Wednesday 10 September 2008

Apple accessibility efforts

For a while, Apple has been criticized from various angles about the somewhat limited accessibility efforts that went into their products. While MacOS X has been accessible to visually impaired users through their (included) voiceover screen reader, other products used to suffer from various limitations (iTunes, the iTunes store, iPods, ...)

However, that is now changing...

Information about the various efforts that Apple has put forth towards true accessibility can now be found at a specific set of webpages found at http://www.apple.com/accessibility. As can be seen there, amongst other important news, a new generation of the iPod nano now offers spoken menus (including text-to-speech rendering of artist names, album names and song titles - created in iTunes and sync'd to the iPod as audio clips that are used in the spoken menus). It also supports a larger font size setting for low vision users. The iTunes software also has been improved to support screen readers on Mac OS X and MS Windows. This is an important improvement because this has been a pain point for many users.

There is a lot more going on, and I expect we'll be seeing more improvements in weeks and months to come. As the user population reviews the offered products, we'll certainly learn more about the capabilities and limitations, and I fully expect Apple to step up to the plate to address user concerns to improve upon the current offerings. There is a commitment behind these recent events that cannot be ignored.

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