Document presentation

We are a group of italian Mac Os X users.
Before making any kind of consideration, we would like to add our voice to those that have shown you great appreciation for your choice of incorporating, directly into the operating system, quality universal access technologies that greatly stand out compared to what others have done.
Having had the pleasure of using your operating system and the Voiceover screen reading solution, we’ve decided to advance some suggestions, which we hope you will take into consideration. For our part, we are certain they will contribute in improving the Mac Os X user experience, making it even more fluid and efficient.

Braille

1 A Braille cursor should be implemented. This cursor would need to be independent from all other system cursors (E.G. Mouse, voiceover). This would allow us to move the braille display regardless of the current position of the System or Voiceover cursor. For this purpose, it would be very useful if this new cursor could even move out of the boundaries of the focused window, so as to give the braille user the most complete and accurate view of the workspace
2 As of this writing, the only available braille table out of the box is the US English Braille table. It would be beneficial to distribute tables for the main languages, or make the VO braille-table system compatible with BRLTTY. This would allow many already available online resources to be used, such as the Louis Libraries.
3 We would appreciate if the active braille table could be changed on the fly, in a similar way as how it is possible to change the active speech voice (vo command up and down arrow)
4 The braille spacial rendering of documents would need improvement. For example, when a bulleted or indented list is present, it would be necessary to be able to discern when a new item begins through the use of braille.
5 Possibility to assign different labels that indicate control types (e.g. buttons, toolbars, checkboxes) so that they are differently shown in braille and/or read aloud. For instance, someone could prefer hearing “tick box” instead of the current “check box”.
6 For sake of convenience, the braille or voiceover cursors would not have to be represented as a continuous line of no. 7 and 8 dots on the braille display: these cover the entire text representing the object in which they are focused. There should at least be an alternate viewing mode.
7 When the braille cursor is located on a portion of text that regularly updates itself (e.g. elapsed/remaining time during playback of multimedia content), if would be beneficial if the update of the braille text occurred in sink with the onscreen text, even if the speech settings are set not to perform any action, or to simply play a tone, instead of reading the progress aloud.

Speech/vo audio output management
1 The language selection menu, which first appears at Operating System Setup, should be spoken. Right now, only the first choice (english) is announced, whereas for the other languages sighted assistance is needed; alternatively, one needs to know how many arrow key presses are required to reach the desired choice.
2 As things now stand, the voices for the italian language are not suited for daily system management. While we understand that Apple is not responsible for the quality of third party products, we must state that availability of adequate voices in different languages is a common need among italian and other international users. This has already been done with the IPad, IPhone and IPod Touch. Should this not be possible, we would greatly appreciate the porting under Mac os X of a very popular speech synthesizer already available on many platforms (Linux, Microsoft Windows, Symbian) called eloquence. This particular speech engine has gained so much popularity among blind people due to it’s fast rate, responsiveness,s , light wright and flexibility.
3 During say all mode (vo+a) it would be greatly useful to be able to scroll up and down by line, sentence, paragraph, and even page if possible, without stopping speech. This would have to be accomplished through simple one key commands.
4 The current dictionaries that allow the pronunciation of words to be corrected would need the following improvements: – Alongside the main dictionary, there should exist one specific to every single application. – The possibility of specifying wether a correction should affect all speech engines or just the active one should be possible. This would avoid situations where adjusting an error occurring only with one tts causes wrong behavior with others.
5 In Voiceover Utility or in System Preferences, the speech output source would have to be configurable separately from the other system sounds.

Table management
We refer, with the word Table, to the object used in the Os X interface to represent a multi-column list view (e.g. message list in mail, list view mode in the finder, track view in the Itunes library). Later on we will talk about tables present in text documents or spreadsheets.
1 When the VO cursor sits on a table, one would have to be able to read a specific cell of the current row even without interacting or moving through said table.
2 We would like to be able to configure Voiceover so that when the cursor reaches a table, we could specify which headings and relative cells would be read and which ones skipped. This setting has to differ for each table in every single application, and wouldn’t have to require interaction. .
3 During interaction, the implementation of commands allowing to skip to the beginning or end of the current row would be necessary.
4 We also suggest two new commands that, during interaction, would read from the beginning of a row to the current cursor position, or from the cursor position to the end of a row.
5 This also applies for columns (read from top of column to cursor position/read from cursor position to bottom of column).
6 During interaction, it would be beneficial to be able to read the current row or column, regardless of cursor position inside that specific row or column.

