<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40"><head><META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 12 (filtered medium)"><style><!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:"Cambria Math";
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;}
@font-face
{font-family:Calibri;
panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;}
@font-face
{font-family:Tahoma;
panose-1:2 11 6 4 3 5 4 4 2 4;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}
a:link, span.MsoHyperlink
{mso-style-priority:99;
color:blue;
text-decoration:underline;}
a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed
{mso-style-priority:99;
color:purple;
text-decoration:underline;}
span.EmailStyle17
{mso-style-type:personal;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:windowtext;}
span.EmailStyle18
{mso-style-type:personal-reply;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:#1F497D;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
font-size:10.0pt;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
--></style><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:shapedefaults v:ext="edit" spidmax="1026" />
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:shapelayout v:ext="edit">
<o:idmap v:ext="edit" data="1" />
</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Greetings All,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>An interesting article on MAC vs. Windows per Tonia.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Cheers,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Todd<o:p></o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Nfbktad [mailto:nfbktad-bounces@nfbnet.org] <b>On Behalf Of </b>Gatton, Tonia (OFB-LV)<br><b>Sent:</b> Monday, February 24, 2014 10:09 AM<br><b>To:</b> 'nfbktad@nfbnet.org'<br><b>Subject:</b> [Nfbktad] Article: Switching back to Windows<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Interesting article and some food for thought.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Tonia<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Switching back to Windows<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Posted on <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>February 7, 2014<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>by <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Marco<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Yes, you read correctly! After <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>five years on a Mac<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>as my private machine, I am switching back to a Windows machine in a week or so, depending on when Lenovo’s shipment arrives.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>me.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>A bit of history<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>synthesizer canot output its data through conected speakers.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>and it was mainstream.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>each cell gets details of the contained text when interacting with each of these items consecutively.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>readers needed 3 versions for this many features and would have charged several hundred dollars of update fees. And it was a correct assessment!<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>for over 40 languages, international braille tables were added, and it was no longer required to purchase international voices separately from vendors<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>such as <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>AssistiveWare..<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>such as support for WAI-ARIA landmarks on the web, activities, which are either application or situation-specific sets of VoiceOver settings, and better<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>support for the Calendar, which got a redesign in this update.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>First signs of trouble<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>grade 2 for several languages, including my mother tongue German. German grade 2 has a thing where by default, nothing is capitalized. German capitalizes<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>in learning material, general orthographic capitalization rules should be used. In other screen readers, capitalization can be turned on or off for German<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>shelved at some point without me being notified.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>things.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>very annoying in day-to-day use.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>fixed the issues I was having.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>right corner of the screen. But again, not many of the previously reported problems were solved, except for the chipmunk effect.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>was solved, basically turning the display into a useless piece of space-waster.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>And so it went on<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>And new ones have been introduced, too.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>always jumping to the left-most item, the newest message in the thread.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>constant change anyway, according to comments from sighted people, and although it is technically accessible, it is no longer really usable, because there<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>are so many layers and sometimes unpredictable focus jumps and interaction oddities.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>calendaring from my iOS devices in the future. There, I have full control over things in a hassle-free manner.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>days before Christmas 2013.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>triggers didn’t fire, and even setting them up fresh didn’t help.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Here comes the meat<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>the attention any more that it would need to as an integrated part of the operating system.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>to left arrow to get to the links. Same with headings. For me, that is a real slow-down.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>app in most cases.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Mac than I am on Windows.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>this would add even more cumbersome to the situation.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Granted, a desktop screen displays far more information than could possibly fit on a TrackPad without being useless millimeter touch targets, but still<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>per year.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>impression, and feels unfinished, or done by someone who is not a braille reader and doesn’t really know the braille reader’s needs.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>result in unpredictable results because the system focus didn’t move where one would have expected it to. And again, VoiceOver’s horizontally centered<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>for example the number of the current page. NVDA, but probably others, too, have multilingual document support in Word. I immediately hear which spell<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>checking is being used in a particular paragraph or even sentence.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>there is no heading navigation, no table semantic output, and more that accessible PDFs support.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Conclusion<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>in your language is highly commendable, too! I will definitely miss the ability to configure my system alone, without sighted assistance, should I need<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>and hopefully also fixing braille problems as discussed by Jonathan Mosen in <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>this great blog post.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>again, is only my personal opinion.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>So there you have it. This is why I am going to be using a Lenovo notebook with <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>NVDA<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>business decisions placing less emphasis on it. Screen readers on Windows are being made by independent companies or organizations with their own business<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p></div></body></html>