Accessibility Improvements wishlist

Hi Jim.
Native Access is very accessible with VoiceOver.
I can see no reason or need why you should need sighted assist to use any of it's functions.

I'm a Mac user myself and have been using Native Access since it's inception. It's gotten much better since the early days, so try to understand how it works using VoiceOver and if you should get stuck, either use one of the resources mentioned previously, or return here and let me know, where upon I will do my best to help you.

It's divided into groups, which may help you to understand a little better.
Toolbar, containing a few options.
Navigation bar, containing add serial, not installed, updates and installed products.
Performing a VO+Space command on one of those options will show you other items to click on and interact with.
IE: Clicking on Not Installed, stopping your interaction and using VoiceOver to go further to the right will show you any products not currently installed that are tied to your account.

Of course, this all assumes you have previously logged in, and I'll base my help on this idea.

Logging in is not difficult however, and simply requires that you VO +Space on the email field, and again on the password field, obviously after you've typed into each of them respectively.

You can then either navigate to the login button or simply press enter once you have entered your password.

 

Hi,
When I open NativeAccess, I can only see a hear line that says "Native Access, the easiest way to get all your musical gear ready for use," and a progress bar. I see nothing else. The steps I performed were:

1. Go to the page and down load the disk image for Mac.

2. Open the disk image and find the Native Access app.

3. Open the app.

I did this with no keyboard connected and with my keyboard connected. I'm at a loss to know what to do to get moving forward.

Thanks for any and all insight. If nothing else, I'll have help from someone with site soon.

 

Jim, this leads me to wonder if you're running this on an M1 Mac? If so, you need a different build of Native Access, but I don't have the link to it at the moment.
You might also try using Aira or Be My Eyes to see if there's an error message on-screen that VO can't read.
VOCR is also an option, if you don't know what that is, I've posted my demo about it below.
Hope these suggestions can get you moving forward asap.
Not fun to have new toys you can't use.

 

Hi Andre,
I'm running Big Sur. My Mac is an early 2015 MacBook Air. OS is 11.1. I'll look into the options above. I'm wondering if the issues relate to running Big Sur. I read the compatibility article listed at the tops of the pages on the site. I forget if Native Access was listed as being compatible. The images that show compatibility status do not have alt text, so it's unclear if they indicate compatibility.

 

Hi Jim. Nope, I'm running Big Sur on two Mac's.
As of yesterday, an M1 MBP, and my main system is a 2019 MBP which I use as my daily driver. It's not a big Sur issue, I can tell you that.

 

Hi Andre,

Thank you for your willingness to help. I very much appreciate it.

I'm happy to report that I got everything installed. By the time I got it done, I wasn't thinking logically, so I'm unsure of what I did that made it work. I figured out that there seems to be something that makes it so that training mode doesn't turn on if I plug in the old USB keyboard for typing, not music, in while my A61. is connected. I am going to try again with a bluetooth keyboard paired. I even got as far getting the browser to scroll through some sounds while Connect Kontrol software was loaded in stand-alone mode. And just for my own use, not for giving away, I converted the manual to a form I can read and started reading it.

I'm very happy that NI has good descriptions of all the keys and good overviews. of how things work

I also connected the A61 up to Garageband, but was only sending MIDI, not actually playing sounds on the keyboard, so I'll try again. to follow those instructions

When the Komplete Kontrol software told me it had a firmware update, I downloaded the updater software, but could only see the window and the menu bar, so I didn't get that update done.

Glad to be making little gains.

Some of this is happening, probably, because I'm much more of a PC user than I am a Mac user. I chose to use Mac because my PC is old and does not have a solid state hard drive, and the NI software is coupled with GarageBand. I may move up to Logic once I have learned more and have experienced producing some stuff. I have been out of the MIDI game for a very long time, 1993 or so. Now I'm having fun getting back into this and hoping to do some stuff with my son. That's a story for another time.

 

Hi,
I am now browsing instruments and making the presets play as I scroll through them. I am not yet playing sounds with my keys on the keyboard. I went to https://support.native-instruments....Keys-of-my-KOMPLETE-KONTROL-S-Series-Keyboard and followed the instructions. They said to use System Preferences to ensure that the two items on the page are installed. I now have the checkboxes turned on. I've restarted my Mac. No keys are making notes play. I'm unsure what to attempt next.

I'm going to come back and see what else I can try but for now I need to walk away before I am too frustrated to think clearly. <smile>

 

You didn't mention if you're trying to make the sounds play in Komplete Kontrol stand-alone or in a DAW.
If you're trying in stand-alone, one word. Don't.
Go direct to a DAW. Configuring the stand-alone's audio preferences to work properly will make you pull your hair and teeth out, and I tell *everybody* simply don't even waste your time doing so. It's pointless.
Good for testing, but not needed, at all.
Move straight to your DAW, load KK on a track and try loading sounds again.
Done.

 

Hi,
The NI Support article at https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/210292525 gives mouse directions for making Komplete Kontrol work in Garage Band. I'm having trouble understanding how to translate this into keyboard instructions. I have done the following.

