[Techno-Chat]: Who's the better BFF: Amazon Echo or Google Home?

[Dane Trethowan]

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All I can say is that Home and Echo are incredibly powerful tools as 
this article demonstrates all too clearly.

http://newatlas.com/amazon-echo-vs-google-home/46423/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers_campaign=4cc9032d68-UA-2235360-4_medium=email_term=0_65b67362bd-4cc9032d68-92350869

--

**
“Oh, I’m an activist and I’m OK / I sleep all night and I tweet all day.”

[Techno-Chat]: Review: HamRadioAndVision - Kenwood TH-D74A Accessibility

[Dane Trethowan]

Absolutely stunning and about time too! that's about all I can say in 
summing up the Ham Rig reviewed here.

http://www.hamradioandvision.com/kenwood-th-d74a-accessibility/

--

**
“Oh, I’m an activist and I’m OK / I sleep all night and I tweet all day.”

[Techno-Chat]: Amauon Echo

[Gordon Smith]

Hello Everybody

"As Chris Moore predicted, I am now having great success with my new Amazon 
Echo. In fact, I've also decided to buy one of the portable Dot speakers for my 
bedside table. It would save me having to use 2 or more devices to play my 
audio books.

I absolutely love the responsiveness of the Echo. It rarely gets my commands 
wrong and, much to my surprise and glee, it also uses my iTunes shared librarry 
and picks up all of the audio content.

But it gets better! I can also list my shopping lists and other data on the 
Echo, and I'm told, it can also store my contacts so that I can check phone 
numbers and so-fourth on-the-fly.

This is definitely one of the best devices that I've bought myself this year. 
Same goes for my Apple TV, although that is another story.

==

My Compliments And Kindest Regards
Gordon Smith
'Accessibility And Information Technology Support Specialist
--

[Techno-Chat]: Re: [Techno-Chat]: RE: [Techno-Chat]: Article: Saying Goodbye to the Mac – Mosen Consulting

[Joshua Gregory]

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A couple things here,

I've said this before, and you can disagree, but as the population
ages there will be more and more people who may have disabilities.
This is going to create problems in the near future, if things don't
improve especially in the arena of new tech. Also, personally for me,
Windows is alright, although it'd be nice if the recovery environment
were accessible ,but that's a small thing. Current tech as it stands?
At least we can do stuff even if it might be a bit limited and even
that, I feel, is a personal viewpoint. Finally and this is meant with
respect, while it is great that you are able to compile and stuff, not
everyone is, so we're stuck with what we have. And while I do agree
with you to a point about planned obsolescence, it's just the nature
of the world we now live in, things break down, malfunction etc and we
have to keep up, whether we like it or not.

Just my thoughts,

Josh

On 11/24/16, Travis Siegel  wrote:
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>
> I do not have a modern up to date mac, the newest one I have is a 2008
> macbook.  I've been increasingly puzzled by apple's propensity to remove
> functionality with each update of their hardware.  It seems to be a
> growing trend.  Back in 2005 when voiceover was first announced, I was
> very happy, and jumped into the mac with both feet.  However, at the
> time, I spoke (to multiple people) that I was afraid that this
> accessibility thing apple was doing was going to begin with a bang, then
> slowly fade out, leaving the mac unusable for any serious work.  It
> appears that is exactly what has happened, and I've not seen it, because
> I haven't been able to afford an upgrade to the newest macs, so still
> work on 10.6 and 10.7 with my ancient macbooks.  I've also spent the
> last 2 or 3 years macless, because all of mine had slowly broken down,
> and being unable to replace them, I simply moved to other devices.
> While IOS seems to be usable still, I have to wonder how deep this rot
> goes, and if it will infect the IOS brand of devices as it has the OSX
> brand of devices.  I sincerely hope not, but one thing that has always
> irked me to no end is the whole planned obsolescence thing.  Seriously,
> what's wrong with my 2008 macbook? Nothing at all, but it won't run the
> newer os versions, it won't run most newer software, it won't do half
> the things it used to do, and why? For no other reason than apple
> decided to make it that way.  Well, it's not all apple, but developers
> aren't going to support something that the parent company doesn't have
> any interest in anymore.  This doesn't just apply to apple, windows is
> guilty of this too, but that's neither here nor there.  I've been quite
> happy on my linux boxes every since I first installed linux way back in
> 1995.  I've never been forced to update my linux box if I didn't want
> to, I could continue using the programs I had, continue using the setup
> I had, and it just worked, and none of this planned obsolescence
> nonsense to break my linux box because a new release came out.  I have
> of course updated over the years, and still update regularly, but rarely
> does a linux upgrade cause anything as significant as a program no
> longer working due to different os requirements.  Sure, upgrading from
> libc to glib broke some things, but those were easily recompiled,
> replaced, or updated.  Kernel versions sometimes require changes in
> code, but nonetheless, all the programs I like to use still work, and
> I'm pretty much still using the same programs in 2016 that I used in
> 1995, albeit newer and more updated versions of said programs.  That
> just plain isn't possible on these commercial alternatives such as OSX
> and Windows.  Why is that? Well, there's lots of reasons, but it's
> largely the fault of the manufacturers of these operating systems.  You
> just can't use a windows 95 program on windows 10, and 

