Quill Weather User Guide

Quill Weather is a small, standalone, screen-reader-first weather app. This guide covers what is specific to the standalone app; the weather features themselves are the same ones documented in the Quill Radio User Guide’s Weather section (they share the code).

Starting the app

Launch Quill Weather from the Start Menu, or run QuillWeather.exe from the portable folder. On first run there is no saved location yet, so choose Weather menu > Add Location… (or the Add Location… button) and search by ZIP code, city, county, or address.

The main window is small on purpose – a status line telling you whether monitoring is on, and buttons for Open Weather Center, Toggle Monitoring, and Add Location. Everything else is on the menu bar.

Quill Weather is built to keep running.

Minimize to Tray (File menu, or Ctrl+W) tucks the window into the system tray; monitoring keeps going.
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W is a global show/hide hotkey: it works from any app, even when Quill Weather does not have focus. Press it once to hide the window to the tray (monitoring keeps running); press it again to bring the window back and focus it. Quill Weather speaks “hidden to the tray” or “shown” so you know which happened, and you never have to go looking for the tray icon. The chord is unique to Quill Weather (QUILL uses Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q and Quill Radio uses Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R), so the three apps never collide. It is Windows-only; if another program has already claimed Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W, Quill Weather leaves it alone and you still show and hide the window from the tray icon.
By default, closing the window also goes to the tray rather than quitting (so a stray Alt+F4 does not end your watch). Only Exit (File menu or the tray) truly quits. You can change this in Options > Close button keeps monitoring in the tray.
Options > Start Quill Weather with Windows launches the app at sign-in. Pair it with Options > Start minimized to the tray and it comes up already watching, with no window.
Options > Check for alerts in the background (even when Quill Weather is closed) registers a Windows scheduled task that checks for new alerts on your monitor interval and shows a toast if it finds one – so you are covered even with no Quill Weather process running at all.

Quill Weather’s icon is a gold sun behind a white cloud, on a sky-blue tile. If you have used an earlier build, this is new: Quill Weather used to share Quill Radio’s broadcast-wave icon, so on a desktop with both installed the two looked identical in the tray and in the taskbar. Every app in the family now has its own - the same rounded tile shape and the same gold accent throughout, but its own colour and its own picture each.

Right-click the tray icon (or use the Applications key) for: the current monitoring status, Open Weather Center, Quick Weather, Start/Stop Monitoring, Open Quill Radio, Open QUILL, Show, and Exit. Left-double-click the icon to bring the window back.

Weather Monitoring (Weather Guardian)

Weather menu > Start Weather Monitoring (Ctrl+Shift+M) watches your saved locations’ official alerts and speaks each new one as it is issued, with a system -tray notification and the alert sounder. Pause Alert Checks snoozes it without turning it off. See Settings for the alert sounder controls (on/off, your own sound file with a Play button, and how many times it repeats), and Weather menu > Test Alert to preview the whole experience.

Every place you have saved is watched, not just one. You do not have to choose or configure anything: if you have added home, work, and your daughter’s town, all three are covered. Each place is checked on the same schedule, and each new alert names its place when it is spoken and in its tray notification, so you always know where as well as what. When monitoring starts you hear one combined summary rather than a line per place – for example, “3 places: Tucson, Boston, and Reno. All clear right now.” The status line and the main window say either the one place’s name or “for 3 places”. (Picking exactly which of your saved places to watch is coming; today the watch covers all of them.)

Customizing features

Options > Customize Features… lists the app’s switchable areas – Alert Monitoring and NOAA Weather Radio – each with a short description. Unchecking one removes its menu items the next time you open Quill Weather, so you can trim the app to just what you use. (This is the same customization Quill Radio offers.)

Quillins

Quill Weather can run Quillins – QUILL’s small, sandboxed, permission-gated add-ons – from its own Quillins menu. A Quillin declares which apps it targets, so only add-ons written for Quill Weather appear here. The bundled weather-extra-alerts sample shows the idea: it contributes an additional alert source whose alerts are merged into the ones Weather Monitoring already watches. Quillins are off in Safe Mode, and third-party Quillins are disabled in this release – the bundled ones are the foundation.

