[macvoiceover] main menu comments about mac and bookshare

Unfortunately I'm listening to this now instead of live. I was really 
disappointed to hear  comments about the mac.
"Your choices are kind of limited right now. I know there's a kind of built-in 
screen reader type thing in the mac ..."
"Voiceover."
"voiceover, which should sort of work with bookshare books in the browser?" 
(emhasis was on "sort of" and the comment sort of ended in a question mark).
Mention was made of Kafkas daytime not being up.
Mention was made of later releasing a free daisy payer for mac; mention was 
made of listening in your browser or notepad (of course there isn't notepad on 
the mac). One of the commentators did try to stress that these books could 
easily be turned into html, and while they didn't mention it, of course it's 
quite easy in text edit to turn them into plaintext if you desire.
No mention was made of the fact that these books can easily be turned into 
audio with text to audio or visiovoice or cspeech (if you have it). I felt that 
the impression was left that the mac was somehow not a very viable option 
because you couldn't read bookshare books as daisy on the mac. as Daisy; of 
course bookshare's version of Daisy isn't audio and is still the 2002 standard. 
Maybe I'm overreacting, but I didn't feel the mac was adequately addressed when 
answering the question. The tone of voice of one of the two just came across to 
me as rather derrogatory of the Mac and voiceover, though I know what you hear 
in tone of voice can be subjective. to be fair, nothing was said about using 
something like Text aloud in windows either so apparently they weren't even 
thinking of using any kind of text to audio. Oh, I also didn't think of 
including dtbmaker though you do need to have a working katieplayer for that.

I will also say, though it doesn't really relate to voiceover, that the picture 
of bookshare painted was extremely positive. I do use bookshare and have gotten 
many very well-done books from it; I've also gotten many that were rated 
excellent that had page after page of unreadable material. So my point here is 
that the presentation was a bit slanted in regard to other things besides the 
Mac.
Of course I know the reasons why the Mac and voiceover are often portrayed as 
soubtful or suspect options for blind people and there's only so much you can 
do to change people's oppinions, but it still seems too bad to me that people 
addressing a large audioence re: accessbility matters can imply by voice tone 
and incomplete information that voiceover is a poor substitute for a 
screenreader. I do realize a lot of this is ignorance on the part of people who 
have not really used this system at all, but it's still too bad.


Cheryl

"Where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also."

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