Testdrive Apple VoiceOver

Apple Malaysia recently set a precedent by having a visually-impaired user test-drive its new Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system for the first time. Ridzwana Rahim was there to observe and what he learned was nothing short of an eye-opener.

Think about Apple Macintosh and the image that immediately comes to most people’s minds is that of the beautifully designed all-white computer called iMac. If you are familiar with the software, you might also think of Apple’s equally elegant operating system (OS), Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger - or simply called Tiger - with its stunning Expose, animated Dock, and cute little Widget applications that open with a water ripple effect right in your face.
 
But eye candy is not the only thing Apple is good at. Unbeknownst to most people, Apple computers also cater to a certain type of user who probably will never in their lives be able to appreciate visual beauty: the visually impaired. There’s a feature in Tiger called VoiceOver, which is a spoken interface that provides users with visual disabilities with an audible description of their workspace and also reads aloud the contents of documents. Shortly after the software’s April launch, visually impaired Moses Choo Siew Cheong, who is the executive director of the National Council for the Blind Malaysia (NCBM), heard about it and was very keen to have test it out. He worked his contacts and was finally introduced to Apple Malaysia’s systems engineer Mohd Shah Sahar at a small training session at the Apple Malaysia office in Damansara.
 
The session was a meeting of two different worlds. On the one hand, you had a blind techie who had never touched a Mac in his entire 20 years or so of computing experience, and the Mac OS is an entirely different animal from the Windows OS he’s used to. On the other, you had an expert who is proficient in both operating systems but had never had to teach the computer to a blind user before. It was bound to be an interesting encounter.
 
Continue to read the story on Malaysia New Straits Times