Today Mac OS X 10.7, named Lion, became available to users. You can download Lion for just US$29 and Lion will run on most Intel-based Mac computers.
To check whether your computer will run Lion click on the Apple shaped icon at the top left of your screen, then choosing “About This Mac” from the menu. The information you need is in the line labelled “Processors”, and your Mac must have an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor to run Lion.
Lion is the first version of OS X which can be downloaded by users from the Mac App Store, which should save you a trip to the store or a shipping charge if your internet connection is good enough to cope. The download is about four gigabytes which could take several hours even on a fairly fast broadband connection. But if you can’t afford the time or money it would cost for you to download the upgrade, you can download Lion at Apple retail stores. Later this August, Lion will also be made available on a USB thumb drive through the Apple Stores.
So what’s new in Lion from an accessibility perspective? Apple’s web page listing new features in OS X Lion seems to list a lot of things which have actually been available to Snow Leopard users for a while now, but I’ll try to let you know which is which.
Note: I haven’t upgraded to Lion yet so I’m going by what’s on Apple’s web pages and documentation writing this article. I’d appreciate comments and feedback, especially if I’ve got things wrong!
- OS X More Like iOS
- This isn’t specifically listed on Apple’s page but it’s been observed my many people: OS X Lion on your Mac now behaves more like iOS does on the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. The two are far from identical but OS X now has more features that iOS has including: more multi-touch gestures, full screen apps, the app store, and ‘suspend’ for apps.
I think having the two systems becoming more similar is an overall win for accessibility because many of us use a Mac and an iPhone or iPad and the more similar they are the easier it is to learn and remember how to use them.
- More Multi-Touch Gestures
- Some multi-touch gestures, such as 2-finger scrolling, have been available for a while to Snow Leopard users with a laptop, Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse. New gestures mimicing iOS gestures include tap-to-zoom (as in iOS’s Safari) and swipe-to-navigate (like how you turn pages in iBooks). OS X also has some new gestures not found in iOS including ways to switch between apps using just gestures.
The support page OS X Lion: About Multi-Touch Gestures lists the gestures with descriptions and pictures, or if you’ve already upgraded to Lion you can open the Trackpad and Mouse panes of System Preferences to see videos of each gesture.
Multi-touch gestures can be great for some people with limited movement but awful for others, depending on each person’s specific limitations. At the moment it looks like all of these functions can be triggered via the keyboard as well as via multi-touch so they can be also be customised to be triggered via on-screen keyboard, switch, etc. – that’s something that I’m sure accessibility teams will keep an eye on in the future!
- Mac App Store
- I believe that the Mac App store is definitely a win for accessibility – it makes it easy to search for access-related programs and takes the fiddlyness out of buying them. Not all Mac programs can be found via the Mac App store though which makes it significantly less useful than the iTunes App Store for iOS, but this should change over time
- Versions and Auto Save
- Auto Save is just what it sounds like – there’s no need to remember to “press save”, the Mac will do it for you. And Versions, a bit like Time Machine, will automatically save old versions of your documents and help you compare the old and new versions.
These will be an especial help to those with memory or attention problems, as well as saving all of us when our memory or attention spans fail.
- VoiceOver and Braille Languages
- OS X now comes with voices in many languages for VoiceOver users and braille tables for a wide variety of languages too. Previously OS X only shipped with text-to-speech voices in English and other languages had to be purchased at additional cost – it’s great to see this accessibility more widely available.
- High Resolution Cursor
- Previous OS X users who increased the cursor magnification, such as myself, will have been frustrated at how pixelated and “blocky” the cursor looked when its size was enlarged. Lion’s cursor finally fixes this problem!
- Picture-In-Picture Zoom
- Getting “lost” at high levels of zoom has always been a problem – it’s not always easy to keep track of which bit of the zoomed screen you’re viewing. The screen zoom feature in Lion offers a picture-in-picture view, allowing you to see the zoomed area in a separate window while keeping the rest of the screen at its native size. Choose to have the window follow the cursor, or keep the window in one place to show only areas you navigate.
- Improved Auto-Correction
- Another area where OS X and iOS are converging, auto-correction in Lion displays suggested spellings below the word. Press Return to accept the change or click the X to keep the current spelling.
There are lots more new features – you can check out Apple’s What’s New In OS X Lion page yourself.
