My Top Ten Accessibility Wishes for OS X 10.10

Hello Mehgcap. I'm with you on the battery thing. I purchased the Battery Monitor app a few months ago, and although it works great for me you'd think Apple would've thought to include a hotkey for checking the battery status and such. I only got my Mac at the end of last year and therefore I'm probably not as experienced as most on this site. But I also think Mail needs some improvements. I think that's all on my end.

I can definitely agree with you 100% in terms of mail. Another issue I've seen is Mavericks with Gmail. Gmail recently altered their iMap servers to be much more diverse, as well as offering support for all the different labels that you can see on the GMail website. Taking a Mac out of the box and instantly getting your Gmail set up with the mail application is literally impossible. I had to fiddle around with labels on the site -- not to mention how navigation was almost an annoyance (several times I had to use the mouse to find things, not the VO cursor, and even though it was still bad). The website is a GMail issue, not Apple, however. Mac just needs to obtain a better integration with GMail itself. I would've expected a fix to this in 10.9.3, but none was to be seen.
It's a severe turn-off having to use Outlook on a Windows virtual machine just to reliably receive mail in an exemplary fassion that supports my workflow.
I'd like to see more compatibility, as right now, it's fairly possible to get around the labels issue; I can receive my mail on iOS just fine.

You managed to nail just about everything, so I don't have much to add here... except maybe language switching on webpages. If VO on iOS can do this, I realy don't see why the mac one couldn't. It's nice that you have activities, which make switching between multilingual synthesisers quick, but I still wouldn't mind having language detection on webpages. Speaking of multilingual voices, I don't understand why, even though Vocalizer Expressive supports pitch change natively with all variants, and VO uses it if you change the pitch, when it changes the pitch for EG capital letters, deleted characters or announcing detectors, the pitch change is very artificial and sounds just horrible.

Mehgcap, This was an excellent post. I agree with all of your suggestions. I'd like to add that iMessage should automatically read messages as they are received if you're in the iMessage window. I enjoy typing my iMessages on my Mac, but I prefer reading them on my iPhone. The Mac should work as well as the phone.

I agree with what's above. I *especially agree with increasing maximum speech. I've been using synthetic speech in one way or another since I was very young, and how slow the maximum speech is in both iOS and OSX drives me absolutely batty, and interferes ith productivity. The faster I can use my speech, the faster I can read things, and get them done.
My other request for a fix is a minor one. VO+J in iMessage, if you have multiple accounts, doesn't take you to the list of conversations. You have to do it manually. Very annoying. Hopefully these things, along with the several bug reports I've sent in, will get some attention in the next update.

Hey all,

Does anyone else get the issue where the keys for quick-nav mode just stop working after a while? I'm not sure if this is an OSX issue, or just especially for me as I use a Mac Mini without a screen and so have had other issues caused by this anyway. Table navigation on webpages is something else I'm yet to get my head around, even after reading all of the help info I could find. Perhaps I'm simply a slow learner, but I ended up setting up Bootcamp just so I could reliably search the internet as a fall back option.

Hi everyone. I just thought of something else in Mail that needs to be fixed, and I'm wondering if it's just me or if others have this problem too. Sometimes when deleting a message, it won't do so until I exit Mail. When I go back into Mail the message which I attempted to delete during my previous session will most likely have been moved to Trash. However, there've been times when these messages just lingered around and haven't gone to Trash at all.

The mail bug has everythign to do wiht the server. This is not an apple issue. I shoudl know as I have done some pattern recognision on this nasty mail server issue.

I do agree with everything posted. This shows a mature view of the system and also of the screen reader.

I would add one more thing and highlight one point posted by another person ...

1- Fix the slowness of the speech server. In IOS, a more limiited system running on a more restrict hardware this slowness does not exist and the source code is known by Apple ...... so I don't know why it is still that slow on Mac OS.
2- The Mac should work as well as the phone. It should ... it does not. Although I can understand that the cash is generated by IOS devices, the codebase between most part of both systems is similar, if not exactly the same. I think that if Apple implements something on one of these systems, porting it to the other shouldn't be hard, so again if the Mac OS worked like IOS in softwares such as ibooks and in voice aspects it should be great.
The other aspect to be noticed is scriptability ... if Apple cant do everything then let us do what we can, specially in making apps more usable. I think that xcode and garageband would be two good examples of things we can fix if Apple opens voiceover scriptability so that we could code workflows that would run incredbly well.

I think the speach surver is fine for me. it is plenty fast. Dunno what you mean by slow. I get thigns done and voices are very responsive.

I just sent apple accessibility this blog post. maybe this will gje ttheir attention as well. I encourage all of you to do the same with different words of corse. lol! but at least link to the post.

I use terminal on a regular basis, as well as some elements of XCode and get no delay whatsoever in terms of speech.
This could probably be a processor/memory thing.

Continueing the conversation to the person who mentioned web browsing, I don't know about any here but for me there a few things that I find really strange and some that are annoying too.

To provide my examples: this is with using Safari and Voiceover of course.

List, of 1 item, 2 item, 3 item. You get the idea?
I have found this more apparent of late on webpages. I don't know about others but I seem to get it all the time mainly when navigating by headings.