How Quill Weather talks to you

Everything Quill Weather tells you – a new warning, the all-clear, “monitoring on for 3 places”, a setting you just saved – goes out on more than one channel at the same time, so you receive it the way you actually read.

Speech. Your screen reader speaks it. Urgent messages interrupt whatever is being read; routine confirmations wait their turn.
Braille. The same message is written to a connected braille display. If you keep speech turned down and read by touch, you no longer miss Quill Weather’s messages – earlier versions spoke only. Two things keep the display readable: when several different messages arrive in a rush they settle into a single write rather than flashing past faster than your fingers can follow (the first one still appears immediately, so nothing feels slow), and an error message is held on the display instead of being wiped by the next routine update. Braille is written through your screen reader, so it works wherever NVDA or JAWS is driving your display.
The status line at the bottom of the window keeps the last message, so you can go back and read it with your review cursor.

If one channel fails – a display unplugged mid-sentence, a screen reader that went away – only that channel is affected; the message still reaches you the other ways.

These preferences are shared with QUILL, because the apps use one settings store on a machine: Preferences > Accessibility in QUILL controls whether announcements are brailled at all, the braille wording style, how long an identical repeat is suppressed before it may take the display again, whether errors stay on the display, and whether the companion apps play sound cues. Change them once in QUILL and Quill Weather follows.

Reaching the other apps

Quill Weather, Quill Radio, and QUILL are separate apps that can open each other. The top-level QuillVille menu lists the others – Open QUILL and Open Quill Radio – and each opens in its own window; if it is already running, it simply comes to the front. Every QuillVille app carries the same menu in the same place, so getting from one to another is the same three keystrokes everywhere. The tray menu offers the same list.

If the app you pick is not installed yet, Quill Weather does not just tell you so. It asks whether you would like to download and install it, and if you say yes it fetches and verifies it in the background and opens it when it is ready. If the download cannot be reached, it offers the web release page instead. Nothing is downloaded without your yes.

On the same machine all three apps share one data store, so a location you saved in one is there in the others.

Editions and the QuillVille Runtime

Quill Weather shares one Python runtime – the QuillVille Runtime – with every other QuillVille app (QUILL, Quill Radio, and QUILL Audio Studio). It is installed once per user and reused by all of them, so once any Quill app has installed it, every app you add afterward starts instantly. The runtime is reference-counted: it is removed only when the last app that needs it is uninstalled.

There are four downloads. Pick the one that fits how you want to run Quill Weather:

Full portable (Quill-Weather-Portable-<version>.zip, about 82 MB) is fully self-contained: it runs from a USB stick with no installation and no internet, and it carries a genuine, unmodified copy of Python. Weather is a small app, so this build is already compact. Extract it anywhere and run QuillWeather.exe. A data folder next to the exe (holding a storage-mode.json marker set to portable) keeps everything on the stick.
Companion edition (Quill-Weather-Companion-<version>.zip, about 2 MB) is feather-light: just the app and its docs, running on the shared QuillVille Runtime. The first time you launch it, if the runtime is not already installed, it offers to download and install it (about 230 MB, once) with a fully accessible progress bar. After that, this app and every other QuillVille app start instantly.
Full installer (Quill-Weather-Setup-Shared-<version>.exe) installs the shared runtime, if it is not already present, plus the app, with a Start Menu entry and an uninstaller.
Thin installer (the -Lite setup) is a tiny installer that downloads the shared runtime only if it is not already present, then installs the app.

Whenever the QuillVille Runtime is downloaded – whether an installer or the app’s own first launch starts it – you get a fully accessible progress bar that works with NVDA, JAWS, and Narrator, announcing progress as a percentage. You can follow it and know exactly how far along the one-time download is.

A note on antivirus: the app’s launcher is now a genuine, tiny native program, and the bundled Python is the official unmodified build. Earlier versions used a renamed and modified copy of Python’s pythonw.exe as the launcher, which some antivirus tools flagged as a false positive. That pattern is gone, so the Quill apps are far less likely to be flagged.

