I am referring to the announcement recently by Apple of its newest operating system, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
You see, one of the most overlooked and under-hyped features of Mac OS X all these years is Universal Access which, in a nutshell, is about accessibility.
It refers to settings that you can apply to your computer to make using it easier if you’re visually impaired, hard of hearing or have motor handicaps.
Most normal users have never heard of Universal Access even though it’s right there in their Mac’s System Preferences. Somehow it just escapes their eyes.
But that changed last week with Snow Leopard. If you go to www.apple.com/macosx, Universal Access is trumpeted right there on the main page as one of the four new features of the operating system.
I am not visually-impaired but I felt a sense of victory when I saw that blue Universal Access icon prominently displayed on the Apple website.
It means all the work I have done with friends from the blind associations in the last few years, and the work of other reporters around the world who care about accessibility, have not gone unnoticed.
I wrote my first article about the visually-impaired and consumer technology in 2005.
Fresh from a trip to Macworld San Francisco where I bought an iPod shuffle (the first generation white stick), I paid a visit to my friend Moses Choo, who was resident techie of the National Council for the Blind Malaysia (NCBM).
I was curious: the iPod shuffle received so much flak from sighted users for its lack of display but how would a visually-impaired techie react to it? He loved it. It didn’t take long for Moses to figure out the device.
He loved the name too. I still remember his joke: “Now everyone can shuffle like the blind!” Since then, I had done a number of blind-related technology stories for NST.
I once wrote about Moses getting trained by Ahmad Shah Sahar, then technical support manager of Apple Malaysia, on how to use Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
That was interesting because it was a meeting of two worlds: a visually-impaired techie who had never used a Mac and a Mac/Windows expert who had never had to teach a visually-impaired person.
Another time, Moses and I sat down and recorded the plight of a visually- and hearing-impaired woman who wanted to learn how to use the PC.
We couldn’t help Wan Zainun because the hardware alone would cost RM15,000.
Exactly how does a visually-impaired person use the computer? Well, unless the user is also hearing-impaired as in the case of Wan Zainun, the setup is unremarkable really.
However, in the absence of sight, the visually-impaired rely on their computer’s speakers and screen reader software to tell them what’s happening on the screen and to read aloud contents of web pages, email messages and documents.
The most popular screen reader in the market is Jaws (Job Access With Speech) for Windows but it’s several thousand ringgit.
This is where the new Mac operating system appeals greatly to the visually-impaired.
The screen reader is free and the voice used is Alex, said to be the most human sounding computer voice so far with natural sounding pauses, breaths and intonation.
Screen reader as a technology is nothing new, but what’s revolutionary about Snow Leopard running on modern Apple computers is its trackpad gestures.
Much like on an iPhone, Apple’s MultiTouch trackpad can now represent the entire active window.
Users can, for example, hear what’s on the screen by touching the corresponding part of the trackpad and a gesture called rotor (which is summoned by rotating two fingers on the trackpad) reads out text based on a chosen setting (word, character, etc).
On top of that, Apple’s computers are also the only ones that support for Braille displays right out of the box.
When I showed Moses the iPod shuffle in 2005, I thought it unlikely that the Apple engineers had the visually-impaired in mind when designing it. But this time around, I think they are dead serious.
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