“Question: If you’re blind and you use OSX for work or education and you’re not an audio engineer please contact us.”
Lets preface by saying that we asked this question back in August 2011. To this day (its now January 2012) we haven’t heard from anyone who had any real answers/ was able to understand the question. So its pretty safe to conclude that the only blind users of OSX who do any real work are audio engineers.
At this point we’re not interested in what the rest of the OSX/ VoiceOver users are doing and what they’ve got there Macs for.
Original show notes:
Access Wizard and kevin Chao talk about their experiences with the Mac. What they can and what they can’t do. Going over the list of VoiceOver shortcomings and quirks as well as accessibility issues of various applications.
Ivan (aka Access Wizard). Audio engineer. Has been happily using his Macs since the mid 90s. currently owns half a dozen macs. Is able to use Voiceover with Pro Tools. Would like to see improvements to accessibility of Pro Tools and 3rd party plugins, would like to see glaring accessibility bugs and issues with Voiceover ironed out. However represents a fraction of Voiceover users who are able to work on the Mac.
kevin chao. Student. QA, alpha/beta tester. First experienced the Mac ages ago. As a sighted user. Many years later after losing his eyesight got his first iPhone. Found its accessibility very impressive. Naturally assumed that the mac can do even more. Was in for a disappointment.
That’s our story. If you are blind and you do any work on your Mac that isn’t audio then please get in touch with us. For clarification work does not involve posting in mailing lists all day long, chatting to friends on Skype, tweeting what you ate and playing music in Piano Pub.
instead by “work” we mean working in the office, coding, working in education and/or using Macs for education. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Oh and did we say “mac”? we’re not interested in those running Windows on Mac to do work on mac. Nope, VoiceOver users only please.