I hate to encourage uninformed Apple bashing, there is plenty of that in the mainstream, but in the interests of fairness I think there are two points of merit, which I will get to in a moment. First I think it is worth putting the regular detractors, like John Dvorak, into perspective. David Pogue this week had a good article that gives a nice overview of how bad things were for Apple: When Apple Hit Bottom, 20 Sept. http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=141
When Apple was a startup, it was a darling. But by 1996, ten years ago, the conventional wisdom was solidly against them. It was popular to predict there doom, because it seemed so obvious. Some of the so called industry pundits hate having been proved so wrong and resent Apple for still being around. Most people who still bash Apple are merely parroting issues from ten years ago. Apple disappointed more than a few of their core fans, myself included, and some are still resentful.
How many of you care enough to have written Steve Jobs?
This is the first point I want to concede. I believe that the detractors were sufficiently vocal and eloquent that I credit them for the fact that VoiceOver was included in the WWDC keynote. I thank you for that. But at this point Apple has demonstrated good faith commitment to accessibility. Further defamation, at least until Leopard ships (probably January 8th), just demonstrates that the complainer is not reasonable, and is not likely to ever be satisfied. The second point I want to concede is that is not quote okay unquote that iTunes remains inaccessible. Because MS Office is not VoiceOver compatible (not Apple's fault) most VO users cannot hope to use a Mac at work. Clearly, for the blind, the Mac is targeted for use at home. The consumer market is Apple's strength in the mainstream, so no problem there. But part of the appeal of a Mac is iLife. It is quite disappointing that no part of iLife is accessible to VoiceOver users. That said, because iTunes is so tied to the iPod and the iTunes Store, and because that triumvirate is so important to Apple as a profit center, it is quote understandable unquote why iTunes accessibility has gotten sidetracked.
There is NO reason we should wait until the next version of the Mac OS to see any improvements.
We have seen some improvements, but unfortunately, a few new bugs too. There are, of course, huge legitimate reasons why we would have to wait until the next major version of the OS to see major improvements
When Tiger was new so many of you blasted me saying, "what do you expect for 6 months, or 9 months". Well we are now at a bloody 18 months,
If you know anything about software development, you will know that two years is a pretty aggressive development cycle for major upgrades. Did you expect VoiceOver to change as much between Tiger patches as it did during the Public Beta?
and still have not seen any progress.
How much progress has there really been between 10.4(.0) and 10.4.7? http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303771 Real sitting-on-the-edge-of-your-seat stuff there.
How many updates have there been in that time for iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and other components of the OS.
For iMovie and iDVD, which required an initial purchase and a paid upgrade for significant changes, there has been exactly one update of significance (iLife 2005 edition to iLife 2006). I already mentioned iTunes. Yes, the OS has been patched seven times, but surely you understand that the majority of OS components have not been patched seven times?