Help

Help > User Guide opens this document, and Help > Release Notes opens the notes for the version you are running. Both ship inside Quill Weather, so they work with no internet connection. They open in your browser, which means you can read them with the screen-reader navigation you already know – headings, links, and find-in-page.

Tutorials

Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) opens 11 guided tutorials – 60 steps, about 47 minutes of material – covering every feature Quill Weather has, in the order somebody would actually learn it. They are not a second copy of this guide. A guide answers “what does this do”; it cannot answer “what do I do now”, because a document cannot see what you have already done. This window can.

They show the keys you have. A step names the command it is about, and the key is rendered when the step is drawn. Rebind something and the tutorial says your key.
Try it runs the step. Any step that names a command can be performed from the lesson, so a tutorial can open a window for you and then talk you through what you are standing in.
Follow me notices that you did it. Tick Follow me and the lesson watches the app – once a second, and it watches what changed, never which key you pressed – so however you do the step, it says what it saw (“Done: the watch is running”) and reads you the next one. It never takes the keyboard, and nothing is graded: every step still has Next, and a check that never comes true costs you one keypress.

The Tutorials window is a real window, not a wizard: leave it open, move to the app, do the step there, and hear the lesson move on behind you. A modal dialog would own the keyboard for the whole lesson, which is the wrong shape for teaching somebody to use the thing underneath it.

The contents. Three tracks, in teaching order. Each row says how many steps it has, roughly how long it takes, and whether you have finished it. The filter box narrows the list – every word you type has to appear somewhere in a tutorial – and typing here narrows it to the tutorials about the window you came from.

Your place is kept. Close a lesson half way through and it opens there again. Finishing one is remembered separately from where you are in it. Forget my progress clears the lot and changes nothing else. Nothing about your progress leaves this computer.

Reading rather than doing. Read it all shows a whole tutorial as one page of text, and The whole book as a document opens all 11 of them as one page – generated from the same lessons the window teaches from, so the two cannot disagree. It ships as docs/tutorials.md beside this guide. The document states the keys the app ships with; only the window can know the ones you rebound.

Updating

Help > Check for Updates knows whether you run the installer or the portable build and downloads the matching one. All the Quill apps publish to one release feed, and each looks only at its own downloads there, so a Quill Radio release is never offered to you as a Quill Weather update. Quill Weather updates on its own schedule, separate from Quill Radio. Because the QuillVille Runtime is shared, an app update is usually just the small app itself; the large runtime is downloaded only when a new one is required, and again with a fully accessible progress bar.

Weather features – full reference

This is the full reference for the weather features, shared by the standalone Quill Weather app and Quill Radio’s Weather menu (they run the same code). It brings official U.S. weather to you as clear, screen-reader-first text: current conditions, the forecast, an extended daily outlook, and – most importantly – active watches, warnings, and advisories for the places you care about.

Everything comes from free, no-account, no-key sources: the National Weather Service (api.weather.gov) for observations, the forecast, and alerts; Open-Meteo for the extended daily outlook and the air-quality index; and OpenStreetMap for searching locations. Nothing is sent anywhere except your request for weather at a place you choose.

A safety note first

Quill Weather is an additional accessible weather tool. Delivery can be delayed or interrupted by network, device, or provider problems. Do not rely on it as your only source of emergency information. Keep a NOAA Weather Radio, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and local emergency instructions as your primary safety channels.

Adding a location

Open the Weather menu and choose Add Location… (or open Weather Now… and press the Add Location button).
Type a ZIP code, a city and state (Tucson, AZ), a county name, or an address, then press Search. (You can also type exact coordinates like 32.2, -110.9.)
A Results list appears. Because a search can match more than one place – there are Springfields in Illinois, Missouri, and more – you arrow to the right one and press Add Selected. Optionally give it a friendly name like Home or Mom's first.
The first location you add becomes your primary location. Add as many as you like and switch between them with the Location chooser in Weather Now.

Removing a location: in Weather Now, select it in the Location chooser and press Remove Location (or the Delete key).

