[blindlaw] Question About Management Software for Law Office and Non-profit Related

[Nicholas Parsons]

Firstly, VoiceOver doesn't lack features or sophistication; rather, powerful professional word processing applications on the Mac have, until recently, not been very accessible. Secondly, the new iWork applications from Apple have changed this. They are very accessible, and handle things like track changes, comments, footnotes etcetera much better than JAWS in MS Word. They can also open and save to MS Office document formats. The Mail, Contacts and Calendar applications are also much easier to use than Outlook and fully support Microsoft Exchange accounts. I think where VoiceOver and the Mac are lacking is in the accessibility of complicated PDF documents, such as those with tables and fillable form fields. This seems to be changing for the better, however.

I am starting at a law office on Monday which has just switched to the Mac OS, so I'll really be able to put this to the test. So far it's working well. Creating court documents actually seems much easier on the Mac for me than with Microsoft Word, because fillable form fields in Word 2010 are not very accessible.