the rub usually comes from trying to use these messengers. some of
them look fine but when you start using them, they have problems with
things like reading incoming messages, reading all the messages that
have come in when a new one comes in etc.
On Dec 19, 2008, at 2:05 PM, Chris Blouch wrote:
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
