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<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>
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