Rutba Office 2.1: its own MP4 export at twice real time, and every app audited for accessibility

Rutba Office 2.1 came out on 15 October, later the same day as 2.0. It makes Video’s export fast, finishes work left open in Image, and does something every app needed: it checks that people who use a keyboard, a screen reader or Windows High Contrast can use the suite as well as anybody.

Video writes its own MP4

Until 2.1, exporting a video took as long as the video: ten minutes of film, ten minutes of waiting. Now the picture and the sound are encoded by the computer’s own hardware, as H.264 and AAC, and written into the file as they are made by an MP4 writer of the suite’s own. A 60-second 1080p timeline exports in about 28 seconds on our reference laptop. Where a computer lacks the codec, the old way is used by itself, so an export never fails for want of it.

Image keeps what you were doing

• Selections are kept in the project. The selection on the canvas, and the one each adjustment layer was made with, are saved in the .rimg file and come back with it. Load Selection puts one back.
• A mask follows its layer. Scaling, turning, Free Transform and Perspective carry a layer’s mask with it, as Photoshop links them, and one Undo takes both back.
• Words are typed on the picture. A double-click on a text layer opens it in place, with a caret, selection and typing in any language, and a bar for the font, size, style, alignment and colour.

Every app, checked for accessibility

Every app’s window, every ribbon tab, each app menu and the main dialogs are now checked at each release with axe-core, an open rules engine, against WCAG 2.2 at levels A and AA. Nothing serious or critical is left: every control is named, every field labelled, the contrast measured, and every target at least 24 pixels. Around the audit:

• The keyboard alone. F6 and Shift+F6 move between the ribbon, the panes, the document and the status bar, as in Office. Menus follow the arrow keys, Home and End, Escape goes back to what opened them, and the focus is never left on nothing.
• A screen reader is told what is in each document: a document’s headings, a worksheet’s active cell with its address and value, a deck’s slides by name, Mail’s list and the open message, the calendar’s dates, and a PDF’s pages and words.
• Windows High Contrast is followed in every app, with the system’s own colours, the chosen and current items outlined, the focus ring drawn and the icons in the system’s text colour.

The suite publishes a conformance statement that goes criterion by criterion through what is met and what is known not to be. It says plainly that the checks are automated: nobody using a screen reader, switch access or speech recognition has evaluated the suite yet, and that is the next step.

Updates that finish

Some updates to 2.0 stopped with “Uninstaller error 2”. The installer starts the moment Rutba Office begins to quit, and the copy being replaced refused to be removed while it was still closing. The 2.1 installer tries again once a second, asks Rutba Office’s windows to close after five seconds, ends what is left of it after ten, and only asks you to retry after fifteen. Unsaved work is copied for Recover every minute, so a copy closed this way loses under a minute of it at most.

Releases are now made as drafts and published only once every file is up and the update feed has been read back against them, so an installed copy never finds a release without its installer. Each release also carries a software bill of materials, in CycloneDX, listing every package and file it ships with its licence and hash.