[Nfbktad] FW: Article: Switching back to Windows

[Todd]

Greetings All,

 

An interesting article on MAC vs. Windows per Tonia.

 

Cheers,

 

 

Todd

From: Nfbktad [mailto:nfbktad-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Gatton, Tonia
(OFB-LV)
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 10:09 AM
To: 'nfbktad at nfbnet.org'
Subject: [Nfbktad] Article: Switching back to Windows

 

Interesting article and some food for thought.

 

Tonia

 

 

 

Switching back to Windows

Posted on 

February 7, 2014

by 

Marco

 

Yes, you read correctly! After 

five years on a Mac

as my private machine, I am switching back to a Windows machine in a week or
so, depending on when Lenovo's shipment arrives.

 

You are probably asking yourself, why I am switching back. In this post,
I'll try to give some answers to that question, explain my very personal
views

on the matters that prompted this switch, and give you a bit of an insight
into how I work and why OS X and VoiceOver no longer really fit that bill
for

me.

 

A bit of history

 

When I started playing with a Mac in 2008, I immediately realised the
potential this approach that Apple was taking had. Bundling a screen reader
with the

operating system had been done before, on the GNOME desktop, for example,
but Apple's advantage is that they control the hardware and software back to

front and always know what's inside their boxes. So a blind user is always
guaranteed to get a talking Mac when they buy one.

 

On Windows and Linux, the problem is that the hardware used is unknown to
the operating system. On pre-installed systems, this is usually being taken
care

of, but on custom-built machines with standard OEM versions of Windows or
your Linux distro downloaded from the web, things are different. There may
be

this shiny new sound card that just came out, which your dealer put in the
box, but which neither operating system knows about, because there are no
drivers.

And gone is the dream of a talking installation! So, even when Windows 8 now
allows Narrator to be turned on very early in the installation process in

multiple languages even, and Orca can be activated early in a GNOME
installation, this all is of no use if the sound card cannot be detected and
the speech

synthesizer canot output its data through conected speakers.

 

And VoiceOver had quite some features already when I tried it in OS X 10.5
Leopard: It had web support, e-mail was working, braille displays, too, the
Calendar

was one of the most accessible on any desktop computer I had ever seen,
including Outlook's calendar with the various screen readers on Windows, one
of

which I had even worked on myself in earlier years, and some third-party
apps were working, too. In fact, my very first Twitter client ran on the
Mac,

and it was mainstream.

 

There was a bit of a learning curve, though. VoiceOver's model of
interacting with things is quite different from what one might be used to on
Windows at

times. Especially interacting with container items such as tables, text
areas, a web page and other high-level elements can be confusing at first.
If you

are not familiar with VoiceOver, interacting means zooming into an element.
A table suddenly gets rows and columns, a table row gets multiple cells, and

each cell gets details of the contained text when interacting with each of
these items consecutively.

 

In 2009, Apple advanced things even further when they published Snow Leopard
(OS X 10.6). VoiceOver now had support for the trackpads of modern MacBooks,

and when the Magic TrackPad came out later, it also just worked. The Item
Chooser, VoiceOver's equivalent of a list of links or headings, included
more

items to list by, and there was now support for so-called web spots, both
user-defined and automatic. A feature VoiceOver calls Commanders allowed the

assignment of commands to various types of keystrokes, gestures, and others.
If you remember: Snow Leopard cost 29 us Dollars, and aside from a ton of

new features in VoiceOver, it obviously brought all the great new features
that Snow Leopard had in store for everyone. A common saying was: Other
screen

readers needed 3 versions for this many features and would have charged
several hundred dollars of update fees. And it was a correct assessment!

 

In 2011, OS X 10.7 Lion came out, bringing a ton of features for
international users. Voices well-known from iOS were also made available in
desktop formats

for over 40 languages, international braille tables were added, and it was
no longer required to purchase international voices separately from vendors

such as 

AssistiveWare..

This meant that users in more countries could just try out VoiceOver on any
Mac in an Apple retail store or a reseller's place. There were more features

such as support for WAI-ARIA landmarks on the web, activities, which are
either application or situation-specific sets of VoiceOver settings, and
better

support for the Calendar, which got a redesign in this update.

