A Message from Alex on Platform Improvements and Our Plan Forward

Ha ha ha! Genius comment :slight_smile: Did they really only double their efforts 16 times? We’ll need a bigger bit count on the CPU soon…

@SBDOBRESCU Reading your comment about the futuristic automated features, I just realized: I’m already there! You must be talking about my house, though I have no cats. And I still feed the dogs manually, kind of a father-and-dog bonding thing :slight_smile: Gotta start working on that Nespresso machine… something must be ah-brewing in the morning :slight_smile:

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Just want to both make the level of automations you and others have achieved with various Routines, Modes, SmartApps both highly reliable, but also much easier to set up. We’ll get there.

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I created an alarm reset routine that is available in smart tiles to reset all my lights and alarm when this happens

I think I’ve seen a “Mute siren” next to the “Dismiss” button when viewing an Alert - that is new, just showed up a couple days ago. Haven’t tried it yet, but I think when I dismiss an intruder alert, my front light goes back to it’s regular color (as opposed to red during the alert)

That is, if the view alert works. It regularly takes 3-4 attempts for that to come up, then the Dismiss button won’t do a thing and I end up killing the ST app and redoing the whole procedure. Annoying as ****.

NOT. GONNA. HAPPEN… Discussed a million times.

Super, then jump on this thread and tell the world how you did it…

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Speaking of plans forward…

Any chance of restoring voiceover accessibility? Since the last iOS mobile app update, the SmartThings app is no longer usable for those of us who rely on voiceover navigation. I really can’t afford to keep paying someone else just to use the app. :disappointed_relieved:

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Okay, I’ll say this: the fact that voiceover is still broken is perhaps more embarrassing than the platform mess of the last month. It would be embarrassing even if one of our most selfless community contributors didn’t rely on it. But it’s doubly so since that’s the case.

As long as we are casting straw poll votes, put me down for making fixing this a top priority.

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We have been working on this JD. It includes blindfolding employees and having them navigate the mobile app. The mobile team has made this a priority.

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Any videos of that?

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Ha! I wish!

So at this point based on the status of Rules Machine are we to gather that the relationship is still fractured.

What steps have you taken to repair the relationship with the very people that keep the majority of us here?

While we are your evangelists to the world at large we depend on you working with the smartapp developers to make this a product worth evangelizing over.

We’ve reached out personally to each of our top contributors to get their feedback and open a dialogue.

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nobody asked me :slight_smile:

BTW, if anybody with an IOS device wants to try this for themselves, it’s simple:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/technotes/TestingAccessibilityOfiOSApps/TestAccessibilityonYourDevicewithVoiceOver/TestAccessibilityonYourDevicewithVoiceOver.html

And in addition to the blindfold, do this test with your eyes on the screen. This is where you catch missed and mislabeled elements.

http://www.applevis.com/forum/accessibility-advocacy/ios-app-voiceover-accessibility-test-plan

Also, I just realized I made an assumption that people testing accessibility know that we don’t use actual blindfolds. There is a feature built into iOS called “screen curtain” which will turn the screen completely off while you are using voice over. Many people who use voiceover use screen curtain because it saves battery and gives you privacy. And of course it means you can’t cheat while you’re doing an accessability test. So a blindfold test means “screen curtain on.” (As long as you’re using an iOS device.)

And if you’re hardcore, A11y did a 40 minute “crash course” for developers on how to test for Voiceover accessibility which is available on YouTube. Full captions as well.

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@JDRoberts thank you for those - even as a iOS developer I was not aware of the screen curtain feature (and I did make sure that my application is as accessible as possible. Feedback from some blind users was extremely helpful).

From personal experience I have to say that direct feedback from users using accessibility features is extremely valuable. Not relying on those features on a daily basis requires making assumptions on what might be useful - and those assumptions typically prove to be incorrect.

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Blindfolded staff (albeit insightful) is a bit different than a native voiceover user… I would encourage you to keep a blind QA engineer on contract for testing purposes.

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@alex is this time different than this pat one year ago?

I brought this up in an earlier post where I said that I have been here over 2.5 years now and this has been an ever-present issue. Every so often there’s an apology and a promise that this time you’re going to fix it, redouble efforts, etc.

Just saying… It just seems like we’ve been here sever times before.

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I think this really comes down to all the changes we are making to our decision making processes and company priorities. Alex and the leadership team have done a really good job at setting and communicating the correct priorities for the next year and the top two are explicitly focused on achieving platform stability and reliability.

^^^^^restated from above

To add a little more it’s more about intensity of focus on very specific goals. Alex and our leadership team have gone through some painstaking efforts to remove distractions. That is in addition to making very clear exactly what the priorities are and like I said above the top two on that list are geared towards having a organization that can scale (We’re hiring big time!) to provide stability and reliability as well as focusing the efforts of that organization on stability.

From the inside, I can tell you, it’s different this time.