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I do not have a modern up to date mac, the newest one I have is a 2008
macbook. I've been increasingly puzzled by apple's propensity to remove
functionality with each update of their hardware. It seems to be a
growing trend. Back in 2005 when voiceover was first announced, I was
very happy, and jumped into the mac with both feet. However, at the
time, I spoke (to multiple people) that I was afraid that this
accessibility thing apple was doing was going to begin with a bang, then
slowly fade out, leaving the mac unusable for any serious work. It
appears that is exactly what has happened, and I've not seen it, because
I haven't been able to afford an upgrade to the newest macs, so still
work on 10.6 and 10.7 with my ancient macbooks. I've also spent the
last 2 or 3 years macless, because all of mine had slowly broken down,
and being unable to replace them, I simply moved to other devices.
While IOS seems to be usable still, I have to wonder how deep this rot
goes, and if it will infect the IOS brand of devices as it has the OSX
brand of devices. I sincerely hope not, but one thing that has always
irked me to no end is the whole planned obsolescence thing. Seriously,
what's wrong with my 2008 macbook? Nothing at all, but it won't run the
newer os versions, it won't run most newer software, it won't do half
the things it used to do, and why? For no other reason than apple
decided to make it that way. Well, it's not all apple, but developers
aren't going to support something that the parent company doesn't have
any interest in anymore. This doesn't just apply to apple, windows is
guilty of this too, but that's neither here nor there. I've been quite
happy on my linux boxes every since I first installed linux way back in
1995. I've never been forced to update my linux box if I didn't want
to, I could continue using the programs I had, continue using the setup
I had, and it just worked, and none of this planned obsolescence
nonsense to break my linux box because a new release came out. I have
of course updated over the years, and still update regularly, but rarely
does a linux upgrade cause anything as significant as a program no
longer working due to different os requirements. Sure, upgrading from
libc to glib broke some things, but those were easily recompiled,
replaced, or updated. Kernel versions sometimes require changes in
code, but nonetheless, all the programs I like to use still work, and
I'm pretty much still using the same programs in 2016 that I used in
1995, albeit newer and more updated versions of said programs. That
just plain isn't possible on these commercial alternatives such as OSX
and Windows. Why is that? Well, there's lots of reasons, but it's
largely the fault of the manufacturers of these operating systems. You
just can't use a windows 95 program on windows 10, and perhaps expecting
that is silly, but I can still go get a copy of a program on linux that
I compiled back in 1995, take the source, make a few updates to allow
for different c compiler excentricities, and have a working program in a
matter of minutes (or hours for some of the more stubborn conversions),
and that just isn't possible under normal circumstances under windows or
OSX (though if you're talking terminal apps on osx, it is still
doable). I understand progress, and I generally have no problem with
progress, but (as I've said for years and years) removing functionality
is not an upgrade, but that's exactly what most of these companies do.
How many times have you updated a program only to find it no longer does
this or that, while it adds many other things, what is wrong with
keeping it behaving similar to the way it did before? I don't know why
manufacturers feel this is necessary, and I honestly don't think it
helps anybody (except the manufacturers), but it's become so ingrained
in our population, folks have come to expect it.
A lot of people say it's stupid to expect things to work now the same
way they did 10 years ago, and if you use windows, you're right, but if
you use linux, bsd, sunos, solaris, aix, or any other unix variant,
guess what? That's exactly what you can expect, and I'd wager, that's
exactly why those operating systems are still around.
Agree or not, (and neither view makes any difference to me) you can't
argue with the mere fact that windows and osx change considerably
between releases, breaking lots and lots of software people depend on.
Each new release requires updates before the applications work again.
I don't have this problem with linux. Sure, there's exceptions, but in
general, I can upgrade my kernel anytime I like, and expect my apps will
still work as they did before I did that upgrade. It's not impossible to
write programs that will work on windows 95 (even today) but ms doesn't
want you to do that, so they make it difficult. However, powerbasic
(http://www.powerbasic.com) still produces the smallest executables in
existence on windows machines, and (provided you don't use any windows
version specific calls) a program you compile on your windows 10 machine
will still run on a windows 95 machine in exactly the same manner.
So, it is possible to build things that work, but the way things are
built on windows work hard to preclude that possibility as much as
possible. It's just the way windows environments are setup. Apple does
the same thing, and again, it's just the way the environment is setup.
I'm not saying which one is better, owrse, or indifferent, but I know
which one I prefer, and of course folks are free to choose anything they
like when it comes to operating system, but to be 100 percent honest,
I'm not the least bit impressed with the current state of technology and
accessibility on either of the major platforms these days.
I'm an oddball I know, but I much prefer my linux machines to either OSX
or windows, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon. However,
I'm saddened by the decay of accessibility under OSX, and the lack of
accessible programs on windows to do many many things I can do with ease
on linux. I know loads and loads of people will disagree with me on
this, and that's fine, but again to be perfectly honest, I don't believe
windows or OSX is anywhere near as accessible as either one of them
could be, especially considering they both have had multi million dollar
companies pushing them for years and years.
Linux has been handled by individuals, and while corporations have
helped (and in some cases) helped a lot, It's pretty sad to see linux
being just as accessible as OSX and windows, and it hasn't had the
resources of major multi million dollar companies put into the effort.
says to me, that these companies perhaps haven't made the best use of
the resources as they otherwise might have, and (as we see with apple)
they aren't keeping it as high in their priority list as they probably
should.
