Hi again.
I certainly hope you're all right, that the method Apple's using is
the right one. I *love* the theory, that's the hardest thing about it
for me. I hate the cludgey screen readers under windows and all the
rest of it, that's why I'm currently using an ibook when I realised I
needed, for a lot of reasons I won't go into hear, a decent GUI setup
for some of what I'm doing. I wasn't going back into the Windows
jungle again if I could help it, and besides, the Mac sounded like
geek paradise.
And it is, mostly. Once you get used to all the idiosincrachies of
any speech interface, and believe me, screen reader or speech
interface, they've all got them, and once you've scoured the internet
and downloaded many, many megabytes of applications to find the ones
that do what you need them to, I at least realised that OSX is the
nicest GUI interface I've used.
the problem,, though, to my mind at least aren't those big companies
you're talking about. All the major software players can, at least to
some extent, be pressured into doing the right thing and making stuff
accessable. And you're right, in that case it's just patience and
letter writing and petition signing. But what about all the little
one man operations the Mac landscape seems to be crawling with? How
do you ask one guy who's writing a really great programmers text
editor that, the nonstandard text widget he's using may be superior
in every way to the standard, but it kind of means that a Voiceover
user can't see the text? How about the app launchers like
Quicksilver and Launchbar? The little insignificant timer apps?
There's where you really start getting the downloading millionsof
application headaches. These people, for the most part, are writing
an application *they* want to use, and it doesn't matter to them that
government departments won't buy their application because it doesn't
comply with usability guidelines. *sigh* ah, never mind. This is a
debate that has no resolution, really, and I'm probably only writing
this now because I'm trying to get my environment the way I want it.
Give it another week or so, and I'll've stopped downloading
applications, for the mostpart at least, and I won't be thrashing
around running into the barriers of what can't be used anymore, and
I'll be discussing more productive things on here, I hope.