Weather Now

Weather menu > Weather Now… (or Ctrl+Shift+W) opens the Weather Center. It reads top to bottom in priority order:

Active Alerts – a list of any watches, warnings, and advisories, most severe first. Arrow through them; the full official text, including the instructions, appears in the read-only box just below (so you can read and copy it). When there are no alerts, that box is hidden, so you don’t stop on an empty field.
Current conditions – a complete, warm paragraph from the nearest station: temperature, feels-like, sky, humidity, dew point, wind and gusts, cloud cover, barometric pressure, visibility, chance of precipitation, sunrise, sunset, the ultraviolet index, and air quality. Every value is written out for speech, and the observation time is shown in the location’s own time zone. You choose which of these details appear in Settings.
Forecast – the National Weather Service period forecast (“This Afternoon”, “Tonight”, …). Arrow the list; each period’s full detailed text appears below, led by its day and temperature so it stands alone.
Daily outlook (extended) – an at-a-glance list reaching about 10 days out (up to 16), each day a friendly line: “Monday, July 20: Clear. High 98, low 75 degrees. Sunrise 5:42 AM, sunset 7:38 PM.” Arrow the list to read each day in the detail box below.
A status line naming the National Weather Service office and the observation station, so you always know where the data came from.

Press Refresh at any time to pull the latest. Close leaves any radio you are playing untouched.

Quick Weather

Weather menu > Quick Weather (or Ctrl+Shift+Q) speaks a one-line summary of your primary location without opening a window – for example:

Here is the weather for Tucson, Arizona. It is 96 degrees Fahrenheit and mostly clear. It feels like 101 degrees. The wind is blowing from the west-northwest at 5 miles per hour. There is one active alert. The most urgent is an Excessive Heat Warning.

You choose what that line includes in Settings.

Active Alerts

Weather menu > Active Alerts… opens Weather Now with focus already on the alerts list, so you can review warnings with the fewest keystrokes.

Settings

Weather menu > Settings… controls:

Units – temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius; wind in miles per hour, kilometers per hour, knots, or meters per second.
Forecast periods to show and Extended daily outlook (days) – how much of the forecast and outlook Weather Now lists (0 days turns the outlook off).
Hourly forecast (hours) – how many hours of the hour-by-hour forecast the Weather Center lists (0 turns it off).
Current-conditions details to include – a checkbox for each of feels-like, humidity, dew point, wind and gusts, cloud cover, pressure, visibility, chance of precipitation, sunrise and sunset, moon phase, moonrise and moonset, the ultraviolet index, air quality, and the current local time at the location. Temperature and the sky condition always show.
Alert severity to show – everything, or only Moderate and above, Severe and above, and so on – plus a list of specific event names to hide (one per line).
Alert sound – turn the sound on or off, Choose your own .wav (with a Play button to hear it and Use Default to go back), and set how many times it plays for each alert (1 to 10).
Refresh interval – how often Weather Now refreshes (never faster than the NWS-recommended minimum).
Quick Weather line – turn feels-like temperature, wind, humidity, the active-alert count, and data age on or off.

The hourly forecast, the moon, and local time

Weather Now (and the Weather Center) show three more things:

Hourly forecast – an Hourly forecast list you arrow through, giving the temperature, sky, and chance of precipitation for each coming hour (from the NWS hourly product). Set its length, or turn it off, in Settings.
The moon – current conditions and every day of the outlook include the moon’s phase, how full it is (percent illuminated), and that day’s moonrise and moonset – all computed on your own machine, no extra internet lookup.
Two clocks and a check time – the report leads with a plain-spoken time summary: the current local day and time in the place you searched, the current local time where you are, and when the reading was taken (“checked just now”, or the exact minute in your own time for an older reading). For example: “Right now it is Thursday, April 27, 9:51 AM in Tucson, Arizona, and 6:51 AM where you are. This reading was checked just now.” When you and the place you searched are in the same time zone, it says so once instead of repeating the clock. Turn the local-time line off in Settings if you prefer.

Weather monitoring (Weather Guardian)

Weather menu > Start Weather Monitoring (or Ctrl+Shift+M) watches your saved locations’ official watches, warnings, and advisories and speaks each new one the moment it is issued – with interrupting speech for the most serious events (tornado, flash flood) – and tells you when they all clear. It also drops a notification in the system tray for each new alert, so you can see it there.

