"[Apple] has traditionally been a fairly accessibility-aware company"
That depends a lot on how you define 'fairly'.
I worked as the lead developer for one of the two disability-solution companies who specialised in Macintosh-specific products during the 90s. I developed a single switch software mouse replacement that would allow Mac users to completely control their Macs - even allow quadraplegics do serious artwork and phototouch ups. I spent a lot of time working with Apple's Disability group and our products were in the running to provide touch screen facilities for the PenMac (I was one of the few people to actually SEE a PenMac).
The thing we got out of it was that Apple was way more about looking like it cared than actually doing anymore more than the minimal needed. To our surprise (an as Mac fanatics - our dismay) Microsoft was far more open to doing things to help users with disabilities.
Then Jobs took over and essentially *shut down* their Disability Group. It's only been recently that there's been a reemergence of interest in serious disability assistance.
The real kicker was when a group of developers from a bunch of companies including myself developed a protocol for Macs to allow any developer to add access awareness to their apps. Apple presented it at WWDC... made posters with pictures of the people it would help... did the soundbites... and then promptly ignored it.
Meanwhile, Microsoft took up the protocol, improved it and integrated it into .Net making it trivial for any .Net developer to add access aware support.
Since then, the company I worked for bought the competition and then faced with little or no support from Apple - switched to Windows.
So yeah - define 'fairly'... I think a better word would be 'barely'...
PS: Lest you think this is sour grapes, I left the biz long before it collapsed. None of that affected me. I just regret how it affected the people with disability who wanted to use Macs.
I have a grandmother who wants to use computers, but she's really slow at pecking on the keyboard (which makes her lose productivity) and it's real hard for her to see.
Vista has Speech Recognition and it really helps her. She just talks, and words appear on the screen, just for her. She got used to it real quick. Unlike that famous YouTube video of Speech Recognition in Vista going haywire, Speech Recognition really does work, and does it real well.
It was also easy for me to find a way to fix the computer so it could improve how she can see the screen. There's a Magnifying window you can drag around, tips for brighter text contrast, and other neat stuff.
Following the commercial success (and technical disappointment) of the original Wildfire -- which featured a miserly 528MHz CPU and QVGA display -- HTC has returned with the Wildfire S.
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"[Apple] has traditionally been a fairly accessibility-aware company"
That depends a lot on how you define 'fairly'.
I worked as the lead developer for one of the two disability-solution companies who specialised in Macintosh-specific products during the 90s. I developed a single switch software mouse replacement that would allow Mac users to completely control their Macs - even allow quadraplegics do serious artwork and phototouch ups. I spent a lot of time working with Apple's Disability group and our products were in the running to provide touch screen facilities for the PenMac (I was one of the few people to actually SEE a PenMac).
The thing we got out of it was that Apple was way more about looking like it cared than actually doing anymore more than the minimal needed. To our surprise (an as Mac fanatics - our dismay) Microsoft was far more open to doing things to help users with disabilities.
Then Jobs took over and essentially *shut down* their Disability Group. It's only been recently that there's been a reemergence of interest in serious disability assistance.
The real kicker was when a group of developers from a bunch of companies including myself developed a protocol for Macs to allow any developer to add access awareness to their apps. Apple presented it at WWDC... made posters with pictures of the people it would help... did the soundbites... and then promptly ignored it.
Meanwhile, Microsoft took up the protocol, improved it and integrated it into .Net making it trivial for any .Net developer to add access aware support.
Since then, the company I worked for bought the competition and then faced with little or no support from Apple - switched to Windows.
So yeah - define 'fairly'... I think a better word would be 'barely'...
PS: Lest you think this is sour grapes, I left the biz long before it collapsed. None of that affected me. I just regret how it affected the people with disability who wanted to use Macs.
I really agree with you on that one.
I have a grandmother who wants to use computers, but she's really slow at pecking on the keyboard (which makes her lose productivity) and it's real hard for her to see.
Vista has Speech Recognition and it really helps her. She just talks, and words appear on the screen, just for her. She got used to it real quick. Unlike that famous YouTube video of Speech Recognition in Vista going haywire, Speech Recognition really does work, and does it real well.
It was also easy for me to find a way to fix the computer so it could improve how she can see the screen. There's a Magnifying window you can drag around, tips for brighter text contrast, and other neat stuff.
Best of all, it's easy to find in Vista, and it's really helped. Microsoft also has a site that shows how you can use their accessibility options. It's pretty good videos. http://www.microsoft.com/enable/demos/windowsvista/default.aspx
I don't know if it's available in OS X, but it was easy for me to find in Vista, and it's really helped.