On Aug 10, 2006, at 11:15 AM, James Austin wrote:
but I read nothing of application support etc.
Hi James,
What do you mean by "application support" specifically? Keep in mind
that Apple has standardized application accessibility for Mac OS
X...so work to ensure application accessibility/compatibility with
VoiceOver falls squarely in the laps of application developers
(including Apple's internally-developed apps viz. iTunes, GarageBand,
Pages, etc. which need accessibility improvements). Generally
speaking, if an app doesn't work properly with VoiceOver, it means
that the developer of the app hasn't updated the app to meet the
published accessibility standards and this is not really a problem
with VoiceOver. For katieplayer, this means a complete redesign/
rewrite in Cocoa (http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/) - which we're
working on now. For us, any gritting-of-teeth associated with the
Cocoa rewrite (which, frankly, needed to be done anyway) is offset by
Apple's making it so "easy" to build accessible apps (compatible with
VoiceOver) when developing in the Mac OS X-native Cocoa framework.
It's certainly not so on Windows, with closed, "bolted on" screen
reading systems (read: expensive to develop for), lack of
standardization, etc. It's, perhaps, easy to miss the point
(particularly if not positioned on the developer side of things) that
VoiceOver is revolutionary for being integrated into the operating
system and native development framework.
My $0.02,
Joe
