Apple’s Mail.app program is a pretty good application for email, and pretty much accessible as far as I know. That said, there are always things that could be improved and people with different disabilities need different types of assistance and accessibility. These are some plug-ins that give Mail.app extra commands and functions that people with disabilities may find helpful.
Plug-ins, for those who haven’t met them before, are not applications by themselves. They add functions to another application, usually fairly small and unobtrusive functions although I suppose that’s not necessarily the case.
These are several that I have installed in Mail.app and use constantly. They mostly sit in the background and only pop up when needed, I usually forget they are even there. These ones seem to be accessible as far as VoiceOver users go, but as I don’t use VoiceOver I am not 100% sure of that – can somebody confirm?
- Subjectivity is a plug-in that pops up a warning if you try to send a message without setting any subject line. It gives options to set a subject, edit the message again, or just send the message anyway.
- Attachment Scanner Plugin is my all time favourite. If it sees words in your message that seem to indicate you are attaching a file to your message but your message has no file attached it will pop up a warning and give you the option to go back and attach a file.
- Mail Attachments Iconizer changes the way messages with attachments are displayed. Mail.app usually tries to display attachments such as PDF files within the message, but this best for everybody. This plug-in asks Mail.app to just display an icon for the attachment, like a finder icon, instead of displaying the whole thing. You can right-click on the icon and open it in your regular applications or save it to look at later.
I have memory problems so I find the plug-ins that check for subject lines and missing attachments are used very frequently, and the attachment iconiser lets me open PDF and DOC files in accessible applications so they are easy for me to read. Together with the “display mail as plain text if possible” command that I posted about last month, they make Mail.app much easier for me to use.
If you are getting to like the idea of plug-ins, there are many more available for Mail.app and other OS X programs. I suggest that you start by looking at
Tikouka’s Apple Mail plug-ins and tools page and the
Hawk Wings Plug-ins for Apple Mail pages.
- Ricky Buchanan
Is there any software to add smileys into apple mail? As its the one thing i’m missing since switching to mac.
If someone emails me using AOL smileys for example I can see them when I open apple mail but there doesnt seem to be any menu for adding smileys or emoticons for me to put them in my outgoing mail.
Hey guys – this doesn’t work with the new mail.app in Snow Leopard. Any chance of an upgrade?
@Jason: Which plug-in are you trying that doesn’t work? I’m not the author, I just listed them here. You’d have to contact the original plugin authors to check about upgrades and such.
I actually think it is truly pathetic that Apple, after all this time doesn’t have emoticons in its email. When I hear people saying you can just type them in the old-fashion way, that’s sad excuse by an Apple fan. There are so many emoticons that you cannot type that are the ones people enjoy using. And Apple, which was for years the king of graphically based computers, ought to be true to its OWN tradition and have the BEST palette of emoticons, and they ought to work regardless of the recipient.
There IS no excuse for such an obvious shortcoming. They need to get with the program.
Forget annoying emoticons, make it so you can edit the subject of received mail easily. It would make spotlight a lot more useful. Every other mail client can do this.
Being able to use emoticons and change the subject line would be great advances for Mail. I agree that it makes NO sense that Apple won’t give these features in Mail.
Grownup, different stokes for different folks. I’d really like emoticons but have absolutely no need to change the subject of an e-mail, esp. to use with that pathetic, disfunctional Spotlight.
@Jeanie: Personally, I don’t have a need for either. I prefer text representations of emoticons to graphic ones so they work better with text zooming commands! And I don’t think I’d bother changing a subject line often enough to need it. But I can see that others would like these things, hopefully these are things somebody can and will write plugins for so people who wish to take advantage of them can do so.