Well, as I don’t use braille, I will not comment to much on  that except just 
to say that I think it’s a little odd to seemingly not egknolege the 
significance of an off the shelf system with braille support out of the box and 
not find away to make good use of it.  
  With that said, there are some problems with some of your assertions that I 
feel need to be addrest since nobody else has done so yet.  I Also should point 
out that it is unclear to me at times whether or not your points are in 
reference to braille or speech.  So, there may be some occasional 
misunderstanding on my part.

1.  Third party icons on the status bar are accessible with Voiceover.  
Specifically the Dropbox app.  Any problems that may occur will be more to due 
with the third party developer rather than Apple.  I don’t understand why you 
said they can’t be accessed with Voiceover.
2.  The idea that there should be some kind of constant indicator that quicknav 
is turned on is your opinion.  It is not an accessibility issue.  This could be 
classified as a feature request however.
3.  What do you mean by network stations?  I have no idea what button in finder 
that you are referring to that connects to all available network shares at 
once.  I know of no such button nor have I found any reference to this function 
in the help documentation.  Finding and connecting to network shares in finder 
is quite easy to do with voiceover and if you want OS X to automatically 
connect to shares on your network, you can easily set this up in user 
preferences.  So, I see no accessibility issue here.  It’s possible however 
that I’m not understanding what you are referring to, but in any event I fail 
to see how this one thing could impact the usability of OS X for blind people 
to the extent that one would email Tim Cook.
4.  Your subject is quality of osx with voiceover for people with dissablities. 
 However, I don’t see how iWork compatibility with MS office has anything to do 
spasifically with blind people being able to use OS X.
5.  With regard to manipulating the mouse with vo, there are some valid 
concerns that need to be addressed, but emailing Tim Cook is not the correct 
way to do that.  I think it should also be said that flooding Apple with 
invalid complaints will increase the risk that the valid ones will go unnoticed 
or be ignored.

Finally, it’s good to hope for and expect new innovations including ones for 
disabilities, but it is also necessary to egknolege what has been done which I 
think is considerable and to be willing to make good use of what we have.


On Feb 11, 2015, at 4:38 PM, William Windels <william.wind...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

I am writing to you since the progress of the accessibility features are really 
pour in the last releases of osx 10.10.2.
The mac is still missing some important features against windows with a 
commercial screenreader, and this after more 6 years of  voiceover as built-in 
screenreader.
Ok, voiceover is still a free, built-in screenreader but on windows , there are 
2 free screenreader for the windows platform that are better in some cases than 
voiceover.

Braille is still very basicnin osx:
Some daily problems I discover with voiceover:
I can’t follow courses with only braille output (without speech) during 
colleges.
I mean: there is some important information missing on the braille display 
that’s only available with speech.

What is missing:
>> 1- no option for word wrapping: this can be useful for fast reading (loudly);
>> 2- no different modes line, structured, speech (like in jaws): specialy 
>> structured mode in jaws is configurable, type of controls is shown, 
>> interaction-levels could be shown on this way. 
>> It’s e.g. very frustrating if you are in a text area and you can read all 
>> with the braille-line but you can’t edit or simply move the cursor to any 
>> position that is visible on the braille display.
>> 
>> 3- to know if quicknav is on/off before moving isn’t possible also.
>> On this way , it’s very easy to lose your position in a text-area or a 
>> window.
>> The quick-nav option has also some bugs in general but is sometimes very 
>> useful for navigation (and specially on a macbook).

>> 4- In some cases, the text that’s in the voiceover cursor is (always) 
>> underlineed with dots 7-8. On this way , no other attributes are shown and 
>> the cursor isn’t shown. If dots 7,8 are turned off, the cursor isn’t visible 
>> at all and capitals aren’t shown also.
>> 
>> 5- When i put the cursor on a letter in a text I delete a .(dot) sign on the 
>> left sign of the cursor and voiceover says sometimes something else.



further  braille bugs:
cursor routing on the first sign of the braille-display: the text on the 
display is gone;
when composing a message to multiple recipients , while the speech is saying 
correctly the contact that has the focus, the braille display isn’t following.

>> Further:


Some bugs since 10.9 aren’t fixed:
the icons in the statusbar like the third party app dropbox can’t be accessed 
with voiceover from there.
The drag and drop-function with voiceover is not improved since the 
introduction in osx 10.7 and  gives not the same possibilities for blind users 
as for sighted users.
The button to mount all external (network)-stations at once in finder is not 
accessible with voiceover;

And some different points:
Ibooks was basically accessible with voiceover after one update from osx 10.9 
to osx 10.10.

iWork’s is mainly accessible but is still missing some important compatibility 
options to work together with ms office.
(most of the people that work in a administrative job, use windows with ms 
office).

I still love the mac because of some intuïtive features like the trackpad with 
voiceover, time-machine, the possibility to maintain the system as blind user 
on my own.
But , I don’t know if the newest features for blind users are good and 
innovative enough to spend that much money on.

With so great financial results the last weeks that where announced from Apple, 
I should hope that more innovation is coming for people with disabilities.

Keep on the work that  Steve Jobs has started.

Kind regards,
William Windels

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