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Apple to Add Free Screen Reader to Mac OS X
Joe Clark writes "Screen readers for blind Mac users have been nonexistent since 2003 when development was halted on the only one in existence. On Windows they cost up to $1,295. This week, Apple announced the upcoming Spoken Interface for Mac OS X, the long-rumoured Apple screen reader and more, we are told. Apple is looking for beta-testers for this technology preview. Already, a developer muses that IBMs accessible Java software could work with the screen reader. No mention of Braille-display support yet, which many blind and deaf-blind people need and want."
Unfortunately it's precisely what OS/Free developers have proved themselves crap at producing time and time again: It's User Interface *and* of no use to the developers. It has no chance.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I do love many things about Mac OS X, but it's a terrible shame that its keyboard accessibility is so far behind that of Windows and Linux. I don't really understand how they could have gotten this so wrong.
Complete and convenient keyboard access is essential for vision-impaired users (and a great boon to fully sighted users who just want to get around more quickly). Unfortunately:
1. Full keyboard access isn't "full".
In some cases, even when full keyboard access is turned on, the blue border highlight never appears and pressing the Tab key does nothing. This causes parts of the user interface to be completely keyboard inaccessible. For example, if I start TextEdit, type in something, and press Command-W, a sheet drops down asking if I want to save the file before closing it. There are three buttons and the "Save" button is glowing, but there is no highlight, so it is impossible to select buttons using the keyboard. It is still possible to activate "Cancel" by pressing Escape, but "Don't Save" is completely unreachable.
There are also some controls that Tab never reaches, even if full keyboard access is enabled. For example, pressing Ctrl-F5 in Safari doesn't move the highlight to the toolbar. Pressing Tab never highlights the toolbar buttons, the bookmarks bar, or the tab bar. In the main iTunes window, pressing Tab cycles between the Source pane, the song listing, and the Search field. But when you first start iTunes, no song is selected, so the song listing is never highlighted; there is no way to tell that the song listing has the focus.
Keyboard access should be properly enabled in every window and sheet. Tab should navigate to all controls, and the border highlight should always be visible, even around list boxes.
2. Responding to prompts is tedious.
Prompt boxes usually present two or three buttons to choose from. The only universal way to operate these prompts from the keyboard is to press Tab several times and then press Enter. Not only does this require more keypresses, it also requires the user to watch for feedback because he must look for the highlight in order to predict which button will be activated. The user cannot simply hit a key and know in advance what will happen.
Buttons should be assigned accelerator keys by the operating system so that they can be activated by pressing a single letter (the first letter on the button, if possible). Pressing Command and the first letter of the button text sometimes works, but this seems to be a rare feature of particular prompts. Single-letter access should be enabled everywhere.
3. Access to menu commands is tedious.
Assume for a moment that you aren't yet totally familiar with an application and haven't memorized the Command shortcuts. The only way to access the menus from the keyboard is to press Fn-Ctrl-F2, a fairly arcane key combination, and then repeatedly press the arrow keys to get the desired menu. Then one can press the Up and Down arrows to choose a command. Although commands can be selected from menus by pressing letters, the association between letters and commands is strange and hard to predict. For example, in Safari's File menu, pressing C activates "Close Tab" (why not "Close Window"?), pressing D activates "New Tab", and pressing W activates "Save As...". In the Apple menu, pressing S once activates "Shut Down..." (why not "Software Update..." or "Sleep"?) and pressing S again activates "System Preferences...". This doesn't make any sense.
Windows users can simply press Alt-F-P to print. But Mac users have to press Fn-Ctrl-F2, Right, Right, Down, Down, Down, Down, Down, Down, Down, Down, Down, Enter. Or, if they are clever, they can press Fn-Ctrl-F2, Right, Right, P, R, Enter. This is tedious, but the more severe problem is that the Mac key combination is not fixed. If the menu changes (by inserting, removing, enabling, or disabling items), the number of times to press the arrow keys can change, and the number of letters one has to type to be certain of se
Catching up my ass. Apple wrote the book in text-to-speech software long ago, pal. There's no catching up involved except on Microsoft's and Linux's part as far as text-to-speech goes.
drop of the "or others" and you'll have it right. Linux is a "scratch an itch" product, and that's why it will never be truly ready for the desktop, because the people who write for it, as a general rule, despise end users as technically illiterate and there is no profit motive to accomodate them.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.