Category: Geeks r Us
Hi,
Over the last few weeks of using an iPhone I've become more and more interested to hear about how well voice over works with the Mac?
Is access to software similar in accessibility as it is with voice over on the Phone? Better?
What sorts of productivity packages work well such as word processing, accounting, etc.
I realize a lot of you use the Mac for sound editing. but I am looking for other types of aplications besides audio or video.
Here is the question I am sure will get a lot of laughs and I really don't want to start a war but do you really feel in all honesty that you can be as productive on a mac in a work environment as you can with jaws or window eyes and a PC?
I'll be interested to hear what you all think.
i've been going more and more to my mac, applications are eally well done for the most part, only a very few haven't worked with voiceover. I'd suggest openOffice for documents, spreadsheets, the whole works. i believe i cold be as fast, if not faster on my mac now than i am on my windows computer
This site may have some info you'll find useful.
http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/applications.html
I'm curious about surfing the web with vo and mac. Do you find it fairly equal to using a screen reader on windows? Maybe more accessible? *smile*
I have the iPad, and I find some items vo reads better than my windows screen reader.
Sean thanks for bringing this up. It seems the blind users of the Mac are as alien to enterprise use as the sighted Mac user population. I'd really like to know about this: real productive apps for someone besides radio and audio people, or people with toys.
I did a few days of Mac studies (Mini Mac with Snowleopard and VoiceOver).
I had very high hopes but was very disappointed.
That being said, I think I came with a very Windows centric view and may not have understood the Mac way of doing things, and it may have affected my productivity.
I tried the numbers application for iWorks and had absolutely no luck with it.
I cannot read formulas in a cell, look at named regions, monitor certain cells for sums, get an overview of cells n a sheet and their values, all the non empty ones etc.
But Open Office might be better and I might need to give it more time, that is definitely the plan next time I get a chance.
But, based on the evidence of that week or so I have no desire to switch desktops or laptops, even if their phone apps are very cool.
That's good info, and perhaps not 'windowscentric' but productivity-centric.
I still wonder if the Trackpad could help with a lot of things, but the major problem with Apple products that I have had long before they ever entered the blinkosphere is that if you ask about productivity, whether it's Office now, or networking in 1996, they blame their lack of productivity to you having a Windows-centric viewpoint. Their thin mobile devices have a lot of promise, but I hope to see more from the productivity side.
Will be interesting to see what happens when you try Open Office.
Perhaps now that they're gaining such market share in the computing space, they'll have to address productivity for real.
I would reccommend Handy Tech North America's mac training. I don't know why, but with that training, there's not much I'm confused on.
Interesting comments from all. I have found that personally, I use iwork 09 for basic word processing although it is capable of more. Numbers, no luck, but I had trouble with other spreadsheets as well. From what I can gather on the mac visionaries google group there are folks who have gotten some good productivity milage out of it. The access methods are somewhat different than we may be used to in windows, some work better and some are honestly clumsy...
One of the issues that came up was with editing. The mac normaly behaves in such a way that the cursor is between letters not on the one to the right you wish to delete. This behavior was most disturbing to me and I never did get used to it. Voiceover can however be modified to exhibit more useful windows behaviors.
Cheers.
Well provided you can get 'er done and in a timely and effficient manner, that's all that matters. Don't know why their spreadsheet application would be failing but anyway.
The problem I've had over the last few years watching the Mac people is they're basically idealists: not task-oriented they're aim is telling everyone how wonderful it is. In the workplace, that just don't fly, though maybe on SSI it does. If the tool is working, and the work's getting done and on time and correctly, it's what you call 'accessible' I guess. But idealism never paid the bills, won't put shoes on my daughter's feet, and won't pay the taxes I owe at the end of the year to support people living on assistance buying devices the working stiffs can't afford.
Now, au contraire, if what you need to do can be done easily on the that's all the reason you need: iOS devices as cloud devices is a great example of this.
I imagine you all who do audio probably have found that to work well as Mac has superceded Windows in the Audio Production department for 25 years.
However, audio doesn't really pay the bills for most.
I suggest that you check out the podcasts at blind cool tech, hopefully you will find the answers to your questions and more info there
The podcasts are a great info and IMHO Apple oughta just up and pay that guy for services as a trainer and be done with it. However, it doesn't show word processing, spreadsheets, and other uses for which working people use their machines.
Anyone nows if voice over has a screen echo mode and or how well it works with Java based apps?
Podcast 13 is the one you want here, monkeypusher69 and LeoGuardian.