Lee is a friend of mine and also the Mac product manager at AOL. Lee and
his Mac developers really do care and have tried to make the new client
work well with VoiceOver. I offered to post about their new release and
pass back any accessibility issues or constructive criticism mentioned
on the list. So of course I tried it out myself first to try and catch
anything obvious. In general it seems pretty accessible and I didn't
discover any unlabeled buttons and such. You can download it from here:
http://www.aim.com/get_aim/mac/latest_macosx.adp
Here's my initial list of issues which I've already passed back.
Download page:
On the page the link is called Install Now so searching for "Download"
in the link chooser comes up blank. The link also has both alt text and
title text so it reads "Install Now" twice.
UI:
To get incoming messages spoken I had to login first, go to preferences,
choose sounds and then check the box that says "speak incoming messages
using system voice. This worked pretty well but spoke very slowly. It
did not honor my system speech rate.
My Status Message reads "blank text" unless an away message is set.
When I insert an emoticon in my AIM message and the read my message
again before sending it the emoticon is read as "Embedded attach image"
rather than "smile"
Using the "Sticking Tounge out" emoticon just gets read as "P Image".
Can only navigate the chat log by going left and right and always start
at the top, so reading the most recent message requires slogging through
everything else every time. Gets tedious as the log gets longer.
Away message on buddy reads message and then "Level 1".
Collapsing a group says nothing.
Need keyboard shortcut to get Buddy Info. Suggest Apple-I as it appears
to be unused and mirrors the command-option-I to get a buddy's profile.
Other than that it seems pretty solid in the little bit I've played with
it. For now Adium is still my daily client but I'm warming up to AIM.
CB
