I hope you do not get thrown off, because I like your frankness. I also
like your curiosity factor and willingness to try to find applications that
work with what you have. Keep up the good stuff.
----- Original Message -----
From: "yvonne thomson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X by
theblind" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2006 8:49 PM
Subject: Re: voiceover, a talking interface:
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.
