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VMWare Releases Fusion 2.0 for Mac with Accessibility

16 September, 2008 @ 12:19 pm by Lioncourt

Today, VMWare released version 2.0 of VMWare Fusion, its award winning desktop virtualization software for Macintosh. Fusion allows users to run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X. The new version includes over one-hundred new features, including enhancements to stability and performance.

Despite the accessibility issues in early beta versions, which we reported on earlier, VMWare has delivered a fantastic product once again with full support for VoiceOver on the Mac. Indeed, the accessibility support in VMWare Fusion 2.0 is at least as good as in previous version, and it’s a free upgrade for all existing VMWare Fusion 1.X users.

The VMWare developers have done a great job of supporting accessibility in their product. We commend them on their efforts once again, and congratulate them for being the most accessible virtualization solution on the Macintosh platform.

VMWare Fusion is available in our Mac-cessibility Shop. To read more about the new features in VMWare Fusion 2.0 click here.

Posted in Apple Inc., Mac OS X, Third-Party Products, VoiceOver | 3 Comments »

3 Responses to “VMWare Releases Fusion 2.0 for Mac with Accessibility”

  1. mjanusauskas reflected:

    I would be interested to know if the recently updated Virtual Box free software from Sun is accessible with VoiceOver.

    September 16th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
  2. Jake said:

    The Virtualbox GUI is still not accessible in version 2.0, due to SUN using QT to power their GUI. Note though that all of VirtualBox’s functions can be accessed via its command-line tools. So if you want to use Virtualbox you can, but you have to learn how to use the VBoxManage utility.
    On the note of Fusion… While I agree that the accessibility is much, much better than in the beta versions there are still a few issues. They are minor issues to be sure, but they still exist. The biggest one I’ve found is that certain table contents are not exposed to VO, resulting in the familiar symptom of table items simply being called “unknown.” Another issue I’ve found is that when there’s an image in the table it’s not tagged and sometimes results in hereing “NSImage” followed by the various image properties. You can still tell what the item is by listening to this, but it’s just not quite as polished in accessibility as version 1.x was. Given VMWare’s track record of accessibility support though I expect we’ll see these minor issues cleared up soon.

    September 18th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
  3. knackslash articulated:

    Hello!

    First of all, as a blind, originally 100% MS-DOS / Windows user who never imagined that the Mac could ever become accessible one day, I’d like to thank all of those who regularly contribute to your site and keep on expanding people’s potential in using VoiceOver! Even more so as you in America and other English-speaking countries seem to be miles ahead of what we are currently in France. At my local Apple store, for example, they just didn’t know anything about Mac OS X’s built-in Universal Access features, so I had to demonstrate them how to turn on VoiceOver and the system zoom in order to show them that it might not be such a silly idea for a blind guy to become an Apple customer…!

    However, in order for me to make the switch almost perfect and say good bye to my PC once for all, perhaps with VMware, Windows and/or Jaws for a transitional phase, I still got 3 questions for the moment, and I would be very grateful if you could help me get the best out of my Mac & the few Windows programs I still need from time to time as a professional translator.

    To be more specific, I’m currently working both on a rapidly aging Dell notebook on Windows XP SP3 and Jaws 9 – “desperately” waiting for Jaws 10 to be released in my country, which may still take several months- and a 24-inch iMac on a French version of Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.6) with VoiceOver and the system zoom turned on, using Alex for English contents and Assistiveware’s Infovox iVox voices for French, German and Spanish texts, since Alex is only available in American English for now. Two months ago, I also bought Nippon Telesoft’s Seika 40 Braille display, which actually works greater on the Mac than on the Dell notebook. Though I’m quite happy with VoiceOver to read texts and accessible, well-structured pages like this one, record / work on audio files, start working on Garage Band after I read the great tutorial on this site, manage a fast-growing, multi-format media library much better than in Winamp, etc., I still can’t give up my PC once for all, since VoiceOver is still unable to read Flash contents, to render complex web sites quickly enough or to handle language recognition on web sites, while Assistiveware’s voices seem to need so many resources that VoiceOver would regularly lose track with the keyboard focus and get me to waste some time returning where I originally intended to go. Which makes it a bit hard and tricky to use in a multinational professional environment like mine, where time is money.

    Therefore, I’m planning to run Windows XP or Vista on my iMac, depending on which system is supposed to be more reliable and compatible with AT used in combination with Firefox / Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice and some CD-ROM dictionaries…
    So, here are my questions.

    1. What’s the basic difference between VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop and maybe some other virtualisation software?
    2. Since I will definitely need a screen reader to get access to Windows contents, do I absolutely have to install Jaws or does VoiceOver fully support the Windows interface generated through VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, allowing me, for instance, to use Microsoft Word for Windows with usual VO commands as I would in Nisus Writer Pro?
    3. Should I need to have Jaws installed on my Mac, could you tell me if you have ever had any specific experience with an iMac? Otherwise, should I rather sell both PC and iMac and buy a brand-new MacPro, MacBook or MacBook Pro instead, as so many people use to say that Windows runs better on these machines, which may also be true for the kind of graphic card support that is so critical to AT in general, and Jaws in particular, or even consider installing a Linux distribution like Fedora, since Linux is also said to come with some screen-reading features and Braille display drivers?

    Anyway, just in case these details were of any importance, the basic / graphic card specs of my iMac are as follows:

    Model ID: iMac 6.1;
    Processor / memory: Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.16 GHz, with 2.5 GB of RAM;
    SMC version: 1.10f3;
    Graphic card: NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT;
    Built-in 24-inch LCD monitor with Core Image hardware acceleration;
    Screen resolution: 1920 x 1200;
    Mirror: off.

    Thanks in advance for your answers, sorry for leaving such a long comment (but I thought it might be important to be as specific as possible), and good luck for the future of the Mac-cessibility site!
    Best regards.
    Knackslash

    April 10th, 2009 at 1:25 pm

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