Snow Leopard, Above and Beyond

Apple once said that you could “Live the digital life in stylish simplicity.” They were talking about the Mac Mini, but this statement could easily encompass all of Apple’s products. Apple is known for making products that are powerful and customer friendly, but what kind of accessibility can be expected from a modern mainstream technology company? What does all this talk about fancy Apple products mean for the average end user? Moreover, what does this mean for the end user with a visual impairment?

Apple has always had products with innovations that most assistive technologies traditionally seem to have found hard to support. Trends in assistive technology would tend to indicate that no support can be expected for such advanced technologies, but Apple is not a company which often follows trends set by others.

In June of this year Apple unveiled some of their plans for iPhone and iPod Touch operating system 3.0 and the new iPhone 3GS. The blind community had been bracing for the worst; version 2.0 of the iPhone operating system had offered some limited accessibility for those with low vision but no screen reader. To everybody’s amazement, Apple announced that iPhone OS 3.0 running on the new hardware, iPhone 3GS, would include support for a built-in screen reader. Prior to this announcement, it was “common sense” that any touch screen device was inaccessible to blind users and nobody expected this to change.

The screen reader, called VoiceOver allows blind and visually impaired individuals to use the touch-screen interface of iPhone like any sighted person would. When a finger is placed on-screen, the item below the finger is read. VoiceOver also supports Flick Navigation, which allows users to find icons even if they don’t know where they are on-screen. Probably the nicest feature of VoiceOver on iPhone is the Rotor. This gesture, which resembles turning a dial on a radio, allows people to select the mode in which to navigate. When on web pages, this allows users to jump quickly through headings, links and other elements.

As if the new and shiny iPhone with VoiceOver wasn’t enough, Apple releases Snow Leopard today. The operating system that Apple calls “the world’s most advanced operating system, finely tuned,” has redefined Universal Access. Before we look at some of the new features, let’s look at some history at how Apple came to where it is now.

In the late 1980s, back in the days of the “Classic Mac”, Berkley Systems had developed a screen reader for the Mac called outSPOKEN. This screen reader was excellent for its time but was third party software, not integrated with MacOS itself. When OS X was introduced, outSPOKEN became obsolete as the operating system itself had changed too much. It was never made functional on OS X, and no other screen readers were developed to fit the space.

In 2004, Apple debuted an OS X application called Spoken Interface that allowed blind and visually impaired individuals to hear descriptions of what was on the screen. This step is now almost forgotten, but it marked a critical turning point in Apple’s attitude toward the visually impaired community.

In April of 2005, Apple truly began its journey to become one of the best known universal access names in the mainstream market place. Their operating system Mac OS X 10.4, commonly known as Tiger, shipped with a built-in screen reader called VoiceOver, a large text screen magnifier called Zoom and numerous other accessibility features for hearing impaired and physically disabled users.

Though Tiger’s screen reader was not deemed appropriate for production environments by many of those who worked in the business of technology consulting for the visually impaired, it still was a topic that gave hope to those in the blind community. It stirred up much controversy as to which direction Apple was heading in regards to its commitment to accessibility. While some members of the visually impaired community argued that Apple was attempting to be all inclusive and break down barriers between the visually impaired and sighted communities, there were those who claimed that Apple only sought to meet the American 508 legislation and would go no further than the minimum requirements of the law. Despite these mixed feelings, Tiger adoption by members of the blind community increased at a slow but steady rate.

In October of 2007, Apple released a major update to their desktop and server operating systems. This release, Mac OS X 10.5, known as Leopard, held even more surprises in store for the visually impaired community. VoiceOver, had received a major update and was now ready for production use, putting it on equal footing with screen readers such as JAWS. VoiceOver was now shipped localised in eight languages and included support for about twenty refreshable USB Braille displays, and the visually impaired community saw a large jump in the number of Mac users.

If including built-in assistive technology as a standard part of their operation system was not enough, Apple’s accessibility team dove head first into the iPod market with an unusual angle next. At Apple’s “Let’s Rock” Event, on September 09, 2008, Apple revealed an iPod like none before. The iPod Nano G4 included spoken menus that could easily be accessed by all users. This was followed by the porting of the VoiceOver technology to the iPod Shuffle 3G in January of 2009. In both instances Apple advertised VoiceOver as a feature that had a benefit to all, not merely those who are visually impaired or blind. Sighted runners could now check album and artist data while on the run, drivers could operate their iPods safely while driving. This placed a big shift on how people viewed text to speech and Universal Access in general on OS X.

Today Apple releases Snow Leopard, an operating system that, as far as the blind and visually impaired community is concerned, is more than “finely tuned.” Apple has yet again surprised the market with something unexpected, but this time it is something most people never dreamed possible. Through VoiceOver, the mouse has been marginally usable for those with visual impairments since Tiger, but totally blind people often found the feature to be more of a hindrance than a help.

Snow Leopard strove to change all that and the brilliant minds at Apple’s accessibility team have pulled it off yet again. The same technology used for VoiceOver on the iPhone 3GS, is now used in MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads to provide a “feelable” view of what is on-screen. Using gestures nearly identical to those on iPhone, blind and visually impaired users can access on-screen elements easily and effectively.

It seems that Apple has now removed all limits the blind and visually impaired face when using graphical environment. This lays to rest a fear that stretches back to the introduction of the graphical user interface and brings new possibilities to what the visually impaired community can achieve on their Macs.

Apple’s road is long, but it is one they have chosen and they strive to meet to the 110% mark. It is an accessibility model that the visually impaired community has come to embrace, and one that has removed boundaries in more ways than one.

Personally, I applaud Apple for their efforts and will be picking up a Snow Leopard family pack as soon as it becomes available here in Canada. Snow Leopard is now available for order through the Apple online stores and other authorised Apple retailers. It retails at an upgrade price of US$29 for a single license and US$49 for a five user family license.

I’ll be going into the Apple store with high hopes for this new operating system. What is your feeling toward this historic release? What issues that were present in Leopard do you most wish to see addressed?

- Alex Jurgensen