Sorry for your sister's problems -- I can't help with most of the
accessibility issues, but a few notes below:
On Sep 12, 2009, at 1:01 PM, Ste
Fonts: Windows can change system fonts and font sizes. Apple,as we
were told, you can't. With Apple, if the smallest resolution
doesn't work for you, well.....
There is entire OS scaling (graphics, windows, text, etc), but it's
basically beta (and has been for years). Need to download a
development tool (Quartz Debug Utility) to enable it I believe.
Now the mouse itself is very primitive-style, you have basically a
bar of soap with a raised dot on it. There are two side buttons of
unknown utility. When you 'click', the whole front of the mouse
does down, instead of there being an actual button.
1) Mouse has pretty much every feature you want, and full ability to
disable or program the different buttons to do whatever you do. Just
check out the mouse control panel. Has 5 buttons and horizontal
+vertical scroll. (shape isn't great IMHO)
The Dock Menu: At the bottom of the screen, you have a line of
application icons. This compliments a menu bar at the top of the
screen. Again, either the balloon text or bar text cannot be
changed. Neither can the icons. Even when you go to White on
Black, the icons remain colored. When zooming, the icons just get
more blurry. Given the problem with contrast that a lot of visually
impaired users have, the inability to do anything with the icons is
a hinderance. If they were just left alone, then the user can judge
by counting over how many. However, Apple also uses this bar for
various announcements, so the placement and number of icons change
with certain situations.
1) You can disable Zooming (and I have since 10.3 -- the first version
of OSX I used) -- Apple Menu -> Dock -> turn magnification off
2) I went to white on black / greyscale / etc and the icons do NOT
remain colored. Not sure why your system is different? You see the
contrast / white on black / etc controls in the Universal Access
control panel?
3) Placement of icons only changes on the right side of the dock. If
you count from the left of dock, the order will always remain the same
until the end of the permanent items.
4) Changing icons -- You can, but it's not intuitive and very
obnoxious. Find the program icon you want to change (ie, go to your
application folder). Press Command+I (or do "Get Info" in the File
menu). You see in the top left corner of the "Get Info" window is a
small version of the applications icon? Click on it. The icon is now
highlighted. Now you can PASTE another icon over it. This can be an
icon from another program that you copied from the get info window, or
another graphic file that you put in the clipboard.
One last bit. When we decided to call Apple support, I wanted to
make sure I had the serial number in front of me. When I clicked on
the Apple -> About this Mac, one of the boxes threw a line right
through the serial number, so that it could not be read. So we had
to 'reset' the system. This involved holding the Cntrl - Command -
P - R keys as you powered up and holding them for 4 resets. It took
two people to do that.
1) Not sure about this. You can always just get the serial number from
the behind the battery if it's a laptop, or someqhere on the case if
it's an iMac. NEver had this problem, and can't imagine why you'd have
to Zap your PROM to get it?
Scott