Web navigation
1 Alongside the two already present modes of web navigation (doom or group), it would be important to introduce a third mode we might call “text navigation”; in this mode, the page would be presented as if it was a regular text document, without the need to interact with objects and items in order to explore their contents. In particular: A- Possibility to move around the web page by just hitting the cursor keys like we do in Pages, TextEdit. B- The eventual presence of frames should be announced by an adequate string, such as “frame start/framename”, but their contents should be directly available for exploration without interacting. C- The same thing applies for bulleted and numbered lists. The user should be able to gather information such as: type of list (numberedd-bulleted-…), wether or not sublists are present, the number of list items etc. D- If the text resides on more than one column, it should be reported on a single column.
2 A set of commands should be implemented allowing the user to jump to the beginning or end of the element on which the vo cursor is focused (e.g. beginning/end of a list, or next block of text which doesn’t contain a link)
3 There should be a better method of text selection than the one currently available, whose results are most of the time uncertain and inaccurate.

Localization
1 At present, there are various issues in the localization of Voiceover messages. We are currently working collaboratively with Mr. Gensen, a Danish user who is in touch with the person responsible for Vo’s translation. He will therefore shortly provide you with a comprehensive list of localization mistakes in Italian and other scandinavian languages.
2 We have noticed that the Vo Framweork contains files storing the braille description of the various control type labels (toolbars, buttons…) localized in various languages. In these files, abbreviations are also set so as to describe these controls without using precious space on the display. These contractions, though, have been defined only for the English language. For other languages there are no abbreviations at all, thus leaving the entire description as it is. What this implies is that for long control descriptions, such as “tool bar button” (Italian=”pulsante della barra degli strumenti), the control description can occupy the braille line in it’s entirety, forcing the user to move to the next line a lot more than necessary. It would be fundamental to add proper abbreviations to those files related to languages different than English. As Italian is concerned, if you consider this useful, we could submit a list of what we think are the best suited contractions.
3 In these files containing the strings for braille description of controls, tests done by us have proven that it isn’t possible to define abbreviations made up of more than one word. It would be useful to eliminate this limitation, due to the fact that in foreign languages these contractions often require multiple words.
4 There should be a preference in Vo Utility that lets us choose, when navigating an app localized in a language that is not the one set at system level, wether vo should describe the controls in that language (which is now the case) or in the system wide language.

Document management
1 In text documents, complete manipulation and exploration of tables must be possible using the same commands available for web tables, those outlined in the Tables category of Vo Utility, and the ones we have requested in sections 3-6 of the Tables paragraph.
2 Comments to the text and footnotes should be immediately available for Vo users.
3 In text documents, the command to read text attributes (vo+t) should also announce information about the structure of the text (E.G. Body, title levee 1, 2, etc)
4 Spreadsheet manipulation should occur in the same way, and with the same commands, as table exploration is accomplished.. In particular, there should be the possibility of reading the current row/column heading, as well as the coordinates of the current cell.
5 In spreadsheets, it’s necessary to have a command which reads the field containing the formula of the calculation whose result is displayed in the current cell.
6 The management of bulleted and numbered list in mail messages should be improved. In particular, who should announce information about their presence and items when reading with the say all command (vo+a), or reading the text through the cursor keys. Right now, this is done only when interacting with the list or locating it with vo+command+x.

Garage band
To significantly improve the accessibility and usability of the program by the blind, which is indeed already good, there should be a way to make the timeline accessible. This would allow tasks such as copy, cut, paste, move, etc.

Zoom
To improve the user experience of visually impaired people using Universal Access’s zoom feature, it would be useful not to invert image colors when activating the “white on black” contrast inversion.

Status bar and third party applications
We have noticed that all third party apps we have tested present a common accessibility problem: the status bar icons are not reachable with voiceover (vo+M-M)
Only system icons are usable.
We don’t know wether this is a voiceover problem or it arises due to an incorrect use of the Accessibility apis. However, the number of applications which present this issue has convinced us to report this fact.
The following is a list of applications where this problem has been encountered
*VmWare Fusion
*Dropbox
*Quikeys
*IPiece
*Key Remap4Macbook
*Airfoil Speakers
*Shimo
*Tunnel Brick
*Viscosity

Conclusion
We hope you will take into consideration the suggestions and observations reported above.
They are the result of work done by a community that is very enthusiastic about the new scenarios of choice that Apple’s approach to Design for All have opened to blind and sight impaired people worldwide.
We would like to state that we are open for feedback by your side. Meanwhile, we encourage you to use the following contact details should you need any clarification.
Massimo Vettoretti. Email: massimo@vettoretti.net
Following is a list of subscribers of this document, along with their Mac Serial Numbers.