[macvoiceover] Re: main menu comments about mac and bookshare

I think we should all write to darel and let him know what the issues are. 
I have to say though that by and large, bookshare is aimed at the windows 
crowd.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jude DaShiell" <jdashiel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 8:46 PM
Subject: [macvoiceover] Re: main menu comments about mac and bookshare


Those commentators are more commentators than experts.  Reality is built
on perception.  When two or more people get to a common perception then
they get to a common reality.  The best thing to try to do is for those of
us on other blindness-connected lists to put a little block in our
.signaturerc files promoting the screenless switchers podcast.



On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, 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."
>
>
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