[blindlaw] Apple:

ALBERT ELIA al.elia at aol.com
Fri Nov 8 16:59:35 UTC 2013


I found the initial release of iOS 7 to be buggy with Voiceover, but I have subsequently found that the iOS 7.0.3. update seems to fix all of those issues. If anything, the new design of iOS seems designed to increase accessibility: I understand from my sighted friends that text labels on buttons have replaced some buttons that were previously labelled with pictographs.

The new iWork, at least on the Mac, seems to be more accessible, not less. The new iWork apps do have many fewer features than the previous versions, but that is not an accessibility issue.

As for Mavericks, there are some issues with navigating in some dialog boxes using the column browser, but frankly I expect some bugs in the initial release of a new OS from any maker. From speaking with friendss, both sighted and blind, Windows 8 is far more of a general and accessibility disaster than any recent release of Mac OS.
Again, there are also some features that went away with Mavericks (like the inclusion of a “save” button in the expanded view of headers in mail), but those went away for everyone, not just VoiceOVer users.

I am disappointed that the new iBooks app for the Mac does not have labelled buttons in VoiceOver, though it does at least permit the reading of a book’s contents. I hope Apple will address this oversight quickly.

Finally, while Safari’s new organization of web pages is different than in previous versions of Mac OS, it is in many ways more, not less accessible. Pages do not cause VoiceOVer to hang as they previously did, and VoiceOver now tries to interpret poorly designed web pages intelligently. For example, it interprets a page with tabbed text as a table, even though it is not coded as an HTML table. This has advantages for navigation, though it does make it more cumbersome to navigate a page if you’ve previously gotten used to it’s table-free appearance.

I am far more concerned with the decrease in the accessibility of apps by third-party developers, both for the Mac and iOS. the Zagat guide for iOS was one of the most accessible apps around: It even made OpenTable reservations accessible when the official OpenTable app was not. After Google acquired Zagat, it turned the app into the least accessible app I’ve tried. As to OpenTable, it became  accessible in later releases, but now is much less accessible than in the previous version. Google Chrome on the Mac was my browser of choice for awhile, because it did not suffer the previously mentioned VoiceOver hangs that plagued Safari. However, for several months now, I have had to stop using Chrome because it crashes all the time when using VoiceOver (no such crashes occur when VoiceOver is off).

And don’t even get me started on the Microsoft Office apps for either iOS or the Mac.

I would certainly like to see the web apps for iWork and iCloud become accessible. However, if we are going to focus on making web apps accessible, I think targeting Microsoft’s Office 365 apps and Google’s apps will have a much greater impact.

Are there specific accessibility issues you’re having with iOS 7, Mavericks, or iWork? As I said, I haven’t found them to be problematic, but perhaps I’m not using them in the same way that you are.


On Nov 8, 2013, at 11:02 AM, wmodnl wmodnl <wmodnl at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Has anyone realized the new flaws with IOS 7, Iwork, and Mac's OS10? The products via Apple are now becoming more and more inaccessible with VoiceOver.
> Has anyone from the NFB thought of the next course of action? I guess the agreement from 2006 went out with Steve Jobs.
> 
> 
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