Re: [Techno-Chat]: RE: [Techno-Chat]: Article: Saying Goodbye to the Mac – Mosen Consulting

[Travis Siegel]

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I do not have a modern up to date mac, the newest one I have is a 2008 
macbook.  I've been increasingly puzzled by apple's propensity to remove 
functionality with each update of their hardware.  It seems to be a 
growing trend.  Back in 2005 when voiceover was first announced, I was 
very happy, and jumped into the mac with both feet.  However, at the 
time, I spoke (to multiple people) that I was afraid that this 
accessibility thing apple was doing was going to begin with a bang, then 
slowly fade out, leaving the mac unusable for any serious work.  It 
appears that is exactly what has happened, and I've not seen it, because 
I haven't been able to afford an upgrade to the newest macs, so still 
work on 10.6 and 10.7 with my ancient macbooks.  I've also spent the 
last 2 or 3 years macless, because all of mine had slowly broken down, 
and being unable to replace them, I simply moved to other devices.  
While IOS seems to be usable still, I have to wonder how deep this rot 
goes, and if it will infect the IOS brand of devices as it has the OSX 
brand of devices.  I sincerely hope not, but one thing that has always 
irked me to no end is the whole planned obsolescence thing.  Seriously, 
what's wrong with my 2008 macbook? Nothing at all, but it won't run the 
newer os versions, it won't run most newer software, it won't do half 
the things it used to do, and why? For no other reason than apple 
decided to make it that way.  Well, it's not all apple, but developers 
aren't going to support something that the parent company doesn't have 
any interest in anymore.  This doesn't just apply to apple, windows is 
guilty of this too, but that's neither here nor there.  I've been quite 
happy on my linux boxes every since I first installed linux way back in 
1995.  I've never been forced to update my linux box if I didn't want 
to, I could continue using the programs I had, continue using the setup 
I had, and it just worked, and none of this planned obsolescence 
nonsense to break my linux box because a new release came out.  I have 
of course updated over the years, and still update regularly, but rarely 
does a linux upgrade cause anything as significant as a program no 
longer working due to different os requirements.  Sure, upgrading from 
libc to glib broke some things, but those were easily recompiled, 
replaced, or updated.  Kernel versions sometimes require changes in 
code, but nonetheless, all the programs I like to use still work, and 
I'm pretty much still using the same programs in 2016 that I used in 
1995, albeit newer and more updated versions of said programs.  That 
just plain isn't possible on these commercial alternatives such as OSX 
and Windows.  Why is that? Well, there's lots of reasons, but it's 
largely the fault of the manufacturers of these operating systems.  You 
just can't use a windows 95 program on windows 10, and perhaps expecting 
that is silly, but I can still go get a copy of a program on linux that 
I compiled back in 1995, take the source, make a few updates to allow 
for different c compiler excentricities, and have a working program in a 
matter of minutes (or hours for some of the more stubborn conversions), 
and that just isn't possible under normal circumstances under windows or 
OSX (though if you're talking terminal apps on osx, it is still 
doable).  I understand progress, and I generally have no problem with 
progress, but (as I've said for years and years) removing functionality 
is not an upgrade, but that's exactly what most of these companies do.  
How many times have you updated a program only to find it no longer does 
this or that, while it adds many other things, what is wrong with 
keeping it behaving similar to the way it did before? I don't know why 
manufacturers feel this is necessary, and I honestly don't think it 
helps anybody (except the manufacturers), but it's become so ingrained 
in our population, folks have come to expect it.