A couple of somewhat over spoken by Voiceover relating to links the 2nd of my two being more of an issue for me are:
Voiceover says: "internal link." For me at least a bit too much for my liking on webpages. By this I mean the word, internal. Unless I'm missing the purpose of what that word symbolises e.g. interacting with a particular link that it announces that presence on, I fail to see how it comes in handy for people who just want the link and not something before it. Unless of course it contains relevant information.
Moving forward to my 2nd point that I would really appreciate the accessibility team to look into has to do with links being reported of the contence of there meanings.
If that didn't make sense let me explain below. Before I do though, I should point that this isn't as much of an issue with Google Crome.

If you are reading an article say from Wikipedia and by the way, this is a source where you can experience this a lot. for whatever you search for.
In this example, I'll use Eric Clapton to illustrate what I mean.

So you pull up the Wikipedia page for him and a 1st example is: CBE Note: If you are just using the VO keys to move through the page or say all Voiceover will say "commander of the most excellent order of the british empire." In fairness, this sounds grate because it means one doesn't have to find out what that means but even then, I don't think that wording is strictly true because is one becomes an OBE then Voiceover says "Order of the british empire."
Why not just have for CBE "commander of the british empire." instead of including "of the most excellent order of the."

Of course, I don't spend all day looking for such people with titles but to just say a couple more so you get what I am trying to point out here. again, using the Eric Clapton page as our example.
Hard Rock, Hard Rock
Rock and Roll, Rock and Roll.
Chesse, Chesse Records
Richmond, Richmond, London

So with these examples, I hope you can see what I am referring too. It seems that, while Voiceover is pertentually repeating links and sometimes providing more information throughout the process, e.g. Richmond, Richmond, London. One finding out that Richmond is, you guessed it London. However, for me at least and I'd be interested to know what others think here I am becoming more tired of this sort of behaviour with links. I'd rather not here the extra verbiage and click on the link to find out where "Richmond." is myself without having Voiceover telling me that it is in London.

Again, I'd just like to say that when you use Crome none of this extra verbiage is spoken after links including no "internal links."

Conclusion
By no means am I bashing Apple here. I just want to say that I am providing my feedback in a professional and honest manor in order for Voiceover to become more less repetitive when using Safari.

Thank you for reading.

Thanks for the explanation about link titles and how VoiceOver treats them. I was also wondering why I sometimes heard some redundancy when reading a webpage, especially on Wikipedia.

I do agree that the extra verbosity should not be spoken automatically at the end of the link text, but should only be spoken as a help tag. The only exception I would make is if the link does not have any normal text, such as a linked image or something similar.

I would like a few things to be more streamlined and refined. One of them being the notification senter. for me, the only way I've been able to load the notification senter is by turning off my trackpad and doing a two fingers swipe left from the right hand side of the trackpad. and getting rid of it is not as simple as hitting the escape key or doing a command q. One had to swipe over to the close button and double tap it to get rid of it. I don't think this is very efficient and wished there was a more quicker way of doing this.
Has anyone else noticed this or know if there is a easier way to working with the notification senter?
the other thing I would like introduced to voice over is being able to review system announcements more specifically, being able to review the last message spoken. this would come in handy when using Skype and being able to see who the last person logged in.
And finally, I would like a greater apple earpod integration with mac OS X. Although we are able to use the mic on the earpod with the mac, I would like certain functionality to also be integrated such as using the remote to skip ahead and backwards, as well as pause and resume play.

Vo shift c is wht you want for reviewing and as stated by the prior poster you can set up a keyboard short cut for the notification center.

Take care.

Hi! I think your list covered almost everything, but there are 2 things I think need fixing.

#1: Pitch changes need to become optional like they are in IOS. I don't like the way the pitch shifting is implemented, and there isn't a way to disable it as far as I know. I understand that many find that type of thing helpful, but for those of us who don't find it helpful, or deem it down right distracting, it should be something we can toggle on and off.

The second thing I'd like to see fixed is the way things in finder lists are read. Back in the Snow Leopard days, which is when I first got my MacBook, reading a list view was almost the same as in windows, although I wish all folders would be at the top and files listed under them rather than everything just being in alphabetical order. However, I understand that that particular aspect isn't VO related, so I won't complain about it here. What I don't like is that voiceOver has become far too vocal when reading through a list view. It used to just say the file name, extention and date. If it was a folder, it would indicate that last or at least in a way that wasn't annoying. Then, in Lion and Mountain lion, something changed, and VO said folder or whatever right after it read the name of stuff. I could demonstrate all of this if people don't understand. I found the saying of folder a bit annoying, but eventually got over it. Now, in Maverics, it's realy gotten out of control, especially if you're in the home finder window. Not only does it always say folder, but now it says disclosure triangle after everything. So, for example, you hit down arrow and it says something like "downloads folder disclosier triangle" Is all that truly necessary? What happened to something useful like "Downloads 6/1/2013 folder" If the folder bit is at the end, you can interrupt and skip past it if you choose. This new way is just getting worse and worse, and again, I can't find any VO settings to change to make it less verbose.

So, those are the changes I'd most like to see, but your list is really great too.

Hi, just a couple comments on this list, some of this can be worked around. In mail, if you want to avoid rows being added while you are selecting messages, you can disable the automatic checking for new messages. Also, regarding automatic speech in applications, this is already possible. Applications can access Apple's TTS voices directly, they don't even need to use voiceover to do it.