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Points all taken, if no VoiceOver on a Mac then its all down to
assumption and naut else.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that Preview hasn't gotten any better
under Sierra, if anything its become worse.
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I agree - I also used and continue to use Abby Finereader for a similar
purpose. Jonathan's main point about the lack of structured tagged support
for PDF still holds though. In terms of basic reading, To be honest I have not
really investigated whether things have improved under Sierra for PDF reading,
they might well have done. My concern is that basic things like this should not
break, even if only some of us, in the first place. Lookin at Mac is clear
that problems can be sporadic for different accordin to mac models or
configurations.
This is why I could never really trust my Mac solely. If things break on
Windows with a screenreader we have a multitude of strategic options, different
svcreenreaders - greater cheaper alternative program support including more
freeware options, virtual OCr with Jaws NVDA or Window Eyes. If something
breaks with Voiceover on the Mac then that is pretty much it- you are up a gum
tree.
There is more pressure then for Voiceover to wwork flawlessy. If Jaws does not
work I can always try NVDA and vice versa.
David Griffith
David Griffith
-----Original Message-----
From: Dane Trethowan [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 25 November 2016 07:48
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Techno-Chat]: RE: [Techno-Chat]: Article: Saying Goodbye to the
Mac – Mosen Consulting
Hi!
Just reading through your excellent post again and it struck me as to why I had
no trouble with PDF documents on the Mac and other people do?
Well I cheated but if cheating is to one's advantage in the case of accessibility
then perhaps I'm excused <smile>.
I use the excellent Docuscan+ OCR tool from Serotek to read my PDF files, have
the Mac open the App automatically and the PDF document is processed
automatically in a matter of seconds for you to read.
Now as I described it happens at my end where I have a broad band connection so
the process may take longer on slower connections.
Docuscan+ is one of the best OCR Apps I've ever used whether that be on
Windows or Mac and I can only hoke that Serotek will consider an IOS or Android
version with the same cross platform compatibility.
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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/
--
**********
“Oh, I’m an activist and I’m OK / I sleep all night and I tweet all day.”
