‘Mac OS X’ Archives

Despite declaring their intention to implement accessibility in a future version of their Flash player, Adobe Systems continues to display a seeming disregard for accessibility of their products. Indeed, things just keep getting worse. Last week, Adobe released version 10.1 of their Flash player plugin for both the Mac and Windows operating systems, which included [...]

Today, amidst hardware updates to its Mac Mini line of desktops and the pre-order sales of iPhone 4, Apple let Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4 out into the wild. Listed changes include: resolve an issue that causes the keyboard or trackpad to become unresponsive resolve an issue that may prevent some Adobe Creative Suite [...]

Tonight, Apple released Safari version 5.0. Our initial impressions are of enormous speed gains where regards the browser’s performance when using Safari 5 with VoiceOver. The latest version of Apple’s popular web browser features the new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction, a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4, and [...]

Today, Apple will be taking the wraps off of new products and services at its annual World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco, California, if history is any indication. Also historically, Apple’s advancements in accessibility tend to be announced during WWDC, though not always necessarily during Steve Jobs’s keynote presentation. For example, last year brought [...]

On Monday, 07/June, Steve Jobs will take the stage at APple’s annual World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. The Screenless Switchers, ATMaine.com, and Mac-cessibility are joining forces to bring you live discussion of the event as it happens. You can tune in at approximately 12:30 PM EDT, (9:30 AM PDT), at this link. Additionally, [...]

MRRSoftware’s popular Twitter client for Mac OS X, Syrinx, has been updated to version 2.4, and includes a number of new features in addition to some VoiceOver enhancements and fixes. VoiceOver support enhancements include a significantly improved timeline display. Problems with reviewing tweets word-by-word with VoiceOver, the double reading of tweets, and more have been [...]

Last week, Google released Chrome for Mac, its web browser product. Despite being built on the open source WebKit HTML rendering engine, which itself provides accessibility support for the Mac OS X platform with VoiceOver, Google’s final release provides no accessibility to web content whatsoever. Indeed, apart from menus and a handful of standard controls, [...]

The Lighthouse of San Francisco is hosting a technology seminar entitled "Apple Products and Accessibility" on 11/June/2010 from 1:00PM – 3:00PM PDT. From the announcement: Join us to hear Apple discuss the latest universal access features on its iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and OS X VoiceOver! Apple’s inclusion of assistive technology as an out-of-the-box feature [...]

Today, Apple posted its thoughts on Adobe Flash, and the reasons why it has not been included on the company’s line of mobile de ices, such as the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. The piece is well reasoned and clearly presented, although it is interesting that the biggest reason to VoiceOver users not wanting Flash [...]

On 29/April/2005, Apple Inc. released Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, the first commercial operating system with a built-in screen reader: VoiceOver. A lot has changed since the introduction of VoiceOver. Here are some highlights: The creation of the Mac Visionaries community of visually impaired Mac users The birth of the Screenless Switchers podcast The introduction [...]

Today, Panic Software released version 4.0 of their popular Transmit FTP client. Transmit v3.X has been a longstanding favorite among VoiceOver users, given its high level of accessibility. Version 4.0 offers better accessibility, most notably in the identification of controls via labels and help tags. New features include the ability to mount servers in the [...]

Today, Apple released iTunes version 9.1.1. The release notes for the latest version of the popular media management and playback software is dominated by fixes for its compatibility with VoiceOver, among other enhancements. The release notes read: Addresses several stability issues with VoiceOver Addresses a usability issue with VoiceOver and Genius Mixes Addresses issues with [...]