Quinter for Twitter. She Looks Good and Sounds Great!

Introduction.

This Blog Post was updated on 6 July 2021 at 7:35 PM.

Some of us get very attached to our favourite Twitter client in order to keep up-to-date and manage our Twitter activity. But it is always helpful to know when alternatives come along. After all, many of us have caught a cold due to the fragile relationship between Twitter and clients to manage it. For some time, I particularly benefited from using a mainstream client called OpenTween which came out of Japan. However this is no longer available.

A new accessible Twitter client from a Fledgling group of developers has arisen very recently. I have no affiliation to this client, nor do I have knowledge of the thinking behind it in terms of why it was felt a need to create a new one. What I do know is that the developers have put a lot of effort into developing functionality quickly and are very responsive to suggestions. The client is named Quinter.
This is the page where you can read more information about Quinter and to download the latest build.

As a result of the point I made earlier concerning a Twitter client no longer being available, I think it is always helpful to have more than one at our disposal and to have choice. Given the quality of this particular client, I want to give its developers maximum encouragement.

So What Do I Like About Quinter for Twitter?

Please note there is an enormous amount I like about Quinter and I cannot include everything here. Even so, this section is quite large. So stay with me and I'll try and summarise most things.

Overview.

I do recommend Twitter clients when people contact me privately or as part of my professional work. Here are some of the reasons why I would recommend giving Quinter a try. Quinter is free, highly responsive, it can coexist on the same machine as your existing Twitter client if you wish, it is accessible to screen-readers, so why not? If you do not like it, you've lost nothing.

Quinter presents to the user an extremely simple interface. For its primary use it consists of two List Box controls; the first contains your timelines, with the second displaying the results of your selection within the first. For general operation, that is all. For many people, that is all they need. The beauty of keeping the interface simple is that some inexperienced computer users get flustered with Tree View controls which this client does not have.

For people who prefer an alternative so-called Invisible Interface, (meaning that shortcut keys can be used globally so as to work with Twitter), this facility is available. But to ensure I receive Braille output and to use first letter navigation, I prefer the User Interface to be visible.

There are many shortcut keys available to serve both methods of working. These are logical and I find them easy to remember. They can be reviewed currently by exploring the menu bar, since each keystroke is listed alongside the focused option for the visible interface and as part of the Readme file in the Quinter zipped archive for the "Invisible Interface". Examples might be: Control+R to reply, Control+Shift+R to retweet an item without quoting, Control+Q to quote the tweet, Control+N for a new tweet, etc. Usefully, pressing Enter opens a tweet for review rather than launching a URL of a web page. To my mind this is a logical approach.

Given that I have mentioned opening a tweet, it is worth spending a moment discussing what happens here.

The text of the tweet can be read with the arrow keys. However, due to the type of Edit Control implemented, it is the one I prefer to use with a Braille display. I am a heavy Braille user, and I find I can read tweets far more fluently without extraneous matter getting in the way of the text, when using this client. Unintentional this facility may be, but it is certainly a useful one.
For example, in the past I have seen tweets rendered on a Braille display in this way:

@brianhartgen Yes, I am! Tweet - 65 characters dlg. Latest version & update.

Whereas Quinter will display it cleanly:

@brianhartgen Yes, I am! Latest version & update.

In addition in this dialog, pressing Tab moves through optional information you may care to review. There is data relating to the tweet, such as the date it was posted, the client used, together with how many times it has been liked and retweeted. You can even get a list of the Twitter accounts which have retweeted your post. Other controls allow you to reply to the tweet, retweet it, like it, view the profile of users, or send a direct message. So if you forget the shortcut keys for these things, all is not lost. It's all right there for you.

I am carefully following the progress of Quinter through a Twitter search, and I noted a comment from someone who claimed that pressing Enter on a tweet took some time to display the content. I have not found this to be the case. I am not sure how fast he would like it to be, but on my primary desktop machine it takes approximately a quarter of a second before my preferred screen-reader (JAWS) begins to read it.

I do like some of the keystrokes to quickly give me information I might need and to navigate to various elements. For example, there is a keystroke to instantly report the originating tweet the focused item is a reply to. You can navigate to the next or prior tweet in the conversation thread, or to the next and prior tweet from the same user. Naturally, you can present the entire conversation in a List Box as well.

There are many features included which have arisen very quickly, including the ability to manage lists, view friends and followers, together with searching and preserving timelines as a result.

I am more than impressed with the friends and followers interface. Invoking either of these presents you with the category you have selected. The dialog contains a List Box of the friends or followers. In terms of followers, you are also advised if you are following the Twitter account, making it very easy for you to cross-reference as to whether you should be following back. To make this process even more thorough, pressing Tab sets focus to a field displaying useful information about the account, such as the date of the last tweet, the bio, how many folloers it has, and so on. Further Buttons in the dialog allow you to send a direct message to the account, follow it, unfollow, or view the timeline for it.

Finally, I have to write about the Messages area, what we might call Direct Messages. These are displayed with those you have sent and received. This is useful as you can view both sides of a conversation easily without the need to move between different areas of the program.

Menus and Dialogs.

The client has a standard menu bar for carrying out actions within the application, together with an Options dialog. There are at least four very useful functions arising from this dialog.

The first of these relates to audio content. Directly from within Quinter, if a link in a tweet points to content such as a YouTube video or an Icecast stream, you can listen to it through the client or using your audio player of choice. My favourite player has always been Winamp. It works beautifully for some streams and is a very clever implementation. It may not work for some streaming sources if used with player such as Winamp.