A smoother cursor is a small thing but I think it’s the accessibility feature I’m looking forward to the most – that blocky cursor really has driven me crazy! The Picture-In-Picture zoom also has exciting potential because it’s something I could use a lot. What are you most looking forward to in OS X Lion?
- Ricky Buchanan
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Jesse the K July 22, 2011 at 12:37 am
I’m with you on the blocky cursor — one reason I use Macs are the lovely asthetics. I may be doing something wrong with the auto-correct on my iPod touch, though; I don’t see a default “ignore” gesture. Space accepts the auto-correct and I have to backspace to get rid of the (too often incorrect) auto-correction.
Paul Natsch July 22, 2011 at 5:58 am
Holding off for the moment but I’m curious about the accessibility features Lion offers. I’ll probably upgrade soon anyways but I’d at least like to see this Mail issue with POP accounts people are talking about resolved first.
Declan Moriarty July 24, 2011 at 3:01 am
I have tried OSX Lion at the Mac Store in Southampton. There is a BIG problem. Force Quit stops zoom from working! You can’t zoom in Force Quit. I had to Force Quit Address Book almost as soon as I started using Lion. I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come. The only thing you can do is to bring the zoom down a bit so you can see what is happening. I use the control-two fingers gesture to control zoom on a Magic Trackpad. What is really bad about this Force Quit problem is that after you have Force Quitted the Control Gesture doesn’t work anymore! You have to reset it in Universal Access and then reboot the machine!
On the plus side, the cursor tracks in Pages. I currently use LibreOffice since I won’t by a paid for office without proper accessibility. I won’t buy Microsoft Office on principle since they have said that their mac product won’t be accessible! Indeed the cursor didn’t track in MS Word when I tried it under Lion. Also the Launch Pad and Mission Control are useless for people using full screen zoom. Zoom won’t track in either app. Mission Control seems to be another name for exposé, and exposé doesn’t allow zoom tracking in Snow Leopard. This problem with Force Quit is dreadful. I wan’t thinking of upgrading yet anyway. I still have work to do on my mac before I upgrade. If they don’t fix the Force Quit problem I will never upgrade. It is dreadful. If Force Quit forced sighted people to reboot in the normal course of events it wouldn’t get out of the door.
kaifu July 29, 2011 at 11:27 am
Wow, thanks! I thought I was going crazy seeing panning not working now and then in Lion, now at least I know it happens after Force Quit. Yeah I can’t live without this Zoom feature either.
Miss Capri July 25, 2011 at 8:41 am
I upgraded to Lion on my 2010 Macbook air (now I’d like to get the new Air, oh well,) and one thing it did was change my email settings on me so that messages were grouped into conversations instead of just individual message view. Deleting one message caused a deletion of the entire conversation, so I went back into the menus, the “view” menu and changed the sorting back and once again I’m happy with mail. Just a heads up, this upgrade could tweak some settings within programs. I read on lion court.com that drag and drop is made easier, you just “mark” the item you want to drag, then go “mark” the destination – problem is, how? How, without accidentally marking the wrong thing on the way back to the destination? Just landing on an item can highlight it. Drag and drop has always been impossible, making programs that use it a real pain and sometimes un-useable. So if Lion really has solved this accessibility problem, that’s great news.
Miss Capri July 25, 2011 at 8:49 am
Oh, and the extra optional voices you can download for Lion are much better than many of those that come with previous OS’s. You can have any and all the voices that are on the iPad/Ipod Touch/Iphone now on your mac, and in addition, you can even get the Tessa South Africa english voice. Plus, Fiona Scottish and Moira Irish – for my part, OS can get rid of the novelty voices like “Hysterical” “Bell” “Whispery” and all those others one can hardly hope to understand let alone use for anything. these newer voices are much better for accessibility purposes. And – keep Alex, best male text-to-speech voice yet.
Jack in Cleveland July 27, 2011 at 1:20 am
I upgraded to Lion and have found that screen magnification using Control-scroll wheel does not work continuously. After bootup, it will work for about 15 minutes, then turn off. Using the same mouse on another Mac, it works well just as it did in Snow Leopard. Apple Tech Support could not provide an answer either, despite a heroic effort; we worked with a tech at the initial level and then he referred us to a senior tech with the same result.. We worked with numerous options in screen preferences and utilities but to no avail. It may be that I will have to buy another mouse or a trackpad for this two-year old Mac.
