Quill Radio 3.0

A radio that answers the questions people actually arrive with.

Community Access Technologies has released Quill Radio 3.0 for Windows. It is free, it is part of the QuillVille family, and it is built for people who listen to their computer rather than look at it.

Quill Radio plays internet radio, podcasts, audiobooks and archive recordings, records what is on, and schedules what is coming. Everything it does, it does from the keyboard, and it says what it did.

What 3.0 is about

Version 2.1 opened on an empty favorites tree. That is an accurate picture of having no favorites, and an answer to none of the questions anybody actually opens a radio app with. Almost everything in 3.0 follows from taking those questions seriously.

You are somewhere, from the first second

The first run asks three questions, not seven, and then the app opens on something to listen to. The main window shows whichever surface you choose – favorites, the browse tree, search, recordings or the player – rather than opening a second window on top of the one you were in.

Thirty branches you can wander without searching for anything

The station directory by country, by language, by what is trending today. Podcasts by country and genre, with no account anywhere. Whole libraries – the Internet Archive, LibriVox, Project Gutenberg, Audius, Mixcloud, ccMixter. NOAA Weather Radio by state, county or SAME code. Radio reading services. Television from the iptv.org catalogue. None of it needs a key or a sign-in.

It works before the internet does

A catalogue of stations lives on your own computer, so a search answers the instant you press Enter – and still answers when the connection does not. The live directories layer in behind the local answers rather than holding them up.

Search now finds the station you meant

This is the newest thing in 3.0, and it came from three listeners who could not find five stations between them. A query is not a string: “Sunny 105.7 Gulf Shores Alabama” is a brand, a frequency, a city and a state, and the directories index two of those.

So the query is taken apart and each directory is asked several narrower questions instead of one wide one. 14.90 AM finds 1490 and 1009 finds 100.9. A trailing FM no longer loses the station. And naming the state does real work: Radio Browser knows Sunny 105.7 only as “WCSN 105.7 FM Orange Beach”, so no spelling of “Sunny” could reach it – but 105.7 inside Alabama has exactly one answer, and now it arrives first, misspelled city and all.

The merged results are then ordered by which one you most likely wanted: name and frequency above frequency alone, the station in the place you named above one that merely shares a word, and – between two equally good matches – the one whose stream is known to play, then the one more people listen to.

Typing a station’s web address works too, in every search box. A site is scanned for its stream, which is how you reach the stations no directory carries at all – and there are more of those than people expect.

Recording that behaves like a recorder

Record what is playing, or schedule it. A scheduled recording wakes the computer for itself rather than silently missing the show. A recording that is interrupted resumes. The Recordings player answers Winamp’s keys.

Every window can reach the player

The player, browse, search, recordings, favorites and scheduling are windows – peers, not overlays – with one menu bar each, one now-playing line, and a status bar whose cells are actions rather than decoration.

The app teaches itself

Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) opens 36 guided tutorials, 251 steps, in six tracks. A lesson runs one step at a time, tells you what you should hear when it worked, and can run the step for you. Tick Follow me and it watches the app and moves on when you have done the thing. The keys a tutorial shows are read from your own keymap, so they cannot go stale – and if you rebind a command, every lesson that mentions it says your key from then on.

F1 answers, everywhere

Every window states its purpose and then describes the control you are standing on. Every menu item shows its keyboard route, and no two items in a menu bar claim the same key – a rule now enforced by an automated gate rather than by anybody remembering.

Accessibility is the design, not a feature of it

Quill Radio is built by and for screen-reader users. Some of what that means in practice:

• It says what the screen reader will not. Window titles, control names and focus moves are the reader’s job; a background result, a state change on a control you are not standing on, and the outcome of an action are the app’s. Saying both is how an app becomes something people turn the speech off for.
• Sizes are measured in characters, not pixels, so a readout grows with the system font instead of shrinking against it.
• Nothing is discovered by looking. Every list says how many rows it has, every long operation says it is running, and a source having a bad day says so rather than posing as “no matches”.

Availability

Quill Radio 3.0 is a free download for Windows 10 and 11, as an installer or a portable build, from the QuillVille site. It shares its engine with QUILL, the full accessible word processor, and sits beside QUILL Cast (podcasts), Quill Weather, Quill Audio Studio, Quill Media Player, Quill Inkwell, Quill Converter, Quill Beacon and QuillLite – one family, one set of keys, one way of speaking.

Upgrading from 2.x keeps your favorites, your settings and your keymap.

About Community Access Technologies

Community Access Technologies builds software for blind and low-vision users that does not ask them to work around it. Everything in the QuillVille family is free, keyboard-first, and designed with a screen reader running.

Support: support@community-access.org