[macvoiceover] Re: Airport, Big Disks, Video...

No, System Access is Windows only. Although not as hard as it would have been a decade ago, writing a cross platform screen reader is, in theory at least, possible but very difficult. As the OS vendors move to an Accessibility API method of sending information to a screen reader they make the idea of a cross platform screen reader increasingly possible.
Unfortunately, though, Apple, Microsoft and Sun/gnome have three separate and incompatible API so a multi-platform screen would need to include an API translation layer.
The folks at IBM created another API altogether. They call it iAccessible2 and it's designed to be a cross platform way to communicate between application and AT. This one is based on the old Microsoft MSAA API which is used in a lot of programs out there already. The iAccessible2 API works very well on Windows and is why Firefox has become so good with JAWS. As far as I know, no one built a compatibility box for Macintosh yet. If I remember correctly, someone has it running with orca on GNU/Linux systems but this could be rumor.
The closest thing we had to a universal accessibility API was the Java Accessibility API. This gave Java Swing controls automatic accessibility (well, mostly) but required the Java Accessibility Bridge to sit between the Java VM and the AT and that extra layer caused all sorts of potential pitfalls. The reason Window-Eyes is now the best in Java applications is that their accessibility solution skips the bridge and gets its data directly from the VM using a very clever technique.
I think that a lot of the incompatibilities will start to fade away now that large, mature companies (Apple, Microsoft, Sun) are taking responsibility for universal access rather than the AT companies who need to compete on the new and unique features and, to some extent, cause superfluous reinvention just to claim a difference and primacy in one area or another. Apple, MS and Sun need accessibility for Section 508, Section 255, ADA and the United Nations Convention on Human Rights and People With Disabilities and don't exactly want to put their futures into the hands of a small (on their standards) company who competes on an entirely different plane. 

Rambling again, where did I leave my coffee mug anyway?

Happy Hacking,
cdh
PS: I see a lot of people sign their emails with "HDH" before their name. What does it stand for? 
On Aug 2, 2009, at 2:09 PM, Russell Solowoniuk wrote:


Hey Chris,

System Access doesn't work with a Mac though, right?

Thanks,

Russell

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Chris Hofstader" <cdh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, August 02, 2009 5:06 AM
To: <macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [macvoiceover] Airport, Big Disks, Video...


Hi Donna,
Most of the movies I "watch" is actually just listening to the DVS collection on the Serotek site (it makes membership in their online service worth the price even if you don't use any other of its features). We own a handful of DVD that we rarely look at and we have "Slum Dog Millionaire" that we bought from iTunes. Thus, my knowledge about video is very slim.
I do not know if any of the Airport models handle video and, recently, I couldn't figure out how to get iTunes to use my Airport for audio on movies (someone on this list told me that I needed to update my firmware which sounded like a simple process but I haven't gotten to it yet). I do know of a few other music bridge devices that support iTunes that advertise support for video but I have no hands on experience with any of them.
So, my babbling turned the simple phrase, "I don't know" into all of the above nonsense. I need more coffee. 

Happy Hacking,
cdh







On Aug 2, 2009, at 5:47 AM, Donna Goodin wrote:


Hi Chris,
Is there any reason that the process you describe below wouldn't also work for movies? My husband and I have been trying to do something like this with our movies collection, and I'm wondering if this would be a sloution. 
Thanks,
Donna
On Jul 30, 2009, at 11:00 AM, Chris Hofstader wrote:


1. Go to a Best Buy store or newegg.com.
2. Find a really huge hard disk that supports either USB 2 or Firewire 800. This should cost about $150 if you go to the two terrabyte size. 3. Make a partition for your music collection on the disk after you get home or it arrives from UPS. 
4.  Move all of your songs to the big disk.
5. Follow the instructions on the Apple site for moving a music library within iTunes (the iTunes notion of a "library" is actually a set of XML files that tell iTunes where to find the actual music but there is a very specific order, detailed on the web site, one must follow to make sure that iTunes finds your music. Fortunately, none of the steps can destroy your music files so mistakes, while frustrating, aren't terribly hazardous. 6. Assuming you have a wireless home network, set both computers to look for and present shared libraries. This will let you have the big external drive on one Mac and it can be seen by everything on your network, including, of course, an iPhone. 7. Take your entire CD collection and re-rip all of it into either Apple Lossless or FLAC formats. 8. Go to audio Nexus (www.audionexus.com) and pick out a killer new stereo that need only include an amplifier and speakers. 9. Buy an Apple Airport Express, set it up and run the RCA cables into your new amplifier. 10. Tell iTunes that you want to play through your Airport Express instead of the computer's speakers. 
11.  Enjoy the best sounding music you've ever had in your home.

Happy Hacking,
cdh







On Jul 31, 2009, at 3:41 AM, Steve Hurd wrote:
I had simlier issues when I tried to sync my iphone. I also have another question. When I try to synk my music it said the library on my iphone will be replaced by the library on my macbook. There are no songs on my new macbook so if it replaced it iot would replace it with nothing. My substantial question therefore is how do I copy or sync the music on my iphone and move the songs to my computer? Do I use the import library function? 
Thanks,
Steve

On 30/07/2009, at 5:23 AM, Chris Hofstader wrote:


Hi,
I do not know if this is an iPhone, an iPhone/VO, an iMac or an iMac/VO problem. Last night, for the first time, I synchronized my iPhone with our iMac 24. I selected not to look at ring tones but did elect to change the library with which the iPhone was to sync with.
In the iPhone settings dialogue in iTunes, I changed a few things (almost all in the Music tab) and let the process start. After a while I would get an error that a program that I think is called Mobile Services Helper (or something very similar) had exited unexpectedly, "Ignore, Send to Apple, Restart," which reminded me an awful lot of "abort, retry, ignore" back in the DOS days.
I then went to the software update menu item in iTunes (after a few restarts) and found that I had not updated iTunes, Safari and a handful of things I didn't care much about. I let the installation procede and the Mac, as expected, restarted.
I reattached the iPhone and iTunes, as expected, came up. A standard sync resulted in the same process crashing. Then (after a few more reboots), I started eliminating options to isolate the problem. In iTunes, when things seemed hung, I saw in the LCD space that it was synchronizing Contacts. I unchecked contacts from the sync list and everything started to acted as I would have expected and a ton of music moved onto my phone but the contacts on my phone did not populate the empty Address Book on the iMac.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I'm not important or useful enough to sign up for MobileMe as its cost outstrips the usefulness of near immediate synchronization. 

Happy Hacking,
cdh


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