My Response to NFB's "Evaluation" of VoiceOver, the Mac Screen Reader

In this month's Braille Monitor, a magazine from the National Federation of the Blind, there is an article "evaluating" VoiceOver (the screen reader on the Mac). I feel that their evaluation does not give VoiceOver the credit it deserves, and so I've decided to respond to it, and to attempt to correct some of the misinformation provided. For a more in-depth response to the article I encourage people to listen to The Screenless Switchers podcast.

Wesley Majerus begins his article by saying that VoiceOver (VO) for the Mac is a new offering and until VO was created Macs were mostly inaccessible. VO has been a part of the Mac operating system for 4 years. This means it isn't new. Also, since the Mac is the only computer that ships with a screen reader built into the OS, I would argue that it is already more accessible than any Windows based system out of the box. And finally, Mac has had text-to-speech built in for over a decade. I know this because I used to listen to documents with Simple Text ten years ago on my purple iMac.

Most of this article, and in fact many of the bogus articles that evaluate VO, are written by Windows users who are trying to operate the Mac like a Windows computer. Although many new VO users will be switching from Windows, users should know that the Mac is not Windows, and therefore it probably won't act like Windows. Not only that, users should be thrilled at the prospect of the Mac NOT operating like Windows, since there are a number of reasons that it's a much better experience overall. For example, because VoiceOver is integrated into the Mac OS, it does not bog down the operating system in the way that most Windows screen readers do. In my experience, it also crashes less frequently.

My advice to any potential new, sight-impaired Mac user is to be open to learning something new, in the same way that sighted users should expect significant differences in the way the operating systems are used. VO is not JAWS, and it doesn't act like JAWS. And I wish people would stop comparing it to JAWS. VO is a great screen reader, and it doesn't cost extra. When you first get your Mac, there is a quick-start feature that will help you understand how to use VO. The manual, which can be downloaded as a podcast or HTML file, goes into more depth once you've learned the basics. I found that both these resources helped me to learn how to use my Mac, and for more information, I used resources on the web. Documentation is very specific and helpful.

The first application that the author reviews is TextEdit. I want to make sure that people understand that TextEdit is comparable to the Windows stock text editor, WordPad. It's actually slightly better than WordPad. Trying to compare TextEdit to an office suite that costs hundreds of dollars is absurd. But, for users that want more sophisticated text programs they should get Open Office which is free, or IWork 09 which has a word processor called Pages. I personally am writing this post using TextEdit, and here is an example of something it does that Office doesn't do. It automatically tells me the attributes of the text as I am reading it. This is very helpful since I often copy and paste in documents, and I can't tell you how many times sighted people have asked me why I have two different fonts in my document. That happens in Windows because JAWS doesn't tell me the text attributes. The author mentions that VO doesn't work well with tables in TextEdit. This is true, but again we're talking about a free, built in word processor. More complex tasks can be done in programs such as OpenOffice and Pages, which are cheaper than comparable Microsoft products. The article's author critique about Text Edit that really bothered me is using the spell check function. I have found using the spell checker to be quite easy, and hitting command plus : will spell check the whole document.

The next application he discusses is the web browser Safari. He claims that Safari is the only accessible web browser for VO. This is not true--Safari just happens to be the most accessible. He claims that surfing the web is cumbersome, again because it doesn't behave like a Windows-based screen reader. He doesn't mention (perhaps he doesn't know) that you can lock the VO keys, which allows you to use the arrow keys to move around in a web page just like you do in Windows. If you don't lock the keys it can indeed be frustrating. I have found my experience with Safari to be quite positive. Pages load much faster, and I have the ability to look through links and items in the page without reading the whole page if I want, and writing in forms has been easier than in Windows. There is nothing I can think of that I can't do in Safari that I can do in either IE or Firefox in Windows.

After doing all of his reviews, the author concludes that NFB can not recommend using the Mac because they feel it will hinder the productivity of a blind user. My response to this conclusion is that: 1. Not many people can learn to use a brand-new-anything in a week, let alone something as complex as a computer operating system. 2. they based their whole evaluation on switching from Windows, which is unfairly asserting that the Mac is not an equally viable starting platform, and 3. I am no less productive using the Mac than I am when I was using Windows; if anything, I am more productive because VO doesn't crash. I hope that people who read this article will understand that the evaluation is filled with flaws, and that if you want to become a Mac user you'll need to be okay with learning something new. Learning how to use VO is just like learning how to use JAWS, or any other screen reader.

What do you think of the article I responded to? If you are a Mac user, what do you like and dislike about VO?