 

First signs of trouble

 

But this was also the time when first signs of problems came up. Some things
just felt unfinished. For example: The international braille support
included

grade 2 for several languages, including my mother tongue German. German
grade 2 has a thing where by default, nothing is capitalized. German
capitalizes

many more words than English, for example, and it was agreed a long time ago
that only special abbreviations and expressions should be capitalized. Only

in learning material, general orthographic capitalization rules should be
used. In other screen readers, capitalization can be turned on or off for
German

and other language grade 2 (or even grade 1). Not so in VoiceOver for both
OS X and iOS. One is forced to use capitalization. This makes reading quite

awkward. And yes, makes, because this remains an issue in both products to
this date. I even entered a bug into Apple's bug tracker for this, but it
was

shelved at some point without me being notified.

 

Some other problems with braille also started to surface. For some
inexplicable reason, I often have to press routing buttons twice until the
cursor appears

at the spot I want it to when editing documents. While you can edit braille
verbosity where you can define what pieces of information are being shown
for

a given control type, you cannot edit what gets displayed as the control
type text. A "closed disclosure triangle" always gets shown as such, same as
an

opened one. On a 14 cell display, this takes two full-length displays, on a
40 cell one, it wastes most of the real estate and barely leaves room for
other

things.

 

Other problems also gave a feeling of unfinished business. The WAI-ARIA
landmark announcement, working so well on iOS, was very cumbersome to listen
to

on OS X. The Vocalizer voices used for international versions had a chipmunk
effect that was never corrected and, while funny at first, turned out to be

very annoying in day-to-day use.

 

OK, the enthusiastic Mac fan boy that I was, thought, let's report these
issues and also wait for the updates to trickle in. None of the 10.7 updates
really

fixed the issues I was having.

 

Then a year later, Mountain Lion, AKA OS X 10.8, came out, bringing a few
more features, but compared to the versions before, much much less. Granted,
it

was only a year between these two releases, whereas the two cycles before
had been two years each, but the features that did come in weren't too
exciting.

There was a bit polish here and there with drag and drop, one could now sort
the columns of a table, and press and hold buttons, and a few little things

more. Safari learned a lot new HTML5 and more WAI-ARIA and was less busy,
but that was about it. Oh yes and one could now access all items in the
upper

right corner of the screen. But again, not many of the previously reported
problems were solved, except for the chipmunk effect.

 

There were also signs of real problems. I have a Handy Tech Evolution
braille display as a desktop braille display, and that had serious problems
from one

Mountain Lion update to the next, making it unusable with the software. It
took two or three updates, distributed over four or five months, before that

was solved, basically turning the display into a useless piece of
space-waster.

 

And so it went on

 

And 10.9 AKA Mavericks again only brought a bit polish, but also introduced
some serious new bugs. My Handy Tech BrailleStar 40, a laptop braille
display,

is no longer working at all. It simply isn't being recognized when plugged
into the USB port. Handy Tech are aware of the problem, so I read, but since

Apple is in control of the Mac braille display drivers, who knows when a fix
will come, if at all in a 10.9 update. And again, old bugs have not been
fixed.

And new ones have been introduced, too.

 

Mail, for example, is quite cumbersome in conversation view now. While 10.7
and 10.8 very at least consistent in displaying multiple items in a
table-like

structure, 10.9 simply puts the whole mail in as an embedded character you
have to interact with to get at the details. It also never keeps its place,

always jumping to the left-most item, the newest message in the thread.

 

The Calendar has taken quite a turn for the worse, being much more
cumbersome to use than in previous versions. The Calendar UI seems to be a
subject of

constant change anyway, according to comments from sighted people, and
although it is technically accessible, it is no longer really usable,
because there

are so many layers and sometimes unpredictable focus jumps and interaction
oddities.

 

However, having said that, an accessible calendar is one thing I am truly
going to miss when I switch back to Windows. I know various screen readers
take

stabs at making the Outlook calendar accessible, and it gets broken very
frequently, too. At least the one on OS X is accessible. I will primarily be
doing

calendaring from my iOS devices in the future. There, I have full control
over things in a hassle-free manner.

