James Jolley wrote:
I think VO should be open beta for blind users as it is, in general,
it is blind users that will be using and benefiting from it.
As James Austin suggests, it's worth raising with Apple. But I think
it's probably not practical.
VoiceOver is designed to function as an integral part of the OS, whereas
Safari is basically another application like Pages. So it's easy to make
a public beta of Safari, but harder to make a public beta of VoiceOver
without making a public beta of OS X as a whole.
At the moment, you have to pay Apple Developer membership fees (500 US
dollars) to gain access to OS X betas:
http://developer.apple.com/products/
I do wonder if Apple might consider allowing people with visual
disabilities to test OS X for a reduced fee, since the set of people who
develop Mac software for a living, use VoiceOver regularly, and can
easily afford that fee must be quite small, and the accessibility
benefits of a wider pool of testers would help Apple push into the
enterprise and government sectors.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
