Hi guys Could someone here do me a favor. I just got done with my meeting at the department of rehabilitation, and they have flatly denied my request for a mac. their points:
1. my converting to Mac would make me less employable since most of employment revolves around windows. 2. Mac won't be able to exchange information with windows since it uses different programs than microsoft office. They really asserted that Mac wouldn't be useful because Voice Over does not work with microsoft word. 3. Mr. Clark asserted that last year, Freedom Scientific made 2 upgrades to Jaws, and that in 6 months, Voice Over has made none. 4. They think that depending on my major (presently to be either Law, History, or Spanish), graduate programs may require special software only usable with windows. They brought up statistics as an example. If I were to go into administration as a vocation, I would probably have to take statistics classes. 5. Mr. Clark asserted that while at present, mac is less suseptible to viruses, that this will change with the introduction of its intel processors. 6. I think a primary argument was that there wouldn't be as much support for mac as for windows should the system need repair since 90 percent of blind people use the latter. Of course, I was able to answer to all 6 of the above, but you see, the organization of my department is different from others. It is not a simple one on one counselor student relationship. Since my counselor feels that she has insuficient knowledge in the world of technology, she has hired a separate person, Steve Clark, to handle that. She places her undying trust in Mr. Clark, and blindly follows his advice. I think that their main point (aside from number 6) is that they think that there will be programs that only run on windows XP with JAWS, and that I will be out of luck with my Mac should I need one of those for a certain class. Okay, so here is my favor. If I can prove that Mac may support XP too, then I might have a stronger argument. So, is there anyone on this list who has tried JAWS with XP on their Mac? If not, could someone give it a try. I couldn't immagine that you would have to buy the program, just download the 40 minute demo off the net, and try that. Thanks for any help I may receive.
