Hi, I just wanted to share some observations/concerns about VO accessibility on the web that I've noticed in hopes that someone else can check some of this out and see what they end up with.
My biggest concern when buying the Mac was in fact web access. I'm on the web a lot so it was important to me. Unfortunately, I've noticed a few issues. If you go over to www.ilounge.com, you will find that it appears to be a page with frames. It has a top frame with all kinds of links in it and then a great many links down the left side of the page. Finally, there is a large frame in the middle where text and news headlines are and finally a smaller frame with advertisements over on the right. It appears to be somewhat a complex page. When I was working with Jaws on the PC I could easily move from one frame to the next on pages. Unfortunately, if I move to interact with the HTML content and start moving with VO keys and the arrows, it doesn't seem that I can make it out of the top frame of the page. I think the last link I hear is RSS and then if I arrow right or down again I hear nothing. After a second or two it jumps down to the bottom of the page and reads the legal stuff like Apple and iPod are property of Macintosh or whatever. Any ideas on how I can improve my ability to interact with this page? Second, I bank with Bank of America and do everything on www.bankofamerica.com. For the most part I do all right with it. However, two issues here. Once I'm logged in and using my account I run in to some difficulties. One of them is that the site is designed to be very user friendly for screen readers and contains links that say skip to main content or to skip past this section. The links you would be skipping run down the left side of the page and are announcements, links to banking options and things like that. I know, I'm about to reference back to Jaws again but its what I knew and was most comfortable with. In Jaws I could click one of these skip to links and jump on to the next section of the page. However, nose such luck in VO. I'm unsure of what the problem is but when I select one of these links nothing at all happens. The focus doesn't move to the main content or even from that link. Any ideas? The other difficulty I have with that same page is when I pay my bills online. I get a page with all of my payees on it and can enter amounts and the date to pay them. When I enter the amount to pay by typing in to the appropriate field and go to leave the field, rather than continuing on from that point, VO seems to go back to the first link on the page. I'd rather have it keep going forward from that very same spot and not need to start over at the top of the page. I'm less than thrilled at navigation on the web with VO and this just complicates things. Thoughts and suggestions welcome. Finally, just curious if anyone uses a mail program that is simpler than the one that comes as part of OSX. Oh and I wonder if anyone has suggestions on a program to use to get album art for all of my music. I have a massive music library and have just enough vision to do some things in iTunes but all of the CD's I've burned do not have album art. Thanks.> > --
