windows says your computer is in, so most of the time there is nothing to change. Choose All countries to search every station by name at once. The Group box lists that country's own genres, so it changes when you change country, and it is unavailable while All countries is chosen because the groups differ from one country to the next.

A few stations only play for listeners in their own country and will refuse to start from anywhere else. AMI-audio, in the Canada list, is one of these.

Stations not in the list

Add an item of type Radio station and press Custom station instead of Pick from list. A Friendly name and a Stream address box appear, and those two are the only fields the radio type ever shows. The address must start with http:// or https://, and it must be the address of the audio stream itself, not the station's web page. Most stations publish this, sometimes as an M3U or PLS link.

Editing one of these later opens with the address already in the box, so you can correct it. Editing a station that came from the list shows only its name, since a stream address read aloud tells you nothing and there is nothing to correct.

Radio volume

The radio has its own volume, set on the Add-on Settings tab, separate from the Windows volume your dial controls. Turning it down means a station can play under NVDA's speech without you having to lower everything else. The change applies immediately, including to a station already playing.

Volume while Dial speaks

Whenever Dial says anything, a category name, an item name, an error, the radio drops out of the way and comes back when the announcement finishes. The setting is Volume while Dial speaks, percent, next to the radio volume, and it is a percentage of that volume rather than of the Windows volume: 25 by default, so a station at 80 plays at 20 while Dial talks.

Set it to 100 to switch ducking off and leave the radio where it is, or 0 to silence the station completely while Dial speaks. Turning the dial quickly does not make the volume jump about: the radio stays down until you stop.

NVDA's own audio ducking cannot do this job. The radio plays inside NVDA itself, and NVDA's ducking quietens other programs, not its own sound.

Where the radio plays

Radio output device, on the Add-on Settings tab, chooses which sound device stations come out of. It moves the radio and nothing else: NVDA goes on speaking out of whatever device it already uses, so you can put a station on your speakers and keep speech in your headphones, or the other way round.

The list is the sound devices Windows currently has, with System default at the top. That is the setting to leave it on if you want the radio to follow Windows, and it is what Dial starts with. Choosing a device applies as soon as you choose OK, including to a station that is already playing.

A device that is switched off or unplugged stays in the list, marked as not connected, and starts working again when you plug it back in. Nothing here changes your Windows sound settings, so if a station ever ends up somewhere you cannot hear it, NVDA is still speaking as it was and you can come back to this dropdown and change it.

BBC stream quality

BBC stations are delivered differently from the rest, and let you choose a quality: 48, 96, 128 or 320 kbps. The default of 128 kbps is recommended because 320 kbps was found to break up during listening tests. The setting applies to BBC stations only, and takes effect the next time you start a station rather than partway through one.

Sleep timer

Put a station on, then press it twice quickly, and the radio turns itself off after your chosen number of minutes, fading out over the last twenty seconds rather than stopping dead. Press twice again to cancel it.

The duration is one setting, Sleep timer, minutes, in Add-on Settings. Anything from 1 to 120 minutes, 30 by default. Type the number or arrow it up and down.

Pressing twice when nothing is playing does nothing except tell you the radio is not playing: there would be nothing to send to sleep. Turning the radio off yourself cancels the timer too.

There is also an unassigned command, "Add 15 minutes to the radio sleep timer", for when you are still awake and the fade is about to start. Assign a key to it in NVDA's Input Gestures dialog. If the fade has already begun, it puts the volume back up.

Turning the radio off

Any of these work:

The first one is the one to remember. It does not care which category you are in or which station is playing, so you do not have to go and find the station before you can stop it. An hour after you started something, that matters: you may well not remember which station it was.

It only does this while the radio is playing. With the radio off, holding the NVDA key and pressing the dial just announces where you are, immediately, as it always has. While something is playing, a single press waits a third of a second in case a second one is coming, and the announcement ends with a reminder that pressing twice turns the radio off.

There is no separate key assigned to turning the radio off by default. Every key this add-on claims stops working for everything else while NVDA is running, so that choice is left to you.

Checking what is playing

Press NVDA and the dial. Along with the current category, you hear the station name, whether it is playing or still tuning in, and how long is left on the sleep timer if one is set.

Stations in workspaces

A workspace can include a radio station, so one press can open your email, your calendar and put a station on. Inside a workspace a station is only ever switched on, never toggled off.

If a station does not play

You will hear that it did not start. Stream addresses change over time and stations do go off air, so a station that worked last month may need its address updating. Check the station's own website for a current stream link, or pick a different station from the built-in list.

Internet radio uses a player built into the add-on, so there is nothing to install and no window ever appears. If those player files are missing the add-on says so rather than failing silently, and reinstalling puts them back. The rest of the add-on works either way.