There are quite a number of shortcomings, actually, but I’m going to concentrate on three which are fundamental and very obvious if you are a habitual braille user on other platforms. In general my bar for braille support is: you can use it with speech off, or you don’t have braille support. Simple as. All of these are fixed in iOS, to varying degrees.
1. Cursor inconsistency. This one has been pounded to death but braille is rendered useless by the fact that it represents whatever the VO cursor is covering, and then in a confusing way because the braille line is being used in a maximally efficient manner, so that depending on how you pan, you may see the left or right edge, and then adjacent to other objects, or possibly even a completely unexpected part of the screen because your VO focus has not followed you to exactly where you needed to be (while editing text, for example). Contrast with iOS, where you are shown exactly what has focus and nothing else. Ironically I think Apple’s intensions here were obviously to make braille more usable and efficient; I’d be perfectly happy with this mode of operation, if it behaved like iOS, and like iOS it had enough commands to get us to other parts of the system. As others have mentioned, even when these commands work, they sadly don’t always deliver very good feedback on the display. About the only thing they got right, in fact, was access to menus, which work wonderfully. 2. Broken translation with symbols. Especially noticeable when an email address is displayed, or a Twitter handle; you’ll see just the symbol, and the rest of the word is cut off. Best hope your text doesn’t contain any of those. 3. Input capture. Input and translation are totally messed up; half the time my braille line is showing the flashing cursor, as though VO is expecting a prompt to be responded to. It looks like this is because every time an input control gets focused, VO goes into the input mode, but then forgets to come out of it again. So almost immediately, I will have to stop reading to move the focus using the keyboard, before I can press space on the display and get VO to recognise that it’s not editing anymore. This is new, in fact—before Yosemite, you simply needed the keyboard for input. That will do for starters. You don’t want my opinion on the way VO converts pluralised acronyms (like CDs) into CD’s. Or how all formatting and horizontal or vertical layout is lost. Or how strange character symbols appear to represent special characters or even double white space. Or how every time a message is displayed, you have to wait before you can pan past it, and every time you try, you extend the timeout. GRRRRRRRRRR! Somebody at Apple needs a whack over the head with a golden mallet for that day’s work. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