Augtalk August 12, 2011 at 4:29 am
This may be a “feature” of Lion, where applications quit after a certain period of inactivity. The problem was detailed in an Issue of TidBits, a mac newsletter. Find the article here: http://tidbits.com/e/12398
Rebecca Page August 12, 2011 at 11:30 am
When I bought my new MacBook Pro in June, it came with Mac OSX 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) and I had Apple move all my “stuff” from my MacBook (also running Snow Leopard). When I bought the new MacBook Pro, I made the decision to purchase MS Office 2011 an upgrade from Office 2004. I had already realized that the life expectancy for PowerPC applications such as Office 2004 was getting short.
When I upgraded the MacBook Pro up to Mac OSX 10.7 last week I was not surprised to see PowerPC apps not work, such as Office 2004, since I already had 2011 to take it’s place, but my problems did not end there. My program management software ConceptDraw Office 1 crashed even though it was an Intel based product and Odessa wasn’t even sure an upgrade to it’s ConceptDraw 2 would work. When they confirmed 10.7 compatibility, the upgrade cost $299.
My biggest surprise was with accessibility software such as the MacSpeech Products, both Dictate and Scribe. MacSpeech Dictate printed junk or “dingbats” under Lion. I had to upgrade to Nuance Dragon Dictate 2.5 for $99. Even with the upgrade I need to reset the microphone gain every time I start it (Tools -> Microphone Setup -> Volume Adjustment).. The big issue is with MacSpeech Scribe. I have the “latest” version of Scribe and Nuance has made it clear on their website as well as when you contact their support, that “since it is a relatively new app, they do not plane to update it soon or bring it into the company’s Dragon line of products. Under Lion, Scribe starts and the Vocabulary Training still works, but the Transcription Training freezes after a sample audio file is entered
Geoff Adams-Spink August 15, 2011 at 9:15 pm
Just read your blogpost with interest. Thought you might be interested in my own contribution to the debate:
http://www.adams-spink.com/Lion_Taming_for_VIPs
From me, it’s a partial thumbs up for Apple. The concluding paragraph says it all:
“So the final verdict – well it’s certainly B+ rather than A- or A. The practice of releasing products that are still in development to an unsuspecting public is now an all too familiar fact of life in the IT world. But Apple’s USP – “it just works” – is beginning to sound more like rhetoric these days (the iPhone signal problem and the erratic MobileMe service spring to mind). It’s the sort of behaviour we’ve come to expect from the Microsofts of this world. And when you couple this bugginess with accessibility features, you’re potentially disenfranchising and alienating a group of consumers who have been seduced by Apple’s philosophy of building accessibility into the operating system rather than relying on third party providers to do the job. This is undoubtedly the right way to go – just make sure that it really does work before you release the Lion from its cage.”
Carol January 20, 2012 at 10:46 pm
Hi I am a quadriplegic that up to now have been able to use a logitech wireless trackball to navigate my way around – this has all changed since updating to lion. Since their genius has removed the arrows in scroll bar I am now jumping up whole screens at a time and am all over the place. As I can’t use my fingers I was hoping that your new magic trackpad would respond to a stylus much the same way my iPad does, sadly no joy there either. I don’t want myself or others like me to be left behind. How difficult would it have been to leave the arrows as an option for people like me. I made an appointment for today with my local apple genius and he didn’t have a clue he started showing voice over which I understand assists the blind. I even let them know at the booking stage that I was disabled and would want someone able to assist in this area. I feel utterly deflated, the best the Genius could offer me was to downgrade me to snow leopard! LION DISABLES THE DISABLED
marina February 2, 2012 at 9:19 am
hi
I am visually impaired. I have been using zoom text magnification on my pc. My dilema is if i should switch my pc to a mac. i love the voice over on the mac but the magnification is not as good as the zoomtext on my pc.
i usuallly use 4x magnification .
on the mac the high magnification gets blurry.
any suggstions? what shold i do ? swith for Mac anyway ? is there anyway to make the magnification on the mac better?
is it save to boost the mac as a windows in case i want to use the zoom text? does it work? any dowside?
any suggestions?
thanks
m.