• Retweet: @vmwarefusion : Fusion 50% off today, one day only. Details: http://is.gd/9Gqi Coupon code "CyberMondayDeal" # 2008/12/01
• It's Thanksgiving Day in the United States. We're thankful for Apple's commitment to accessibility in their products. # 2008/11/27
• We've added social bookmarking and "Send this to a Friend" to the Mac-cessibility Site as a trial. Let us know what you think. # 2008/11/27
• Apple released Safari 3.2.1 today. No known accessibility changes, but a good update to have nonetheless. Stability is the focus. # 2008/11/25
• News: Comparing Accessibility of the Big Three Operating System http://www.lioncourt.com/?p=247 # 2008/11/21

Mac-cessibility Quick Tips is a weekly feature of Lioncourt.com where we provide brief tips and tricks for getting more out of your Mac experience. Not all the tips will be specific to VoiceOver, and most will apply to both Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Would you like your Mac to automatically read messages from your iChat buddies as they come in? In Leopard, you can have the OS’s system voice do just that. Here’s how:

1. In iChat, open the preferences with Command-Comma, or by choosing it from the application menu.
2. Interact with the toolbar and select the "Alerts" category.
3. From the "Event" pop-up button, choose the "Message Received" option.
4. Now check the checkbox for "Announce when Event Occurs"
5. Close the Preferences window.

Note that this will have the system voice read you the messages as they come in, not VoiceOver, so you may want to adjust the voice settings for this voice. To do so, choose the "Speech" section in System Preferences, and navigate to the "Text-to-Speech" tab.

Happy chatting!