• 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!

Lioncourt.com is now offering a new Guides & Tutorials section on our site. We hope you will find this resource useful.

Apple enhanced the accessibility of many of the bundled applications with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Our first guide helps you get started using iCal with VoiceOver under Leopard. We’d like to thank Anne Robertson for providing "iCal with VoiceOver".

Mac-cessibility Quick Tips is a Lioncourt.com featured series of useful tips and tricks to help blind and visually impaired Mac users become more efficient with their Mac. Not all tips will be specific to VoiceOver, and most will be applicable to both Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard. So, on to this week’s tip!

The one thing that computer users of any platform do more than any other is launch applications. This week’s tip…or really group of tips…focuses on making the launching of applications faster and easier.

When perusing your Applications folder, (or any folder of files and documents), most users are accustomed to pressing Command-O to open them. This is not as convenient as it might be if your right hand is already over the arrow keys. A more convenient equivalent to pressing Command-O is Command-Down Arrow. This will launch the currently selected application or open the currently selected file.

But what about all those lovely application icons you ahve on your Dock? Wouldn’t it be nice to arrange those in any order you like? Well, you can. When on the Dock, move focus to the application who’s icon you wish to move and use Option-Left Arrow or Option-Right Arrow to move it one place over in the respective direction. But if that’s not enough…

In Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, you can now type the first few letters of an Application’s name while you are on the Dock, and focus will automatically jump to that application. Just hit Return or Space to open it.

Until next time!

Leopard may be out in the wild, but Apple keeps access improvements coming. On Monday, Apple released iTunes 7.5, which includes two major improvements to access with VoiceOver. Smart Playlists and the iPod settings display are now fully supported with Apple’s built-in screen reading software. Once again, this demonstrates Apple’s commitment to improving access to its products for the blind and visually impaired. Thank you, Apple!