I’m a Mac user, and I use VoiceOver, its built-in screen reader. It’s odd, but the impression exists that VO isn’t a very good accessibility tool, and I don’t really know what causes this. It’s a shame though as VO users are caught in a vicious circle concerning cross platform accessibility of things like flash content on websites. Because the impression exists that VO is somehow “flawed”, it isn’t taken into account by developers. And because developers don’t pay attention to it, its usefulness is less than it could be. Currently, VO doesn’t “see” flash, so to me it is as if it is not there. Other than that web navigation with Safari+VO is great and now that VO has been included in OS updates and supports ever more braille displays, its usability has improved markedly. I use it for everything I do with computers. The allure for me is that VO is installed on every Mac. Recently I was at VBK to discuss a residency program: I brought along my MacBook, my counterpart had one, and I was able to use his MacBook, with VO switched on, to “walk” him through my photo collection on flickr. I’d say that is pretty cool, also because - as the place is Mac only - I don’t even need to bring my own computer to work there, I can switch on VO and get going. One other thing I often point out to people who are wondering which adaptive technology they should use is that I can buy two MacBooks for the price of one reasonably specced windows box plus JAWS. Additionally, JAWS users need to upgrade often, as applications change. VO is native to the OSX operating system, so I have none of these headaches. And that’s a wonderful thing. To anyone who considers switching, I want to point out the excellent Mac VO site at icanworkthisthing.
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I am a PC user who has never touched a Mac. The rap I’ve heard about Mac’s accessibility features is that they are mouse-driven with few keyboard commands. Is that true, or are there workarounds?
Nope, not true at all. It’s a fully fledged screen reader with braille display support. Not mouse driven at all. It’s strange that the myth (perhaps spread by the NFB in their review of VoiceOver for Tiger) is so persistent. Only, Apple’s philosophy is different and VoiceOver works different from JAWS. On the Mac, safari is accessible to me, openoffice, OSX mail, the entire OS of course, garage band…the point is, as long as the myth endures, developers will not code for VoiceOver. This blog post was in response to a call to action on the VO list, to talk the accessibility person at Adobe into looking into the possibility of making flash content accessible to VO. His response, like yours, was that VO was so flawed as an accessibility tool that they wouldn’t consider coding for it.
In my particular case, I think the myth has to do with the Mac screen magnification app. Did you ever use that?
http://www.apple.com/accessibility/vision/
I know many people who love zoom: the quartz rendering engine really makes a difference. super easy to use too.
apple&+ magnifies the screen: you can magnify the screen or windows separately.
Thanks. I’ve always wanted to try a Mac.
just try it out in the apple store. on every mac, command + F5 will bring up VO, zoom is command + plus sign. It take a while before I became comfortable with VO, because of its design philosophy. It was frustrating to a certain degree. But I’m glad I started using Macs in this way.