Hello Mary On 28 Dec 2011, at 21:10, Mary Stores wrote:
• Well, there is ZoomText, and also Drangon Naturally Speaking. Those are both great AT products that do well with Windows, but many of our students have reported frustrations on the mac to the point of returning the programs. I would never claim that Mac accessibility is perfect. But I would like to raise one point if I may. I am in regular correspondence with 3 people who teach VoiceOver and Mac OSX in general, professionally in 2 cases. All 3 of them have told me repeatedly that much of the problem with a lot of new Mac OSX users is an inability to "Let Go" of the concepts and practices of their Windows working experience. I'm not in any way criticising, because I am sure that it's a very difficult thing to do for some people. But the point I'm making here is that this very issue often seems to distort the picture because people assume that, because they can't master it, the operating system itself must be flawed. Conversely, however, the same is probably true of somebody used to Mac OSX and suddenly finding themselves plunged into the Windows environment. So what I'm saying here is that the fault isn't always necessarily the system itself, but user error or user lack of knowledge. • Firefox also have some very good web accessibility evaluation tools that have been developed recently. Under Mac OSX I agree that the Mozilla platforms are frustratingly inaccessible. I do sometimes use FireFox on the Mac and the new functionalities are actually giving it a significant edge over Safari. Now, yes, Apple is a big part of that problem because they won't release the API's necessary to have developers of certain applications enable their products for the VoiceOver user. And yes, I'd be the first to agree that Apple is definitely selling the vision impaired short on that count. • But the term "versus," ... I have to say I don't like it. They are two different OS's and there are different ways of navigating both. That was merely a figure of speech. The discussion at that time was a direct comparison between the two in terms of cost. Ergo, marketing philosophies made me believe, as I still do in that context, that the term "Versus" was quite appropriate. In the wider scheme of things, perhaps less so. • Regarding Android, I do hope Google does a better job. The got booed off the stage, so to speak, at last year's CSUN conference. Hopefully that has caused them to ear alarm bells, but several of my friends who have gotten Android phones have said they are very frustrated with their purchase. As I understand it, there are several incarnations of Android. I've only actually had hands-on play with 2 phones, a Samsung and another whose brand name I honestly can't remember right now. Neither phone, as far as I am aware, was equipped with accessibility and although some of the apps onboard were quite visually appealing, I'm not sure how they would have worked with access technology. Now, before anybody jumps; I' not pre-guessing or judging here. I'm only commenting on what I saw; and my hypothesis could be way off the mark. Lynne ======================================= The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> ---------------------------------------
