Back in July I wrote about my VoiceOver experiences in Intro to VoiceOver and VoiceOver saves the day. The first experience was when I was invited to assist Kylee Maloney, the Producer of the radio programme One in Five to experiment with using a Mac. We had some fun and some frustration, in part because I hadn’t really used VoiceOver before.
Tonight Kylee’s programme was broadcast, and I must say it was particularly interesting, and not just because I was part of it. Kylee also spoke with a technology person from the Foundation for the Blind, a blind user who is using VoiceOver for real and with an Apple product manager from the USA. It seemed to be a general conclusion that Apple have made a great start with this accessibility software and that we can look forward to improvements which will enhance its utility to the target audience.
The broadcast was about 30 minutes and should be available from Replay Radio (even if it’s not actually listed).
While listening I had felt a bit silly as Kylee and I got ourselves tangled up with Dashboard, and I said I didn’t think it could be disabled. The blind user however mentioned turning it off. A little research tonight has shown it’s not entirely easy, and involves a trip to the Terminal and restarting the Dock, or perhaps turning off all hot corners and keystrokes and dragging Dashboard out of the Dock.
When we did the session Kylee also found some unexpected results from otherwise innocuous keystrokes. I suspect it’s because she was using a non Apple brand external keyboard.
The other interesting thing was that all I had to do was hook the line out from the radio into the line in on my Powerbook, start up Audio Hijack Pro, and I was able to capture the whole programme into a 50Mb high quality file. I love my Mac!
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