 

iBooks, a new addition to the product, is a total accessibility disaster
with almost all buttons unlabeled, and the interface being slow as anything.
Even

the update issued shortly after the initial Mavericks release didn't solve
any of those problems, and neither did the 10.9.1 update that came out a few

days before Christmas 2013.

 

>From what I hear, Activities seem to be pretty broken in this release, too.
I don't use them myself, but heard that a friend's activities all stopped
working,

triggers didn't fire, and even setting them up fresh didn't help.

 

Here comes the meat

 

And here is the first of my reasons why I am switching back to Windows: All
of the above simply added up to a point where I lost confidence in Apple
still

being dedicated to VoiceOver on the Mac as they were a few years ago. Old
bugs aren't being fixed, new ones introduced and, despite the beta testers,
which

I was one of, reporting them, were often not addressed (like the Mail and
Calendar problems, or iBooks). Oh yes, Pages, after four years, finally
became

more accessible recently, Keynote can now run presentations with VoiceOver,
but these points still don't negate the fact that VoiceOver itself is not
receiving

the attention any more that it would need to as an integrated part of the
operating system.

 

The next point is one that has already been debated quite passionately on
various forums and blogs in the past: VoiceOver is much less efficient when
browsing

the web than screen readers on Windows are. Going from element to element is
not really snappy, jumping to headings or form fields often has a delay,
depending

on the size and complexity of a page, and the way Apple chose to design
their modes requires too much thinking on the user's part. There is single
letter

quick navigation, but you have to turn on quick navigation with the cursor
keys first, and enable the one letter quick navigation separately once in
the

VoiceOver utility. When cursor key quick navigation is on, you only navigate
via left and right arrow keys sequentially, not top to bottom as web
content,

which is still document-based for the most part, would suggest. The last
used quick navigation key also influences the item chooser menu. So if I
moved

to a form field last via quick navigation, but then want to choose a link
from the item chooser, the item chooser opens to the form fields first. I
have

to left arrow to get to the links. Same with headings. For me, that is a
real slow-down.

 

Also, VoiceOver is not good at keeping its place within a web page. As with
all elements, once interaction stops, then starts again, VoiceOver starts
interaction

at the very first element. Conversations in Adium or Skype, and even the
Messages app supplied by Apple, all suffer from this. One cannot jump into
and

out of the HTML area without losing one's place. Virtual cursors on Windows
in various screen readers are very good at remembering the spot they were at

when focus left the area. And even Apple's VoiceOver keystroke to jump to
related elements, which is supposed to jump between the input and HTML area
in

such conversation windows, is a subject of constant breakage, re-fixing, and
other unpredictability. It does not even work right in Apple's own Messages

app in most cases.

 

Over-all, there are lots of other little things when browsing the web which
add up to make me feel I am much less productive when browsing the web on a

Mac than I am on Windows.

 

Next is VoiceOver's paradigm of having to interact with many elements. One
item where this also comes into play is text. If I want to read something in

detail, be it on the web, a file name, or basically anything, I have to
interact with the element, or elements, before I get to the text level, read
word

by word or character by character, and then stop interaction as many times
as I started it to get back to where I was before wanting to read in detail.

Oh yes, there are commands to read and spell by character, word, and
sentence, but because VoiceOver uses the Control+Option keys as its
modifiers, and

the letters for those actions are all located on the left-hand side of the
keyboard, it means I have to take my right hand off its usual position to
press

these keys while the left hand holds the Control and Option keys. MacBooks
as well as the Apple Wireless Keyboard don't have Control and Option keys on

both sides, and my hand cannot be bent in a fashion that I can grab these
keys all with one hand. Turning on and off the VoiceOver key lock mechanism
for

this would add even more cumbersome to the situation.

 

And this paradigm of interaction is also applied to the exploration of
screen content by TrackPad. You have to interact or stop interacting with
items constantly

to get a feel for the whole screen. And even then, I often feel I never get
a complete picture. Unlike on iOS, where I always have a full view of a
screen.

Granted, a desktop screen displays far more information than could possibly
fit on a TrackPad without being useless millimeter touch targets, but still

the hassle of interaction led to me not using the TrackPad at all except for
some very seldom specific use cases. We're talking about a handful instances

per year.

