Jay Leventhal authored a Product Evaluation article, Not What the Doctor Ordered: A Review of Apple’s VoiceOver Screen Reader in the September 2005, Volume 6, Number 5 issue of AccessWorld. The byline reads: “Get to the core of the problems with Apple’s new screen reader for the Macintosh.” Jay has stated elsewhere that his main point is that “VoiceOver does not work well.”
Jay Leventhal is a respected technologist and about as famous as one gets in the insular field of assistive technology. On casual inspection, the observations, assertions, and conclusions might seem reasonable. That is only true if one knows nothing about the product being reviewed. Unfortunately, most of the article’s intended audience are unfamiliar with VoiceOver, and are depending on Jay to enlighten them.
The article is not long, less than a thousand words, not counting a generous response allowed Apple. In that short space, Jay makes several rather blatant mistakes, each of which should have been easily avoided. This error rate strains credibility. Any conclusions associated with an article that warrants this amount of correction are obviously suspect.
Factual error list (seven items, with references) follows. Opinions expressed are not otherwise challenged. No criticism is offered regarding the structure or writing style. At least half these items are admittedly picune, and would not usually be worth pointing out, except in the interests of establishing a pattern of neglect to detail.
The press release shows that this was actually April 29th.
There are actually four errors here, but they are counted together as just one. Power Mac is two words and always refers to desktop machines. All the current Apple laptops use the G4 chip (but not the current Power Mac) and it is not possible to tell from the article if the test machine was a PowerBook G4 or an iBook G4. Both of those use DDR SDRAM. Technology journalist usually pay attention to manufacturer trademarks and Apple treats these distinctions rather seriously.
The best documentation is indeed the fully accessible OS X Help Viewer system, but that is hardly all that is available. The main VoiceOver Support index lists over one hundred documents and links.
The online VO help can only be fairly characterized as robust. (From context, “online” almost certainly refers to the Mac-based Help Viewer documents which, as noted above, are actually better and more complete in significant ways than the material available on the web.)
The equivalent of the Windows desktop on Apple computer is, of course, the Mac OS Desktop. For users migrating from Windows, Apple has good material describing What’s What, What’s Where. There is readily available information about the OS X Desktop and Dock. The Dock doesn’t have a close analogy in Windows, but it might be considered as analogous to a hybrid between the Windows Task Bar and Start Menu.
TextEdit advanced features include checking spelling, formatting text using styles, adding movies or photos to a document, and summarizing the contents of documents. You can use TextEdit to view and edit plain text, HTML, Rich Text Format (RTF), Rich Text Format Directory (RTFD), and Microsoft Word Files.
You can type in a web address by pressing Command-L, as shown in the Browser Window and Menu Shortcuts.
VoiceOver may not be for everyone, but there are compelling reasons to be paying attention to it.
Version 1.1, September 16th, 2005 (BB).