ATMac

Erik Burggraaf wrote a great post on the MacVisionaries list recently about a metaphor which he uses to explain the differences in approach between Mac’s VoiceOver screen reader and Windows JAWS and WindowEyes screen readers. He calls it the “Dropped Penny Approach.”

Here’s what Erik wrote, reproduced with permission and edited slightly for clarity:

The penny drop was an orientation exercise my sister and I had to do when we were kids. It says a lot about the way blind people work versus how sighted people work. Neither approach is wrong, they are just different.

When a penny falls on the ground, a sighted person steps back, takes in the scene at a glance and focuses in on the penny so they can pick it up. This is the approach VoiceOver takes.

When the same penny falls on the ground, a blind person listens to the sound, chooses a point of reference such as a table leg or the toe of a shoe, and circles out concentricly in the direction of the sound until the penny is found. This is the approach taken by Windows screen readers.

While using Windows screen readers, for example, you are on a link which is in a table which is on a web page which is in a browser which is on the desktop. The point of reference is the link, akin to the table leg or the toe of your shoe.

Conversely while using Mac OS X’s VoiceOver you are on the desktop, in a browser, on a web page, in a table, on a link filled with text. This approach, like the way a sighted person finds a penny, starts with the overview before dealing with specifics.

Both approaches are good, but blind people are not taught top down or outside in view, which is the way sighted people naturally do things. Blind people are generally taught to view things from the bottom up or from the inside out. In other words, first identify something by its parts and then identify the whole thing based on information about its parts, rather of taking in the full scene at a glance and then zeroing in on each part to see how it fits with the whole.

The new Mac user coming over from Windows may look at the way VoiceOver works and think, “Oh my Lord! That’s not intuitive at all!”, but of course it is extremely intuitive once you wrap your mind around it.

I’m not personally familiar with Windows screen readers, but I love Erik’s analogy as a way to describe the differences in paradigms between the two systems.

- Ricky Buchanan