 

Next problem I am seeing quite often is the interaction braille gives me. In
some cases, the output is just a dump of what speech is telling me. In other

cases, it is a semi-spacial representation of the screen content. In yet
another instance, it may be a label with some chopped off text to the right,
or

to the left, with the cursor not always in predictable positions. I already
mentioned the useless grade 2 in German, and the fact that I often have to

press the routing button at least twice before the cursor gets where I want
it to go. The braille implementation in VoiceOver gives a very inconsistent

impression, and feels unfinished, or done by someone who is not a braille
reader and doesn't really know the braille reader's needs.

 

Next problem: Word processing. Oh yes, Pages can do tables in documents now,
and other stuff also became more accessible, but again because of the
paradigms

VoiceOver uses, getting actual work done is far more cumbersome than on
Windows. One has, for example, to remember to decouple the VoiceOver cursor
from

the actual system focus and leave that inside the document area when one
wants to execute something on a tool bar. Otherwise, focus shifts, too, and
a

selection one may have made gets removed, rendering the whole endeavor
pointless. Oh yes, and one has to turn the coupling back on later, or habits
will

result in unpredictable results because the system focus didn't move where
one would have expected it to. And again, VoiceOver's horizontally centered

navigation paradigm. Pages of a document in either Pages or Nisus Writer Pro
appear side by side, when they are visually probably appearing below one
another.

Each page is its own container element. All of this leaves me with the
impression that I don't have as much control over my word processing as I
have in

MS Word or even the current snapshot builds of OpenOffice or LibreOffice on
Windows. I also get much more information that I don't have to look for
explicitly,

for example the number of the current page. NVDA, but probably others, too,
have multilingual document support in Word. I  immediately hear which spell

checking is being used in a particular paragraph or even sentence.

 

There are some more issues which were not addressed to this day. There is no
PDF reader I know of on OS X that can deal with tagged (accessible) PDFs.
Even

when tags are present, Preview doesn't do anything with them, giving the
more or less accurate text extraction that one gets from untagged PDFs. As a
result,

there is no heading navigation, no table semantic output, and more that
accessible PDFs support.

 

And the fact that there is no accessible Flash plug-in for web browsers on
OS X also has caused me to switch to a Windows VM quite often just to be
able

to view videos embedded in blogs or articles. Oh yeah, HTML5 video is slowly
coming into more sites, but the reality is that Flash is probably still
going

to be there for a couple of years. This is not Apple's fault, the blame here
is solely to be put on Adobe for not providing an accessible Flash plug-in,

but it is one more thing that adds to me not being as productive on a Mac as
I want to be on a desktop computer.

 

Conclusion

 

In summary: By all of the above, I do not mean to say that Apple did a bad
job with VoiceOver to begin with. On the contrary: Especially with iOS, they

have done an incredibly good job for accessibility in the past few years.
And the fact that you can nowadays buy a Mac and install and configure it
fully

in your language is highly commendable, too! I will definitely miss the
ability to configure my system alone, without sighted assistance, should I
need

to reinstall Windows. As I said above, that is still not fully possible
without assistance. It is just the adding up of things that I found over the
years

that caused me to realize that some of the design decisions Apple has made
for OS X, bugs that were not addressed or things get broken and not fixed,
and

the fact that apps are either accessible or they aren't, and there's hardly
any in-between, are not compatible with my way of working with a desktop
computer

or laptop in the longer term. For iOS, I have a feeling Apple are still
full-steam ahead with accessibility, introducing great new features with
each release,

and hopefully also fixing braille problems as discussed by Jonathan Mosen in


this great blog post.

For OS X, I am no longer as convinced their heart is in it. As I have a
feeling OS X itself may become a second-class citizen behind iOS soon, but
that,

again, is only my personal opinion.

 

So there you have it. This is why I am going to be using a Lenovo notebook
with 

NVDA

as my primary screen reader for my private use from now on. I will still be
using a Mac for work of course, but for my personal use, the Mac is being
replaced.

I want to be fast, effective, productive, and be sure my assistive
technology doesn't suddenly stop working with my braille display or be
susceptible to

business decisions placing less emphasis on it. Screen readers on Windows
are being made by independent companies or organizations with their own
business

models. And there is choice. If one does no longer fit particular needs,
another will most likely do the trick. I do not have that on OS X.

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