There's way more to write on this topic, and I could probably go on and
on for pages and pages, but there's really no point. The sad fact of
the matter is that none of the currently available options are as good
as they should be, and it's a damn shame that disabled individuals are
being left behind (again).
I love my macs, as old as they are, and I love my linux machines, (both
the old and the new ones), and while I am beginning to like my windows
machine, I'm not real hopeful of ever coming to love it, or the newer
mac machines either, and that is just sad.
On 11/24/2016 11:23 AM, David Griffith wrote:
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I agree wit the bulk of what he says but I suspect he will still get abuse
from the Apple Fanboys for whom Apple can do no wrong.
I personally went into Mac in 2011 and invested heavily in it, both in terms
of money and time to learn the OS and apps.
I spent a lot of time producing Podcasts to assist people with using parts of
of the OS. I was determined to find at least as much functionality on the Mac
OS, as I had on Windows.
My ambition was to leave Windows as my main computer and migrate as far as
possible to the Mac and use that as my main machine.
Unfortunately this did not prove to be possible and particularly during the
period of submitting my PHD over 2012 and 2013 there was far too much
clunkiness with accessibility for me to realistically use the Mac as my main
machine.
Some features after a long period were introduced, such as Table support in
Pages, but by the time they had got that together I had to dive back into Word
for over a year to get the bulk of my PhD written so suddenly switching to
Pages made no sense at all.
As far as I am aware there is no Mac based accessible Office Database
solution, the previous otption of Bento having apparently broken accessibility
some years ago.
I also sadly found that things that were free or very cheap on Windows cost
serious money the Mac side. Daisy reading support, free even with demo versions
of Jaws, cost 3 figures on a Mac. The free otption on the mac, whose name I
cannot recall was not a serious otption and rapidly ceased development. I
spent quite a lot of money on app like IDEG Tag Edit but if I am honest these
apps still cannot compete with the free Windows utilities like Mp3Tag for
efficiency and ease of use.
Accessibility Apps like GhostReader on the Mac lack basic functionality
compared to Wimndows equivalents like TextAloud. I was surprised to find that
Ghostreader could not even create an mp3 version of spoken
text. When I contacted the developers about this they were unaware that many
specialist Blind Talking Book players like the Plextalk devices did not support
the m4a format they were outputting to. This sadly re-inforced to me that in
many ways Apple driven development on the Mac was not for the mainstream but
aimed more at the shiny and stylish and probably geeky.
I like Jonathan find Apple Mail almost unusable in conversation thread view
because of the tedious reading out of all recipeients before giving me the
subject of an email. I do not use Classic view for other reasons. The only time
I use Classic view is when I need to locate a mail sorted by sender with first
letter navigation, though why they should not provide this functionality after
all this time in modern view is still baffling to me.
On most occasions I use Apple Mail on my Mac I have to restart Voiceover in
order to regain proper cursor tracking when reviewing my email messages.
Throughout the entire life of El Kapitan I was unable to use iBooks for reading
as it constantly spat busy at me when I tried to interact with the reading
area, though to be fair this does appear to have been fixed in Mac OS Sierra
with busy far less common now, but it took over a year to fix what was a basic
function for a blind person, reading properly electronic books on a Mac.
It mayh be that my iMac machine is getting old now but it still has a 256 GB
SSD and 16 GB of Ram along with a processor upgrade when the machine was
purchased allied to an secondary 2 TB data internal drive .. Despite
deliberately overinvesting in the hardware web surfing with Safari nowadays is
a bit of a nightmare. I am constantly assailed by Voiceover announcing busy or
Voiceover restarting itself.
When I got my Mac in 2011 with Lion Safari was pretty much a joy to use, fast
and rapid in its execution.
Like Jonathan I still enjoy the Reader function but even this is far more laggy
than it used to be.
The rest is a bit shakey.
When I first got my Mac reading PDF was pretty easy, though support for tagbged
elements was not there.
All through El Kapitan I found it impossible to use Preview, no matter how many
times I interacted with the text and in the end resorted to using Nisus Writer
Pro for reading PDF documents. I recently trialled PDF Pen Pro but considered
it so far short of free options on Windows it would be ridiculous to purchase
it.
there is no doubt that I love using Mars Edit but I now conclude, again like
Jonathan, that it is ipossible to reliably create blogs with it. I now
routinely create my blogs in Word on Windows. Save to iCloud Drive, open in
TextEdit and then copy and paste directly into Mars Edit for publishing.
However I did not pay over £2,000 in 2011 for a machine where I had to
undertake these clumsy work arounds for an accessible experience.
David Griffith
-----Original Message-----
From: Dane Trethowan [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 24 November 2016 12:41
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Techno-Chat]: Article: Saying Goodbye to the Mac – Mosen Consulting
Yet again another interesting and thought provoking post from Jonathan.
I use a Mac Mini here though not exclusively.
Whilst I don't do a lot of the sort of work Jonathan does I can see many of his
points, I agree with some and disagree with others however - as Jonathan states
- everyone needs to make the choices in technology that are best for them.
Can I see the day when I myself will be parting with my Mac machine?
That's a difficult question to anser I work pretty much 50-50 on both Mac and
Windows machines and I also have a Virtual Windows machine set up on my Mac
Mini from which I work.
I've integrated all my machines and devices as best I can which helps.
Anyway enjoy the read, its rather a lengthy one but worth the time and trouble
to read.
http://mosen.org/saying-goodbye-to-the-mac/
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