The second interesting feature is that you can input text which is automatically tagged onto the end of every tweet you send. If for example you are working on a project, and you need to group together such tweets using a hashtag, this ensures that you do not have to remember to insert it after the message has been typed. A very nice touch.

Thirdly, a Check Box allows for filtering out Emoji characters in the Twitter screen names. So if you're not a fan of those, you do not need to hear them in the output.

Finally, there is a Check Box which asks if you would like tweets to be displayed in reverse order, so that the newest of these appears at the bottom of the list. Some of us have become used to working in this way.

Quinter uses a template system for reporting (or displaying) tweet-based information. This is highly customisable, and is fully described in the accompanying readme file. The difficulty with some Twitter clients which do not use this kind of system is that there is a lot of "verbal clutter" when reviewing tweets, meaning that the screen-reader will report far too much. If for example you only want to hear the tweet details without the date or client, this is very easily achieved. It can be done with some other clients, but to some extent it depends upon screen-reader configuration which does not always work successfully. After all, as I have already documented, there are other ways of getting this information if you need it.

Auto-Complete.

Many of us do have difficulty in remembering the Twitter usernames when we want to mention someone. I count myself among those people. Quinter contains a very innovative solution to handle this problem - Auto-Complete.

When composing a new tweet, or replying to an existing one, type the at sign then either the first part of a Twitter username if you can recall it, or the first part of the person's screen (or real) name. Press ALT+A, and a list of users will appear matching the search criteria. Just select the one you want, press Enter and it is right there.

The coolest thing is that there is no intervention from you in order to set this up. It just works. It will even show users who you have not written to previously. I don't know where it's pulling the information from in terms of the users it displays. Maybe it is from the people who follow the account, those you have written to at some time and forgotten about, or a combination of these. I don't know. However it's doing it, it is impressive.

Auto-Read.

A new feature has been introduced which can be enabled or disabled for each timeline. This is the ability to auto-read specific tweets as and when they arrive. For example, if you always want to be advised of new direct messages, you can do that by moving to the relevant timeline and enabling the feature.

I wasn't sure if I would like this feature or not. You can find it in other Twitter clients, but I've only just started using it. What I like about this feature is that in addition to speaking the incoming tweet, it will tell you the account it came from. This is helpful to me because I can have the important timelines set to auto-read for my Twitter accounts I do not monitor too often, and I am notified of any activity there, even if it is not focused. Of course you can have it notify you of new mentions or messages in your regular account, and even those buffers containing lists of tweets which you may have flagged as being worthy of your attention.

Installation.

There is no installer for this product - a little like OpenTween which I mentioned earlier. It is a zipped archive, the contents of which can be extracted to a folder of your choosing and, if necessary, a shortcut created to the Quinter.exe file which runs the program. Naturally, there is an activation process you initially go through so as to link Twitter to Quinter, but once done, you can forget it.

Twitter has a multiple accounts menu, activated with Control+A. This interface, which is beautifully constructed, allows you to add existing Twitter accounts and switch to the one you wish to work with. A keystroke is available to speak the name of the account being used.

Observations.

I did initially have a difficulty with muting sounds. I am most definitely not a fan of audio cues. Whenever something is developed for visually impaired people, it comes with a plethora of sounds which are immediately in your face. I did try to remove the Sounds folder, but it seemed to make no difference at all, so I turned the volume down instead which you can do by pressing ALT+Down Arrow repeatedly. In later builds of Quinter, sounds are much more under the user's control. The volume can be lowered for each account which I find incredibly helpful or the sounds muted entirely for each timeline.

I would recommend implementing a tutorial so we all know what the sounds are meant to represent, should we choose to use them.

I would like to see the ability to filter out specific Twitter clients. Other Twitter clients do this very well. I have a Twitter account on a list for example which I occasionally review. However every few minutes, the owners of the Twitter account insist on sending out tweets using a specific client. To my mind this equates to spam, but hey, it's their Twitter account. But I would like the ability to be able to not see tweets from a specific client.

Conclusion.

The Quinter Twitter client does have an update facility which is very effective. When you start the client, it will prompt you if an update is available and allow you to download it. Alternatively, you can select the Help menu with ALT+H and you will find Check For Updates there.

Quinter has been developed at an extremely fast pace and I can well understand the excitement and enthusiasm evidenced by the developers' Twitter accounts when they discover they have achieved something new. I think it is excellent they are doing this work. What they have attempted to do is to make the application flexible, customisable and powerful, while implementing some features I've not seen elsewhere and keeping the interface simple and easy to use. They seem to have pulled it off.

Quinter is also available for the Mac. It has been some years since I have used an Apple Mac, so I am not in a position to say how well it functions. I am advised it does perform well, but I personally cannot state this.

I am an efficiency nut. I like to configure screen-readers and applications so they give me the essential information in the quickest possible time; something which is becoming sadly lacking with screen-reading of late. This client gives me that and a lot more.

In conclusion, I have to say this. When I wrote the first version of this blog post, I did so with the clear expectation that I would not state which Twitter client I will be using day-to-day to manage my three accounts. But I now have no choice. Quinter has emerged into the Twitter client which I will be staying with. If our company had been commissioning developers to create a Twitter client for blind people to use, the functionality offered within Quinter is how I would have created it on the product specification sheet. That is the highest complement I can pay to the client and its developers. Their next job when they feel they are ready is to create an official public version of Quinter with supporting documentation. There's a lot of punch in this small product and they will need to communicate to their user base the effectiveness of the functionality within it and how it is used. But I return to the point I made at the start of this blog post. I know all too well that you can be enjoying something one day and it is gone the next, not through the fault of developers but because someone higher up the chain has decided to block it from working. We can only hope that does not happen here.