Hi, all.
As much as I agree with all this, and as much as I love the whole
"talking interface" concept, we all have to admit, surely, that it's
not without its problems.
The main one, as far as I can see, is that it's far, *far* too easy
to make an application inaccessible, and it puts the onus squarely on
the software writer to do the right thing and make it possible for us
to use the software they've written.
As far as I can see, unless the app is stock standard cocoa, you have
to get extremely lucky, or have someone specifically design the app
to be accessible for you. Reality check here, people. Software
designers are absolutely *awful* at this. That, from what I can see,
is in part why screen readers exist. software designers seem to just
*hate* whatever the stock standard interface is. It isn't fast
enough. It isn't pretty enough. It doesn't do what I want and so
theay write their own. That's happened for as long as I've been using
computers, and probably longer. We want it to be cross platform so
the toolkit they use isn't read by Voiceover. And the problem with
all of this is, that there's no solution other than hoping that the
writer of the application you want to use takes pity on you, or just
to do what I, at least, have always done. Decide you want an app to
do something, go to a site that catalogs as much software as
possible, and download practically everything in that category just
to find something that works, forget whether it's got the features
you want, worry about that later. First, can we use it at all?
Now please, this isn't to say I'm not loving the Mac, I am. When it
works, it's incredibly easy to use and incredibly accessible, but I
honestly don't think *this* is the silver bullet for us, either. I
have no idea what the heck is, though.
Yvonne who is probably now going to be thrown off the mailing list.
