Yes, I use a mac, watch, and iPhone. However, when are we going to stop overly praising Apple? They have 20 year old technology with Voice over, 40 year old supported languages, again, unable to be updated. well let me rephrase it. apple can and should, update voice over. however they want new shiny devices, not accessible products. Anyone who has the vision pro, if you try it once and find any use in it, I'll give my dead mother CPR to come back to life. All in all, how do we contact them and really ask for change/ Why do we not? What would make us use a disintegrating screen reader like voice over then the obvious, I don't wanna pay a 100 bucks a year plus the 3000 to get it up to speed? Why is it ok we're driving a fifties car when we have 2020 cars out? are we happy? If so, give me one great reason why, bad software, bugs, bad update cycles, no beta testers, bitching when you do and something messes up, is ok? I make no bones about whatever works is fine. windows? Awesome. Mac? Great. Linux? No issue. No one operating system is better then another. If we kiss up to any "leader", how does it make the others in the game feel? are they perfect? They shouldn't be. I don't claim to know everything, I don't want to until I have a valid reason to dislike something. I wish apple and other companies really got a shovelful of how we are treated. I don't mean petitions, I don't mean cheesy YT videos. I mean honest to goodness, sit down with a person from Apple Google, spectrum and let them have it. No swearing, just honest to goodness, frustration to get things changed. Anyone can call themselves "Joe" from Apple, or, Ellen from Microsoft. Until we see change in any form, we are as pathetic as we are presenting ourselves on a dynamic level. Let's get beyond the keyboard and out into the community. Whatever country you are in, whatever currency you have, use it to change your area, town, city, beyond.
Comments
A question.
@siobhan since you're in the US, what's stopping you flying to apples headquarters and trying to get in the door to talk to someone? It might be costly but you're clearly passionet about this so go for it!
@Brad
She is just shy of 3000 miles away. That would be quite a trip just to make a point.
I'm bad at measuring things so
I looked it up, 6 hours isn't so bad, you could get a hotel and stay the night.
Vision Pro
I agree with almost all of this but I can see some real utility in the Vision Pro. So many of us blind folks, myself included have a lot of trouble pointing a camera just the right way to get good OCR or AI. Iāve gotten a lot better but Iām still not great. As for the utter absurdity of merely getting a hotel and staying a night for a trip across the Atlantic Ocean ā¦ well, keep dreaming my friend.
Eh?
I'm confused, Siobhan lives in Florida as far as I know so she'd not have to fly over an ocian at all to get to the apple headquarters, it's in america right?
And even if she did, so what?
If you want something done, get it done yourself.
As for it being absurd, it's really not, I didn't say it wouldn't be expencive, it would be, but if you guys care so much, get off of your bums and pay for it to get your point across.
You're an optimist after allā¦
You're an optimist after all, Brad. How sweet.
In all seriousness... Airing frustrations is one of the functions of this site. The fact that there are no easy solutions to having these problems fixed only adds to our grievances. It would be lovely if popping into apple rectified everything. They are aware of the issues, they have been reported, they haven't been fixed. These are the facts. The reasons are up for debate.
well, i'm not really sure what can be done.
I assume this is just another venty post then? The thing is, these don't really go anywhere in the end.
Better to start again?
Would it be better for Apple to basically scrap VO and start again. Rather than keep trying to fix old software build from scratch. probably be cheaper. Lets face it people get their cars looked at each year. Depending on the MOT they may have to keep paying out to keep the car going. Eventually, it becomes less economic to keep fixing the car and just buy a new one. Maybe Apple should take that option.
oo, i like that.
A complete redo of Voiceover would honestly be awesome!
Perhaps they're kind of going to do that if they redo IOS 18, according to a post on here; it won't look anything like IOS 17.
Pointless post but
I noticed this... I have just about 7 full months of experience with voiceover on mac. I started my ios jurney in 2012 and over the years I honestly don't have much complaints for voiceover on ios *for my usecase*, but I definitely do for the mac VO version. Although for me, the fact that they added numeth code support for math equation on sonoma although it's criminally late compared to the ios counterpart shows me that they truely *want* to care. My best tip as for now is, especially if you have apple care, reach to the accessibility section for whatever device you own through that interface and have a human to human talk to the ... advisor they called there. This person, as an apple employee, will assure that he/she understands your feedback (if it's politely written and the impacts and concerns are voiced well) and escalate to the appropriate. Yes, voiceover on mac is indeed the most complicated screen reader I've ever used. The biggest problem of it is honestly just the web browsing and how apple suttlely change the web randerer or by an accident of a combination of safari, webkit, and voiceover update that broke things appart. Like Monaco editor for me. You must understand (I do now after this difficult leson) how updating can possibly broke things. Is it advisable to have such structure and a screen reader so tied to the os? No. But apple, is the only company, that has created a full fledged screen reader from the scratch without being at all in the accessibility industry at all. Google just copied with talkback and narrator on windows was a joke of a screen reader until... until windows 10, even 11 actually.
Voiceover is weird in this sence that it is both very customizable and not at all. Default keyboard shortcuts suck. But the trackpad is not just a decoration for once. You can virtually assign anything and everything. My wish is that one day they allow us to combine the modifiers, cmd ctrl shift option... But even now, but for the default without modifiers, we have
up down right left 1 finger, 2, and 3 fingers, with either cmd, option, ctrl, or shift. With the clicks that I forgot as their doc is not clear as to which gesture means what in practice, you have ... quite a lot of options.
The biggest problem is again more the backend of the screen reader and not the various input methods we have. It's how VO gathers and present us (or not) some information.
A very underated feature of VO that is also its biggest flaw is how it doesn't use a virtual buffer for parsing and allowing us to navigate web content. It can give surprisingly good results for *some* websites in *some* situation compared to the windows screen reader out there.
Anyways, I just wanted new comers to actually have something useful to grasp from this post.