Archive for January, 2008

After a break for the holidays, we’re back with Mac-cessibility Quick Tips, a weekly feature of Lioncourt.com to provide brief tips and tricks to assist blind and visually impaired Mac users improve their Apple experience. Not all tips will be specific to VoiceOver, and most will work on either Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger [...]

Microsoft has altered the EULA (End User License Agreement) for the Home Basic and Home Premium varieties of its Windows Vista operating system. Previously, it was technically possible, but illegal, to run either version of Vista in a virtual machine with software such as VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop for Mac, much to the [...]

At MacWorld Expo, MacSpeech announced the release of MacSpeech Dictate, which is new voice recognition software for the Mac. In their press release, they talk about compatibility in this product with Apple accessibility standards, particularly VoiceOver.
This is a fantastic development, and we hope other developers will also take this kind of initiative.
MacSpeech Dictate [...]

We’ve just received word that Microsoft has acknowledge that Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 does not meet Mac accessibility standards as outlined by Apple. This is a real tragedy, given that Microsoft has had four years to work on this product, developed it with the Mac native XCode and Cocoa tools, and had all [...]

The Screenless Switchers Podcast have posted their latest episode. Darcy and Holly are joined by Josh de Lioncourt to discuss the announcements from Apple at Steve Jobs’s keynote address this morning, along with commentary on what these announcements mean for the blind and visually impaired community. They also touch on other topics, including [...]

Today, Apple released details on many new products. Here’s a brief rundown on what we know so far, and what it may or may not mean to blind or visually impaired users.

iTunes Movie Rentals — Apple released a new version of iTunes today with support for movie rentals. Movies will begin showing up [...]

Adium is a popular alternative to iChat, and supports multiple instant messaging protocols such as MSN, AIM, and Yahoo. Until now, the program has suffered from a variety of accessibility issues with VoiceOver, but that is all about to change.
This morning, we received a statement from Evan Schoenburg of the Adium development team. [...]

ProToolsPetition.org posted an update this morning from DigiDesign, developers of the ProTools audio engineering application for professional sound and recording engineers. In essence, DigiDesign is reaffirming their commitment to accessibility, and will be undertaking a two phase project to provide access to ProTools with VoiceOver. The first phase will take most of the [...]

A new version of the Mozzilla Firefox web browser extension Firevox has been released with full support for Apple’s TTS engine in Mac OS X. The update also includes some bug fixes for users of the Orca screen reader under Linux.
Unfortunately, installation of Firefox and Firevox is still quite difficult with VoiceOver, but once [...]

Wired.com published an interesting story today by Fred Vogelstein. It gives a "behind the scenes" look at the history of the iPhone’s development. This lengthy article focuses heavily on how the iPhone has and will continue to change the wireless communications industry, as well as describing the massive challenges, particularly technical, that APple [...]

Following an investigation by an EU commission, Apple has announced it will cut the price of music downloads in its UK iTunes store within six months. Currently, song downloads are more expensive on the UK version of the popular music download service than in the rest of Europe.
Apple blames the higher price on record [...]

Just a week before MacWorld Expo, Apple updated their online store with substantial updated configuration options for the Mac Pro and Xserve desktop computers.
The new Mac Pros boast of having two of the new Intel 45 nanometer Xeon quad-Core chips clocked at 3.2GHz, and a choice of high-end graphics cards from ATI or NVIDIA. [...]