Today, Apple release Ma OS X 10.5.3, which contains a significant number of enhancements and fixes for the operating system, including VoiceOver. Some changes in VoiceOver include:

• Braille Update 1.0 which enables GW Micro, HandyTech, HIMS, Nippon, and Papenmeier Refreshable Braille displays.
• Addresses an issue with Braille dot 7 and 8 underlining.
• Fixes an issue in which HTML page anchors may be ignored by the VoiceOver cursor.
• Fixes an issue that prevented Hot Spots from being used in text areas.
• Resolves an issue with spell checking in which VoiceOver may only announce the first misspelled word if there are multiple words spelled incorrectly.

We’ve also noticed that Voiceover no longer crashed in the "Get Info" dialog for folders and volumes when navigating to the "Sharing and Permissions" section.

There may be other improvements as well. We’ll keep you up to date if we find them. You can let us know as well.

As always, you can update to the latest version of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard through "Apple Menu->Software Update".

Mac-cessibility Quick Tips is a 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 or Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Now for this week’s tip!

Safari’s Bookmarks Bar places a row of buttons beneath the Safari toolbar for quick access to your most important or frequented bookmarks. You can have fast access to the sites on your bookmarks bar by holding down the Command key and pressing one of the number keys across the top of your keyboard. Command-1 opens the first bookmark, Command 2 opens the second, and so on. This is a fast way to get to your favorite web sites.

If the bookmarks bar is hidden, you can choose to have it displayed from the "View" menu, or by pressing Command-Shift-B.

Until next time!

Most VoiceOver users are well aware of the wildly inaccurate and blatantly bias review of VoiceOver published by the American Foundation for the Blind back in 2005. There have also been allegations from multiple and separate sources that representatives of the AFB have commented that they would attempt to undermine VoiceOver, viewing it as a threat to commercial Windows screen reading applications.

In the May 2008 issue of Access World, an online magazine published by the AFB, they once again play down the capabilities of VoiceOver. The comments come in a piece entitled "From Vinyl to Digital: My First Experiences with Electronic Audio Players" by Darren Burton. To his credit, Mr. Burton’s comments are not nearly as outlandish as those put forward by Jay Leventhal, but it is important to call attention to a couple of the most inaccurate.

The most notable of the misstatements in this piece is also the most transparent. Mr. Burton writes that VoiceOver will give access to "some, but not all" of the applications on the Mac. While perfectly true, the same statement holds true for any screen reader for any platform. Not every piece of software will be wholly accessible with any screen access solution. This statement, coupled with his emphasis that VoiceOver does not provide as complete access as Windows screen readers serves no purpose but to undermine how powerful Voiceover is in reality without providing any real evidence.

The above is compounded by the fact that Mr. Burton says that he could not load songs onto his iPods with iTunes and VoiceOver, excepting the iPod Shuffle. This seems to indicate that he did not take the time to learn VoiceOver and its full functionality, as there are several ways of loading tracks onto your iPod through iTunes and all of them are perfectly accessible with VoiceOver. These include VoiceOver’s drag-and-drop functions, as well as iTunes myriad of methods for synching music in your library to your iPods.

If Mr. Burton did not take the time to learn VoiceOver, he is clearly in no position to claim that it is less capable than the Windows screen readers he is familiar with.

We encourage those of you who feel strongly about insuring that Access World publishes the facts about VoiceOver and accessibility on the Mac, to contact Access World.

Mac-cessibility Quick Tips is a 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 or Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Now for this week’s tip!

In Mail, you can quickly jump to the top or bottom of the mailboxes table with Option-Up Arrow or Option-Down Arrow. This is a great way to quickly get to the mailbox or RSS feed you wish to peruse, particularly if you have a large number of folders, mailboxes, and feeds to organize your mail.

Until next time!