"Snow Leopard builds on our most successful operating system ever and we’re happy to get it to users earlier than expected," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. "For just $29, Leopard users get a smooth upgrade to the world’s most advanced operating system and the only system with built in Exchange support."

In Snow Leopard, Apple has refined 90 percent of the more than 1,000 projects that make up Mac OS X. Some of these refinements include a more responsive Finder, Mail that loads messages up to twice as fast, Time Machine with an up to 80 percent faster initial backup, a Dock with Expose integration, QuickTime X with a redesigned player that allows users to easily view, record, trim and share video, and a 64-bit version of Safari that is up to 50 percent faster and resistant to crashes caused by plug-ins. Snow Leopard is half the size of the previous version and frees up to 7GB of drive space once installed.

VoiceOver users will find a substantial upgrade to the Mac OS X’s built-in screen reading solution, as detailed on Apple’s Accessibility page for Snow Leopard. Among VoiceOver‘s new capabilities are VoiceOver‘s new gesture-based navigation with multi-touch trackpads, similar to the iPhone’s VoiceOver controls, as well as enhanced web browsing features. Details of other refinements and capabilities for a range of Mac OS X’s Universal Access features can be found there as well.

Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade to Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard users on August 28 at Apple’s retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers, and online pre-orders can be made via Apple’s online store starting today. The Snow Leopard single user license will be available for a suggested retail price of $29 (US) and the Snow Leopard Family Pack, a single household, five-user license, will be available for a suggested price of $49 (US). Additionally, the Mac Box Set includes Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 and will be available for a suggested price of $169 (US) and a Family Pack is available for a suggested price of $229 (US).

Users who bought a qualifying Mac after June 8th 2009 are eligible for the Mac Up-to-Date program, and can upgrade to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for $9.95 (US).

Apple Inc. announced today that iLife ’09 will begin shipping tomorrow, 27/January/2009. The suite of multimedia applications such as the popular iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and others was first announced at MacWOrld Expo earlier this month, and will come pre-installed on all new Macs. For those upgrading to the new iLife on your existing Mac, you can purchase the software for $79 USD for a single user, or $99 for the five user license family pack.

At this time, we have not become aware of any accessibility improvements in this addition of the suite, but given the dramatic improvements we saw earlier this month in Apple’s productivity suite iWork ’09, we are hopeful. We will of course report back as soon as possible.

Today, Apple announced updates to their iWork and iLife application suites. The new features are certainly impressive, and incremental, but we are uncertain at this time whether or not any accessibility enhancements are part of these updates.

Additionally, iWork.com became a public beta today. This suite of browser-based applications allows users to collaborate on iWork files over the Internet, and appears to be relatively accessible.

We will update further when we know more on the accessibility of these products.

Keith Reedy has provided two new entries to our Guides & Tutorials section. Learn how to use multiple tracks in "GarageBand with VoiceOver 2" or how to use special effects in "GarageBand with VoiceOver 3". If you haven’t already done so, start with general usage of GarageBand in "GarageBand with VoiceOver 1".

Thanks again to Keith Reedy for these guides.

Last week’s update to the iLife ’08 suite from Apple proved to be a boon for VoiceOver users. Garage Band the suite’s recording-studio software is now radically improved in the area of accessibility. Indeed, virtually all functions and areas of the program are usable with VoiceOver, according to reports from VoiceOver users. Given the high number of visually impaired musicians, this should prove to be very exciting news. Once again, Apple has demonstrated amazing commitment to accessibility. Thank you, Apple.

We contacted Apple Accessibility about the access issues with IWork and ILife ’08. The response was brief but encouraging. Apple points out the dramatic improvements in accessibility with the IWork ’08 suite in particular, but is aware of the problems and is working to improve access in these products. Garage Band accessibility, according to them, is comparable to that in the previous version. We will report more when we have it.