[bcab] Re: Accessibility of the Mac Minnie for office, web and development.

I own one of the first gen Mac Minis at home that were G4 based.  The
form factor is very nice and is a nearly silent machine except if it has
a lot to do.  The newer Mac Minis are both more powerful and have four
USB ports to my two and is generally a much better machine, though I
think Apple may abandon this line of machine shortly.  That is a shame
because I really like the Mac Mini, and it is fantastic if you don't
give it too much to do. 

With the introduction of Leopard the VoiceOver utility has made
significant steps to being a useful screen reader.  The iTunes software
is now pretty accessible and mac Mail is too.  

I believe it is still the case that Microsoft Office won't go, I don't
have 2008 to try but 2004 did not work.  There are however a large
variety of third party word processors some of which may be more
VoiceOver friendly than Word.  I think a similar mantra may go for your
text editor for development purposes.  Underneath the pretty UI of
course is Darwin Unix so you may be able to use some command line tools
for Unix as well which you could access via Terminal (I haven't tried
VoiceOver with Terminal though).

I still think that VoiceOver is not yet comparable with any of the
commercial Windows screen reader offerings, applicatino specific support
is missing for example, but it is going albeit slowly in the right
direction.  A few evangelists out there claim that they can do
everything they want on a Mac.

If you can afford to dabble then the Mac Mini is a good way to do it.
VoiceOver however needs some undivided attention before you can really
exploit it to do some of the tasks you want.

Regards.

Tristram Llewellyn
tristram.llewellyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Technical Support
Sight and Sound Technology
 
-----Original Message-----
From: bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Nick.Adamson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 1:20 PM
To: bcab@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx;
program-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bcab] Accessibility of the Mac Minnie for office, web and
development.

Hi All.

I'm sure this has been spoken about so many times but I've not been
interested before.

One of the guys at work has been talking about his mac and I'm pretty
impressed.

I'm thinking about one for home and I'm wondering about accessibility.
I know there's Voice Over which is the built in screen reader. How good
is this, how does it compare to the plethora of windows screen readers.

Mostly I'd want to do email, office type applications, read books which
are plain text or html, brows the web, maybe a bit of IM.

I'd also want to develop PHP on it and some C++. what are the
development environments like, how accessible are they?

Any information gratefully received.
Cheers.
Nick.



Nick Adamson
Software Engineer
General Dynamics United Kingdom Limited

Email: nick.adamson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tel: 01495 236467
http://www.generaldynamics.uk.com

General Dynamics United Kingdom Limited
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Units 3 & 4,
Oakdale Business Park,
Oakdale,
South Wales,
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