Joe,
Indeed, it's a huge advantage for any developer to fire up VoiceOver and
experience, first hand, what blind users encounter when navigating websites
or applications. This scenario has been useful with smaller developers such
as yourselves, companies like Rogue Amoeba and a handful of others. The
truly frustrating issue is that, with larger developers, including Apple
themselves, more compolex applications, especially those that have been
around for a while, are simply not accessible and the huge corporate
machines can't seem to get their act together to make their applications
accessible. Even Coco apps exhibit this problem.
Of course, smaller developers, by nature, can act more quickly on
accessibility issues and don't have to have meetings and work flow studies
in order to fix a problem that would, otherwise, only take hours or,
perhaps, a day or two to fix.
Yes, we are in a potentially fantastic situation with anyone using Tiger to
be able to have VoiceOver at their fingertips. Again, I say, potentially. So
far, it's been extremely frustrating to not be able to use programs like Pro
Tools, Logic, Office, FileMaker, among many, many others.
I do appreciate your willingness to address accessibility and I'm glad your
participating in the list. I do also hope that Apple is successful in
persuading their developers to follow Apple's guidelines for creating
accessible applications. Further, I hope Apple, themselves, manage to follow
their own guidelines and make their applications accessible. We haven't seen
it all happen yet and I suspect it'll be some time before we do,
unfortunately. To add to the frustration, Apple is not in the business of
accessibility and, therefore, does not make it a priority, understandably.
What's more, given Apple's notorious secrecy, again, understandably, we
can't get a single bit of information about what to expect in the future.
This makes it extraordinarily difficult to plan for the future as a Mac
user. Do you think I'm going to invest in a new Intel Mac? Not until I see
some improvements to VoiceOver, and there's plenty of room for that. Of
course, there's nothing I'd like more than to join the other consumers who
have gone ahead and ordered their machines. I'd love to buy the latest and
greatest Mac. I used to do it back in the OS 9 days when things seemed
pretty good in terms of accessibility and support from a third-party
software developer. Things are quite different now. In a way, very good and,
in a way, very bad. It's hard to feel hopeful when you can't see the road
ahead. Liteerally, we have nothing to go on except the hope that Apple and
other developers will somehow come through. It's a very difficult position
to be in and feel comfortable with.
You know, many people look to me as sort of an unofficial spokesperson for
blind Mac users, mainly in the audio community. I have to say, whereas, at
one time, I spoke with confidence about the future of accessibility on Macs,
I'm more skeptical now and I don't necessarily like that feeling. What it's
boiled down to is, what we have is what we have, for now. Anything that may
come in the future will only be known when it happens. No plans to speak of
and only suggestions that we keep feeding to Apple but hardly ever get any
response. And when we do get a response, it's usually a simple confirmation
that the message was received. Incredibly frustrating, you might imagine.
OK, well, I've rambled on enough. Again, thanks for your participation.
Best,
Jerry
aka Slau