1. Open the app and let it connect to my A61
2. Start a new project.
3. When the Create Track dialog comes up, select the Software Instrument radio button.
4. When the dialog coses, open the Smart Cjontrols group.
5. Here is the instruction I am having trouble translating: "In the upper-right corner of the Smart Controls pane, press the Inspector button once to show the Inspector." When I look at the Smart Controls area, I see what I think is what they are refering too. It's a scroll area. Inside that area are a bunch of controls to use. Here is where I'm doing something incorrectly. There are lots of choices of what I could load: Komplete Kontrol, Battery, Kontact, and more.

In trying to wrap my head around what controls what, I thought that from the Keyboard browser, I was supposed to be able to pick products, which I take to mean things that can either play instruments or add effects. Some products only play instruments. Some only add plug-ins. Some do both.

Maybe I am mistakenly telling Garage Band to use something wrong. I'm getting a dialog that asks me to adjust or save a patch. This seems wrong to me, because my concept of how this works is that I should be able to do all this stuff from my keyboard.

The outcome of all this is that when I'm done attempting to do this, I'm playing the electric piano sound from Garage Band and having various results, none of which is that I can get the keyboard to play its own instruments.

Thanks for letting me rant.

Jim

4.

 

I'm a Logic user first and foremost but I would suggest you load Komplete Kontrol, which will then allow the keyboard to load your instruments as expected.
This is the plugin that is effectively the front-end to your other Native Instruments plugins.
The keyboard is how you control this.
Failure to load Komplete Kontrol however, means that the keyboard has nothing to talk to, so naturally it needs to be connected to something it can work with. That is Komplete Kontrol.

By all accounts you were 99.9% on the right track, but either forgot, or didn't understand that one last,vital step.

Go forth and make music.

 

Hi,
Now I think Garage Band knows I have the Komplete Kontrol plug-in loaded. Since I'm new to this, I'm likely using incorrect terms. I can go to my keyboard and switch between instruments and other items. When I press the knob that makes a selection, I hear my computer say "No results." This causes me to think that this is no longer an accessibility issue, but a loading issue.

In standalone Komplet Kontrol I can scroll through instruments. I'm still not confident that I have really loaded things by picking the right stuff in Garage Band. I will check to see if I can get support from NI in case it is some sort of driver or other issue. Thanks so much for your patience.

 

Jim, I really think you'd do better with the actual Komplete Kontrol email list. Please subscribe there instead. This forum is not seen by huge amounts of people as you can probably tell.
komplete-kontrol-access+subscribe@googlegroups.com

 

Hi,
Here's something that would be a wonderful accessibility improvement.

Currently, we can touch the top of one of the 8 knobs on the keyboard and here the parameter name. It would also be great to hear the current value. My opinion also is that it may be too much verbalization to hear new values as we turn the nobs. I'm unsure about that, though.

Thanks for considering.

Jim

 

I've had this same discussion with a few people that have contacted me and asked my thoughts and initially I thought it may be too undesired to hear the value, also some plugins do not report the value of whatever they control, just offer a 0-100 value or something but that is still a position value.

A thought on how to make it annunciate in a useful way would be maybe to speak the value on first touch after the parameter name then again on touch release maybe? so if you want to know what value you are at as you turn just release the parameter. Some smarts could also be put in the code to only annonce the label of the parameter when a control if first selected, if you re-select the same control then just speak the value... Lots of things that could be done but needs someone that cares enough (and is allowed to by the bean counters) to actually develop it..... Since it seems like even VST3 support is a distant pipe dream that slips further and further away I doubt they could find any time to do that. Seems they are really stretched in development resources these days.

 

Hi there!

My name is Marco, and I am going to use a Summer Of Sound offer in a bit to purchase an S61 with Komplete 13 Ultimate.

I am wondering, being based in Germany, if the announcements coming from Komplete Kontrol are going to be in English even on a German language Mac, or if they are localized into some other languages, like the website for Native Instruments is. Not that English would be a problem, but I'd definitely like to know just in case.

Thanks!

 

Hi Kair. I own Macshine Mk 3 and Studio. Are there any plans to update the Maschine studio in the future? I love it because it's bigger.

 

Hi everyone! As I am waiting for my S61 to arrive, I went ahead and already installed the software native Access offered me. I noticed a few accessibility problems on the Mac side still, using the current version:

1. In Preferences, the current path for any of the three items is not accessible to VoiceOver. I have to use the VOCR tool to OCR the screen to get them to show up. It would be good if these became accessible by default, for example to confirm that a newly selected path did indeed get input correctly.

2. If there are installation errors, these are not accessible. I only found out about one, and one activation error which is due to the still missing keyboard serial number, by OCR'ing the screen.

Something to add to the wish list for a future update.

Thanks!
Marco

 

It would be amazing if we can make changes to a preset and save as a favorite! If there's already a way, please let me know. Thanks!

 

make the changes you want, then File > SaveAs. Saved to your user library and you can favorite mark it if you want.