I worked in an educational environment and we had to get rid of our Macs
during the period when there was no screen reader for the version of Mac
OS that was current at the time. We weren't going to run an old version
of Mac OS. We switched a lot, I mean a lot, of machines over to Windows
and jaws. Assuming the same thing was going on at other educational
institutions, it would have represented hundreds of thousands of sales
in a market segment that had always been particularly important to Apple.
My opinion is that you can directly attribute the development of
voiceover to the federal 508 regulations that require computers in
schools to have screen readers.
The trend is now totally in the other direction. There is a Mac in the
room with the tredmills in the gym at this institution if you can
believe that. You can check your email after you're done with your
workout, I guess. I would just use my iphone but ...
On 03/30/2015 06:56 PM, Sabahattin Gucukoglu wrote:
I wonder what the catalyst was for Apple’s ultimate choice to develop their
screen reader? The education sector? Government? The mythical two blind
sons? Certainly the APIs are now available for the development of an AT
solution, so it’s entirely possible, technically. But it doesn’t surprise me
to learn that the Jobsian quest for perfection extended further back even than
Apple’s introduction of their own usable screen reader, to the exclusion of
others; I had not heard that story, and merely assumed that OS 9 was the choice
of blind musicians (one of whom I knew) because it happened to be accessible
with OutSpoken. Although I’m not complaining that I didn’t have to pay for
VoiceOver, there’s something to be said for diversification when it actually
has the effect of giving the customer what they ultimately desire.
For my current weekly bash at Apple, see:
http://www.applevis.com/forum/accessibility-advocacy/suggestion-report-accessibility-bug-friday
Sometimes it’s the little things, sometimes not so little. I only started it
recently, because I think the situation for Yosemite is particularly
disturbing, but many of those niggles go back to the very beginning. And yes I
think iOS is starting to feel the effects now as well. It’s very fortunate
that none of these issues currently make the platforms unusable.
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