Inside OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion GM: new iOS-style Accessibility
Apple has long been associated with making technology easy to use, and a significant part of that commitment has applied to users with special challenges in seeing, hearing or physically interacting with the company's devices.
The company pioneered many early concepts to help disabled users gain expanded access to computers, including features such as Mouse Keys and Sticky Keys on the original Macintosh.
In OS X 10.4 Tiger, Apple added a spoken interface called VoiceOver, which built a screen reader (previously an expensive third party option) into the operating system to allow sight impaired users to navigate windows and menus via auditory cues. VoiceOver has since been incorporated into iOS for use on Apple's mobile devices, as well as on the iPod Shuffle.
In 10.5 Leopard, Apple added the advanced Alex voice to make VoiceOver even more useful, and it has further expanded its voice selection since, using RealSpeak voices licensed from Nuance. VoiceOver currently supports over 30 different languages and dialects.
Along with VoiceOver, screen zoom, contrast, cursor size and related features for making the desktop easier to use by people with visual impairments are currently squashed, "Panther Era style," into the Seeing tab of the Universal Access preferences pane (below). Other tabs contain Hearing, Keyboard features and Mouse and Trackpad options related to accessibility.
In Mountain Lion, these features are given a facelift for the new Accessibility pref pane, which presents a more modern looking, graphical menu of options related to the Display, Zoom, VoiceOver, Audio, Keyboard and Mouse & Trackpad (shown below).
The new pane also presents the Speakable Items section that has been removed from the Speech pref pane to make way for Dictation features. Once referred to as "Speech Recognition," the Speakable Items features are now most applicable to users who rely on them for accessibility features.
This revamping of the user interface isn't the only new accessibility feature in Mountain Lion; Apple says it is adding support for 14 new braille displays (on top of the 40 USB and wireless devices Apple already supports out of the box), and Mountain Lion's VoiceOver now supports press and hold buttons, dragging items to hotspots, and drag and drop modifier keys (such as Command and Option). The Accessibility pane also now has a universal keyboard shortcut: Option+F5.
Late last year, blind-from-birth musician Stevie Wonder praised Apple for its pioneering efforts in making its devices accessible to users with disabilities. "I want you all to give a hand to someone that you know whose health is very bad at this time," Stevie Wonder said to his audience. "His company took the challenge in making his technology accessible to everyone. In the spirit of caring and moving the world forward, Steve Jobs."
14 Comments
Strange that the occasional 'Open bladiebla Preferences...' button is smaller than the others. I know it is now, but would've made more sense. Certainly hope the Help in all the Pulldown menus will be the same font and size as the rest; right now it's... off.
I find the juxtaposition of the changes to System Preferences, and the changes to the Finder over the last few OS revisions very interesting. Shows a bit of a schizophrenic Apple. System Preferences continues to move away from text on ly labels, adding colorful, and even realisting icons for finding the Preference you want. Finder, OTOH, has constantly been dropping color, and been making distinguishing between stuff even harder. I hope Apple, over the next few OS revisions, decides on a common design language. They badly need to update, and adhere to the HIG.
[quote name="addicted44" url="/t/151353/inside-os-x-10-8-mountain-lion-gm-new-ios-style-accessibility#post_2148990"]I find the juxtaposition of the changes to System Preferences, and the changes to the Finder over the last few OS revisions very interesting. Shows a bit of a schizophrenic Apple. System Preferences continues to move away from text on ly labels, adding colorful, and even realisting icons for finding the Preference you want. Finder, OTOH, has constantly been dropping color, and been making distinguishing between stuff even harder. I hope Apple, over the next few OS revisions, decides on a common design language. They badly need to update, and adhere to the HIG.[/quote] You're right. It's odd. But maybe it reflects the different intents of the teams. If we look at iOS for reference, Settings has become deeper and more complex, adding more application-centric stuff in there (apps at the bottom, though usually about/info now, notifications, location, storage, docs/data, backed-up data). Whilst the file system is... Well non-existent apart from the weird "Open with..." which seems to duplicate files between apps (makes no sense to us mac users IMO). Point was, they are making the ridiculously complex simpler, and where they have a simple format that people understand (SysPrefs) to build on, they are doing so. Finder is mmmm... not making people as happy as he would have you believe. I've always thought he has a smile so uncomputery users don't hate the mac in frustration. I don't know any "regular" (non-programmy, non-obsessive) users who have treated the file system with anything but disdain or used it only begrudgingly (Desktop & Downloads, before Downloads... what a mess!). Even "techy" users without a programming background tend to order stuff in some odd, opaque ways. I can see Apple hating this. Even spotlight and the "smart searches" (which often turf up terrific amounts of crap), the weird recents menus that are dotted around in various places (holdovers from
Holy cow, had to read this to realize that there was already a way to lock dragging with the trackpad (which by default is annoying as hell).
I find the juxtaposition of the changes to System Preferences, and the changes to the Finder over the last few OS revisions very interesting. Shows a bit of a schizophrenic Apple.
Reminds me of this paradigm: