I understand and agree with your POV on that, and I think idealy that
is a noble goal to shoot for, but the ideal will backfire, or at
least undermine or delay, the outcome. I think Apple should be
working to set the record straight where accessibility is concerned.
To me, the keyboard and mouse analogy is a good one, but we are years
away from that being something accepted in an OS where regards
accessibility. Apple is revolutionizing computing by including a
very capable screen reader in a commercial OS...commercial being the
key word there. And even OS's like Ubuntu, which also include screen
readers, are not as easy to get the screen reader up and running as
under Mac. Apple should tout VoiceOver, and then let it fade into
the background, once it is an accepted part of the operating system.
On Apr 16, 2007, at 5:36 PM, Greg Kearney wrote:
While sometimes I too wish that Apple would be more aggressive
about advertising VoiceOver in a way I think it tell us a great
deal about how they view accessibility in general.
In the Apple mindset accessibility should just be a natural
extension of the computer experience. It is just something that is
there in every computer sold. Sort of like a keyboard. When was the
last time you saw an ad for a computer that extolled the wonders of
it coming with a keyboard or a mouse? Apple's efforts is to make
computer that can be used by anyone, computers that people will
come to simply expect that of course if I am blind or dyslexic I
will be able to use a Mac. The fact that Apple is held to a very
high standard when it come to anything involving the human-computer
interface, and that includes VoiceOver, is not a bad thing at all.
Apple has survived all these years exactly on that reputation.
When seen as part of a lager philosophical approach to computer and
how humans use them it seem out of place for Apple to call
attention to VoiceOver because VoiceOver is simply one small part
of a complete environment, like cut and paste, AppleScript or a
hundred other parts of the Macintosh experience.
Greg
