On Nov 18, 2007, at 12:01 PM, Jed Barton wrote:
Hey there, o you understand where my problem is?
It just seems that web pages are a royal mess in terms of getting
around. It's kind of like a crap shoot in terms of where you will
find stuff.
Well, this isn't exactly true.
The first thing you have to realize is that you're getting a more
visually accurate representation of the page with Voiceover than you
would with any Windows screen reader. So it really isn't a crap shoot,
but you may have a bit more to do in the way of navigating. I say you
may have to do a bit more navigating. Some pages work better with DOM
navigation, which presents somewhat more like a straight left to
right. Group navigation might work better on pages with lots of tables
and columns and things.
The reason i mention windows, it was real cut and dry where stuff
was if this makes any sense.
It was real cut and dried because the screen readers pretty much throw
away most of the page formatting and put the page straight down, top
to bottom. Tables are something you had just better pretty much forget
about using the browse mode of your screen reader. The advantage, of
course, is that you can just read straight down. The disadvantage is
that you have absolutely no idea what the page looks like.
So the advice that you've likely gotten about the Mac for other things
applies equally if not more so with Safari. Forget what you know about
Windows, because you're going to have to switch your brain. If you
don't do this, you will ultimately fail to realize your Mac's
potential because you won't let go of the idea that the screen reader
makes things accessible by changing them for you. With the approach VO
takes, you have to realize that the screen reader changes
*****NOTHING*****. You get direct access to what's there and what is
exposed to VO for its use. I think the design philosophy is
significantly different: where the Windows screen readers take the
approach that our environment needs changed so we can use it, VO takes
the approach that we'll hand you some tools to let you use what's
already there and that very little actually needs changed, assuming
the apps we want to use are properly designed and implemented in the
first place. (Granted, this isn't always a good assumption, because so
many apps don't behave properly in the first place, but the assumption
is becoming more the rule than the exception.)
