As a new person to the MAC, I like the accessibility features out of the box, but in general find it difficult to get basic information on how to do a lot with it. Your comments on Bookshare ring home with me since I've just been struggling with this. I have not made the unpack utility work successfully. I'm not sure what I'll do with a book after it's unpacked.
I'm trying to learn as much as I can about the MAC from the MAC without falling back to my PC. But I'm finding that rather difficult to do. I VERY MUCH WANT VoiceOver to appeal to a market beyond just techie folks, so I'm open to suggestions here.
Thanks. Dave On Feb 27, 2008, at 12:13 AM, Cheryl Homiak wrote:
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."
