I thought Opera on the Mac worked with voiceover. It's annoying that
Firefox has taken so long to still not work with voiceover. It seems to
be a collision of philosophies. They want Apple to change their APIs to
conform to the way Firefox already does it for other platforms, which
isn't going to happen.
CB
On 9/2/10 6:15 PM, William Windels wrote:
Hello,
I want also to say something about this topic:
Apple is doing great efforts to make their products accessible and macosx with
voiceover is in global, working good.
Also , the trackpad is a very nice feature that don't exist on windows
computers for blind users.
However, I have also some remarks:
since 10.6, voiceover isn't that stable like in 10.5.
Sometimes, voiceover is restarting while reading texts , I think because of
some strange characters.
But, this is not a big problem while comparing with windows and the
screenreaders because they are also crashing sometimes.
A bigger problem , in my opinion is that voiceover from apple is the only
screenreader on the mac.
I mean: since safari 5, the braille isn't working correctly in formfields.
This problem can also happen of course on windows when a new release of a
browser is installed but, on windows , there are at least 2 browsers that are
fully supported by the most screenreaders: internet explorer, firefox and
perhaps opera.
firefox 4 (beta) isn't also accessible with voiceover after a first look.
Also, the time-machine program, to restore e.g. a deleted folder from the past,
isn't accessible with vo.
The automatic backup system of timemachine works great!
Pages, a great texteditor isn't also fully accessible : tables in pages are n't
working with vo.
The numbers application has not the same features as excel with a screenreader.
Navigation in numbers is missing some important features.
Also: the braille representation on the mac has not the same contort as on
windows, I give 2 examples:
The text on the brailledisplay isn't independent of the speech. so. in global,
what the mac says, that will be shown on the braille display and revers.
It makes it much more powerful if you can configure what to read in braille and
what to hear.
A second thing is the representation of controls on a braille display:
They should give a option to configure how the representation of a radio
button, a button, a dropbox/pull down menu, a checkbox, a link, should be shown
on a braille display.
The best solution here is to have language independent symbols for this kind of
controls.
Since some people have only a braille display of 12, 20 or 40 characters, it
doesn't make sence to see only checkbox on your display.
When I try to speak with other blind people about the mac and the included
accessibility, the first question they ask is about particular programs they
want to use.
When I compare this about text processors, internet, spreadsheets , databases
(ms access), powerpoints, chatting, listening to music..., not all of this
tasks gives the same confort on a mac as on windows.
Conclusion: I love the mac , osx is great but the accessibility is still a
work in progress and, in my opinion, not at the same level of most windows
screenreaders.
best regards,
William
Op 2-sep-2010, om 22:47 heeft Mike Arrigo het volgende geschreven:
Just a few comments to add to this. First, I think gw-micro is a great company
and window eyes is a great product, I'm using it with my work computer to write
this message. With regard to supporting the web, at this point at least,
voiceover is actually ahead of window eyes, because it handles the pages that
change dinamicly. In window eyes, if a page changes through something like java
script, you must reload the browse mode buffer. On the mac, as apple says, it
just works. The new content is available as you navigate the page. I know
gw-micro is working on this, and I'm sure once the work is done, it will work
very well. Also, on a mac, you can install a new version of the operating
system completely and totally without sighted assistance, with speech and or a
braille display. This cannot be done with windows. Of course, this is not the
fault of gw-micro, Microsoft gets the blame for that one, but I think it
demonstrates the commitment Apple has to accessibility.
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