Every saved location is watched at once, with no setup: home, work, and family are all covered. Each alert names its place when it is spoken and in its tray notification. Starting the watch speaks a single combined summary across the places (“3 places: Tucson, Boston, and Reno. All clear right now.”), and turning it off or reading the status line says either the one place’s name or “for 3 places”. Choosing a subset of your saved places is a later addition.
It keeps working while the app is minimized to the tray, and it starts again automatically the next time you launch (choose Stop Weather Monitoring to turn it off for good).
While a warning is active it checks much more often (as fast as once a minute) so you hear about changes quickly, then eases back when the weather clears.
Weather menu > Pause Alert Checks snoozes it temporarily without turning it off; the same item then reads Resume Alert Checks.

Test Alert

Weather menu > Test Alert shows you exactly what a real alert is like – the spoken words, the sound (using your sound settings), a system-tray notification, and the alert window – all clearly marked as a test and dismissable with OK. It sends nothing over the internet and does not touch your real monitoring.

The Quill Weather app – alerts even when everything else is closed

Quill Weather is a small companion app whose only job is to keep the alert watch running on its own:

It lives in the system tray; closing its window tucks it back to the tray and it keeps watching. Only Exit quits it.
Options > Start Quill Weather with Windows (with Start minimized to the tray) makes it watch from the moment you sign in, without opening a window.
Options > Check for alerts in the background (even when Quill Weather is closed) goes further: Windows itself wakes a quick check on your interval, looks for new warnings, and shows a toast if it finds one – so you are covered even with no program running at all.

And on the radio side, Station > Start Quill Radio with Windows launches Quill Radio automatically when you sign in.

Your local NOAA Weather Radio

NOAA Weather Radio is the National Weather Service’s own broadcast voice – continuous forecasts, conditions, and warnings from real VHF transmitters. Quill Radio carries the authoritative directory of those transmitters and their internet re-streams:

Weather menu > Listen to your Local NOAA Weather Radio – one keypress plays the transmitter covering your saved Weather location: your county’s transmitter first, or the nearest one whose coverage includes you. If you have not set a Weather location yet, it tells you how instead of failing silently. Once playing, it is a normal station – favorite it, record it, schedule it.
Weather menu > Update NOAA Weather Radio Directory – pull the newest directory on demand. It fetches off the UI thread, announces the result, and on failure leaves your existing data untouched. The complete directory ships inside the app (1,035 transmitters across every state and territory), so browsing and the local lookup work even fully offline; an update simply layers fresher data on top, and the bundled copy always remains as the floor. Off in Safe Mode.
Browse Stations > Weather / NOAA – the same directory as a browsable state-by-state tree; see the Station menu chapter.

The audio stream is a companion to the text weather above, not a replacement for a dedicated NOAA Weather Radio receiver with alert tones.

What’s coming later

This release shows weather as text, watches your saved places for alerts in the background, and streams NOAA Weather Radio audio. Later phases add spoken weather with its own voices and interruption rules per feed and per alert, continuously generated weather channels, and choosing exactly which of your saved places the alert watch covers. See the Product Requirements document (Help > Product Requirements) for the full roadmap.

Getting help

Support is run by Community Access, and the address is support@community-access.org. A person reads it, and replies come back by email.

The quickest way there is Help > Get Help from Support… (Ctrl+Alt+F2), which every app in the family answers with the same form: what kind of message this is, a subject, what happened, and – if you want an answer – an email address to reply to. What you expected and how to reproduce it are optional, and worth more than anything else when you can give them.

Press Send and your own mail program opens with the whole message already written, addressed to support, with Quill Weather’s name and version and your Windows version filled in at the bottom. Nothing is sent until you send it there, so you can read it over, add anything, or change your mind.

If this machine has no mail program set up – webmail only, say – the app puts the whole message on your clipboard and tells you the address, so nothing you typed is lost. And writing to support@community-access.org yourself always works just as well: there is no form you have to use. Say which app you were using and what happened.