Hi Ray,
See my comments below.
erik burggraaf
A+ sertified technician and user support consultant.
Phone: 888-255-5194
Email: [email protected]
On 4-Jun-09, at 5:08 PM, Ray wrote:
Interesting Appple has occured more than once in this conversation.
Good
machines, well made, good operating system with in-built access (but
at a
price). Remember to upgrade your Voice Over you have to upgrade the
OS, which
is an outlay of more than a hundred pounds in UK money almost every
year.
I've owned a mac since march of 2008. When I started I had OS leppard
10.5.2. Now I'm at OS Leppard 10.5.7 and my upgrades have thusfar
been free. Snowleppard 10.6 is going to be a paid upgrade, but the
upgrade is going to introduce professional quality support for logic,
and probably usher in safari 4 support with seemless web browsing, as
well as multi-lingual support for voice over in the OS, and enhanced
scripting features. If it costs me $200 to upgrade, that'll be a bit
unfortunate, but my upgrade from we6 to we 7 costed that, or at least
it would have if not for my SMA.
I don't know how good Voice Over will get but many are seeing it as
an escape
route from expensive Windows access programs.
I have to admit, the idea of upgrading to windows vista scared me
away. I would have been perfectly fine on vista, but I didn't want
the huge performance hit and driver compadibility issues that came
along with it. I am also completely boared by windows and I wanted to
try a totally different computing experience. Am I ever glad I did.
(Don't be too reassured by the much vaunted superiority of the Mac
though as I keep hearing stories of battery failures, laptops waring
out quite quickly, and oh yes, bugs too. No,
Apple can't be dismissed just because there are bugs, just that you
get the
impression some times that such things never happen in this superior
environment.
Well, maybe it's different for me because I live in a metropolus and
there are four apple stores here, but I have to say, if you buy a mac
and you buy apple care you get superb service. You simply walk into
your apple store, explain the problem, and in 24 hours the problem
goes away. If your battery goes bust you just walk in to the store
and they hand you a new battery and off you go. CD burner die? They
take your mac into the back room and if there's no line up they slap a
new burner in and hand it back while you wait. If there's a line up
you may have to come back tomorrow and pick it up. I spilled deep
frier oil all over my macbook, and when I took it in to void my apple
care, get some parts replaced and have it serviced and cleaned, they
just replaced it with a new one, and when I went back the next day
they had immaged my old opperating system over to this mac and I
walked out of the store with it for nothing. It may be possible to
get that kind of service from a manufacturer of a windows PC, but I
don't know where. I was thrilled when a company let me replace a
burner myself on an advance rma.
As for IPhones and the like, wel, with these and IPods one could
be forgiven for wondering if Apple's in the computer business any
more, but
when, if ever will IPhones become accessible? This is one place vi
people
won't be going any time soon, I'd have thought for their all in one
portable
needs.
IPods and Iphones are very trendy, but do they do what you need? For
example, if they make an overlay that will let a blind person dial a
number on an iphone, and find some way to give access to text
messages, contacts, calendar, and so on, that will be great. But if
there isn't a fully featured gps system with reliable accuracy,
pedestrian routs, poi's, and so on I won't be switching. If it
doesn't connect to my braille display via bluetooth I won't be
switching. If it doesn't give me access to third party applications,
I won't be switching. In other words, unless it is not only
accessible but fully featured on the level that I have right now with
my hp I-paq and mobile speak pocket, I won't be switching no matter
how trendy or intergrated or even affordable it is. So, while I think
that something should be done about IPhone accessibility according to
apple's other accessibility commitments, I'm not really all that
worried about it. They made IPods accessible. The classic, the
touch, and the nanno all speak now and apparently they have full
access. ITunes is now fully accessible out of the box on the mac
platform and I am pretty sure on the windows platform as well. I
bought the classic because of it's storage capacity, but I'm thinking
of reselling it since I haven't used it in eyons. It doesn't record
at all for one thing, much less to wave, which is a feature I really
want. It's also completely locked to ITunes, and ITunes, despite it's
now total accessibility is an absolute piece of garbage. It's one of
the worst designed and benighted pieces of software I've ever seen in
my life and I can't believe any one likes it. My sighted brothers and
sisters all claime to love it, but I watched three of them wrestle
with it for half an hour to get a set of audiobook files to sync with
an ipod from a cd once and I just had to sit back and laugh.I love my
mac, but when my trusty classic finally gets converted to cash, I will
probably pour a celebratory wisky and command delete itunes.app to the
trash. Anyway... My point in all this is that in the case of the mac
and OS Leppard, accessiblity has translated into usibility, where-as
in the case of IPod, accessibility hasn't translated into usibility,
at least for me. Others love it and more power to them. But I'm not
going to cary around an IPod just to look cool. I'd rather take my
macbook and listen to my audiobooks and tunes on that. We'll see
about the IPhone, but if it doesn't do what I need, then it won't
matter in the slightest.
This from someone who may well by a Mac eventually but won't be
forsaking
Window-Eyes.
In fact, Your mac experience will be somewhat enhanced by Window-
eyes. I much prefer it in any environment, but it does much better on
the mac than jaws does. They have finally got most of the video
compadibility issues with jaws worked out, but every once in a while
they reer their ugly head, like last weekend for example when I had to
install bootcamp for a client. Window-eyes used to be seemless in
both bootcamp and fusion, but then they took the number pad off of the
built in keybord on the macbook, and that screwed things up a bit. I
complained about that to the apple geneus last time I was there and
they didn't even know there was a built in number pad. There wasn't
even any point in taking it off either, since they didn't replace the
keys with anything else. I don't understand the rational at all.
As you can see, I love my mac, and I've gotten great joy from dealing
with apple. I'd love to see you switch to the mac, and I think most
people would be very happy with what voice over has to offer once they
get arund the learning curve. I'm not ready to sell my soul to apple
though, laughs. If some one tells you the system is perfect, then
there is probably a lot they don't know.
Cheers,
Ray.
Ray
Paulette Vickery wrote:
Hi all,
Those off the shelf main stream devices are great, but my Voice
Sense, or as
I like to call it, my Braille Berry, has one thing they don't have.
It has
the ability to let me write in grade 2 braille as a braille document
or in
grade 2 braille as a text document. Yes, I can write in grade 1
print, if
you will, writing out every letter of every word on a quirty
keyboard, but
like many of us, I learned how to write braille first. It is my first
written language. When it comes down to really learning or writing
fast and
feeling comfortable, give me a device that understands braille every
time. I
also prefer the Voice Sense over other note taker devices because of
its
size. I can put it almost anywhere. So that is my Two cents about
the Voice
Sense. Smile.
Paulette
Paulette
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