A lot of people say it's stupid to expect things to work now the same 
way they did 10 years ago, and if you use windows, you're right, but if 
you use linux, bsd, sunos, solaris, aix, or any other unix variant, 
guess what?  That's exactly what you can expect, and I'd wager, that's 
exactly why those operating systems are still around.


Agree or not, (and neither view makes any difference to me) you can't 
argue with the mere fact that windows and osx change considerably 
between releases, breaking lots and lots of software people 

[Techno-Chat]: RE: [Techno-Chat]: Article: Saying Goodbye to the Mac – Mosen Consulting

[David Griffith]

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I agree wit the bulk of what he says but I suspect he will  still get abuse 
from the Apple Fanboys for whom Apple can do no wrong.
I personally went into Mac  in 2011 and invested heavily in it, both in terms 
of money and time to learn the OS and apps.
I spent a lot of time producing Podcasts to assist people with using parts of 
of the OS. I was determined to find at least as much functionality on the Mac 
OS, as I had on Windows.

My ambition was to leave Windows as my main computer and migrate as far as 
possible to the Mac and use that as my main machine.

Unfortunately this did not prove to be possible and particularly during the 
period of submitting my PHD over 2012 and 2013 there was far too much 
clunkiness with accessibility for me to realistically use the Mac as my main 
machine.

Some features after a long period  were introduced, such as Table support in 
Pages, but by the time they had got that together I had to dive back into Word  
for over a year to get the bulk of my PhD written so suddenly switching to 
Pages made no sense at all.

As far as I am aware there is no Mac based accessible Office Database  
solution, the previous otption of Bento having apparently broken accessibility 
some years ago.

I also sadly found that things that were free or very cheap on Windows cost 
serious money the Mac side. Daisy reading support, free even with demo versions 
of Jaws, cost 3 figures on a Mac.   The free otption  on the  mac, whose name I 
cannot recall was not a serious otption and rapidly ceased development.   I 
spent quite a lot of money on app like IDEG Tag Edit but if I am honest these 
apps still cannot compete with the free Windows utilities like Mp3Tag for 
efficiency and ease of use. 

Accessibility Apps like GhostReader on the Mac lack basic functionality 
compared to Wimndows equivalents like TextAloud.  I was surprised to find that  
Ghostreader could not even create an mp3 version of spoken 
 text. When I contacted the developers about this they were unaware that many 
specialist Blind Talking Book players like the Plextalk devices did not support 
the m4a format they were outputting to. This sadly re-inforced to me that in 
many ways Apple driven development on the Mac was not for the mainstream but 
aimed more at the shiny and stylish and probably geeky.

I like Jonathan find Apple Mail almost unusable  in conversation thread view 
because of the tedious reading out of all recipeients before giving me the 
subject of an email. I do not use Classic view for other reasons. The only time 
I use Classic view is when I need to locate a mail sorted by sender with first 
letter navigation, though why they should not provide this  functionality after 
all this time in modern view is still baffling to me.
On most occasions I use Apple Mail on my Mac I have to restart Voiceover in 
order to regain proper cursor tracking when reviewing my email messages.

Throughout the entire life of El Kapitan I was unable to use iBooks for reading 
as it constantly spat busy at me when I tried to interact with the reading 
area, though to be fair this does appear to have been fixed in Mac OS Sierra 
with busy far less common now, but it took over a year to fix what was a basic 
function for a blind person, reading properly electronic books on a Mac.

It mayh be that my iMac machine is getting old now but it still has a 256 GB 
SSD and 16 GB of Ram  along with a processor upgrade when the machine was 
purchased  allied to an secondary 2 TB data  internal drive ..  Despite 
deliberately overinvesting in the hardware web surfing with Safari nowadays is 
a bit of a nightmare. I am constantly assailed by Voiceover announcing  busy or 
Voiceover restarting itself.

When I got my Mac in 2011 with Lion Safari was pretty much a joy to use, fast 
and rapid in its execution.

Like Jonathan I still enjoy the Reader function but even this is far more laggy 
than it used to be.

The rest is a bit shakey. 
When I first got my Mac reading PDF was pretty easy, though support for tagbged 
elements was not there.
All through El Kapitan I found it impossible to use Preview, no matter how many 
times I interacted with the text and in the end resorted to using Nisus Writer 
Pro for reading PDF documents. I recently trialled PDF Pen Pro but considered 
it so far short of free options on Windows it would be ridiculous to purchase 
it.

there is no doubt that  I love using Mars Edit but I now conclude, again like 
Jonathan,