‘Mac OS X’ Archives

In a new editorial, John Panarese offers a follow up to his original piece exploring the trials and triumphs of switching from Windows to Mac OS X. He revisits the state of Apple accessibility five years on, and covers the ways in which things have changed for visually impaired Mac and iOS users.

In this episode of the Mac-cessibility ROund Table Podcast, our knights discuss the newly unveiled iPad II, the new publicly available details on Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X 10.7 Lion release, the new MacBook Pros, and more. Notes: Darcy’s pick – TextExpander M.J.’s picks – BopIt and PlainText Josh’s pick – Magic Trackpad Cara’s pick [...]

In a new editorial, we take a look at the width and breadth of Apple’s commitment to accessibility over the last ten years, and try to dispel some of the myths, rumors, and misconceptions which persist in the visually impaired community about Apple and its products.

This is just a quick notice that we have received word that Apple’s newly released iLife 11 suite of applications includes significant accessibility enhancements. These improvements will be found in iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand. At the time of writing, we have not had the opportunity to test these applications yet, and do not have a [...]

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 [...]