I suspect it needs each nation's braille authority to tell Apple what needs doing in terms of code, and for standards to be created in terms of representing things on braille displays, which Apple can then implement. The UK Association for Accessible Formats will be looking closely at this area, as I am sure ICEB will. Apple give us the perfect opportunity to sort out the link between braille code and standards development and technology once and for all.
Cheers Dave -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris Moore Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 1:27 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: VoiceOver 4.0 Totally agree, all the legacy voices should go (am sure they could be downloaded if anyone really wanted them) as they are useless. Apple already have a license for international voices as they use them on the iPhone. Not sure if they are suitable for the Mac, but hopefully this will be considered. My partner speaks german (second language) and was very impressed when I showed him the language rota on the iphone. I am assuming Alex is not too clever with speaking other languages? I do agree that I do not want to see VoiceOver become bloated. JAWS has become bloated with silly features like built in search and weather etc. JAWS does not take advantage of what the windows os HAS TO offer. I find JAWS would be happier if everything could be done within the application. That is the beauty of Mac and iPhone users, they are prepared to step outside the ring gardened fence approach and use the computer like sighted users would. But a few finishing touches to polish voiceover up a bit would not hurt. Clearly by reading some of the feedback so far a great deal of Braille support is needed for other languages too. I am not a braille user so I can't speak from personal experience, but a great number of you are. I feel confident though that Apple will implement these steps in time. It is just up to us to tell Apple what we want and they will probably come up with an even better and slicker way of doing it. This is what I love about Apple. On 29 Jun 2010, at 12:15, Krister Ekstrom wrote: > Hi, > Normally i don't comment on these threads, because i'm so very afraid that too many user requests will turn an excelent screen reader into bloatware as the case is with Jaws, which unfortunately has become the defacto for what we blind users want, but there are actually a couple things i'd love to see: > The remembering of hot spots: preferably on a per application basis. This would be helpful in situations where we have to set hot spots to quickly come back to a place where we once were. > And i definitely agree with the suggestion about a new voice, only i want to go a bit further: skip all the ploy voices like bubbles, bells, trinoids, zarvox, hysterical and all the other nonsence and give us international users voices in our own languages such as Swedish, then we even here could enjoy the total freedom of going up to a mac in an apple store and using it as anyone else. > And one thing i don't want to see, and this will probably make most blinks angry: no virtual buffers whatsoever! > /Krister > 27 jun 2010 kl. 07.09 skrev Pete Nalda: > >> 1. Language rotor, so I can hear Spanish, French, and Basque spoken like they should be. Alex and Vicki just don't do it for me, it sounds so sterile. >> 2. Automatic interaction with the text area in Mail. I wonder if another key should be used for stopping speech, as I don't get to use control+2 finger flick to change magnification when VO is running with the trackpad commander. >> >> On Jun 26, 2010, at 11:57 PM, Chris Moore wrote: >> >>> Well guys now the iPhone 4.0 is out of he way, I think the next thing we should start looking forward to is the next Mac OS. 10.7 (lion maybe?). >>> >>> so I was wondering what features/ improvements you would like implemented into VoiceOver 4.0 and hopefully Apple are listening. >>> >>> i will get the ball rolling ... >>> >>> 1. Intelligent number reading. if voiceover encounters numbers then it can only be set to read them as words or numbers. It would be neat if VoiceOver knew when it was more appropriate to say the numbers as digits or words. For example if the word year appeared after 26 (digits) voiceover knew in this instance to read two six as twenty six years. Another example would be a phone number, if the word tel: or mobile: etc appears before numbers beginning with either + or 0 then to read this out as digits and not some huge number containing millions and thousands. The same could be said for time and measurements etc. >>> >>> 2. In mail it would be more useful if voiceover did not read blank blank on every line on the message viewer if there was nothing in that cell. yes I know you can turn buddies off and move columns around etc to get around this, but really voiceover should only read out what is relevant unless the user wishes to interact with the item in more detail. I think it would also be useful to know if the email has an attachment before opening it. >>> >>> 3. An additional voice. Alex is wonderful and plays great fast and slow, the other voices that come with the mac have been there since the year dot and probably sounded impressive in the 80s or 90s but now I wonder why they are still there. I would like to see an additional voice added to complement Alex, maybe a female voice. This would be useful for reading events as some of us have to purchase an additional voice for this task. >>> >>> 4. Portable document image , when using adium or the weather widget I get infuriated when I hear the graphic image read out as portable document image. Why can't voiceover simply say oh its a picture of the sun or a cloud or its a smiley or sad face etc. >>> >>> 5. The ability to change the speech rate etc within iChat for when you have events set up so new messages or buddies online are read out., as currently the default is very slow and there is no way to speed them up. >>> >>> 6. The ability to remember hotspots and web hot spots (by website basis) after turning the mac off would be very useful. Landmarks has been added to the iPhone, perhaps this could be added to the Mac too? >>> >>> 7. JAWS has the ability through scripting to make unaccessible applications accessible. This is not an ideal long term solution but it is a temporary fix and the ability to share these scripts with others etc would make the likes of Microsoft Office etc accessible until they finally get around to following Apple's accessibility guidelines. >>> >>> 8. A keybaord shortcut to read out battery status when using a laptop. Or even better still, when pressing the battery status button on the side of the macbook, enable voiceover to detect that button press and act on it. >>> >>> 9. When setting password protection on the Mac, VoiceOver is not set as default to alert the user that they need to enter their password. even though VoiceOver might be set as the default to come on once you have successfully logged onto the mac, you have to manually set in the accounts preferences to enable voiceover to run on the login screen. >>> >>> Ok over you to guys now... >>> >>> Chris >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. >>> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. >>> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >>> >> >> Egun On, Lagunak! (Basque for G'day, Mates) >> Pete Nalda >> http://www.myspace.com/musikonalda >> http://www.facebook.com/lpnalda >> >> >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. >> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
