Old habits die hard, they say, and apparently the same is true for hardly adolescent ones. You may recognize all of these sounds from the iPhone 3GS, where they have essentially the same usage.
Additionally, the "wrapping" sounds have also been replaced, giving the audio cues a more coherent and consistent feel. In Snow Leopard, these have been replaced with subtler and more elegant sounds. I felt that in Leopard, these sounds were useful, but far too jarring for my taste. Two of the audio cues that I was not a fan of in Leopard were the "page loaded" sound in Safari, and the "boundary" sound, when the VoiceOver cursor can move no further in a given direction. I’m not going to go through all these changes in minute detail, but I will draw your attention to a few of the most significant. If you’re familiar with the iPhone 3GS, you’ll recognize many of these sounds, and the consistency between the two platforms is an excellent idea. In Snow Leopard, some of these audio cues have been altered. In the same way that a sighted user can glance at an icon and recognize its function more quickly than if he/she had to read some text, so too do audio cues provide information in a faster, more succinct manner than if VoiceOver had to articulate a description. Since the beginning, VoiceOver has used optional audio cues to provide the user with a better and more productive experience. Everything about the system is smoother and snappier. The Responsiveness on my late 2006 MacBook (black) with a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM was frankly amazing, and this of course spills over to VoiceOver as well. Faster Than a Speeding Bullet!Īpple boasts that Snow Leopard has been optimized for modern, Intel-based Macs, and this shines through the entire system. It’s the Little Things…īefore we get into some of the heftier changes, let’s take a look at some of the smaller changes that VoiceOver users are likely to notice early on, and that will improve the VoiceOver experience tremendously, despite their size. I will not be discussing anything, beyond what is new in Snow Leopard. Through this review, I will be assuming a basic knowledge of VoiceOver, what it is and what it can do.
APPLE MAC OS X 10.6 SNOW LEOPARD UPDATE
It is, without a doubt, the most significant update to the software to date, and at $29 USD to migrate from Leopard, it’s unquestionably the most affordable major update to any commercial screen reader in the history of access technology. Quite simply, the update to VoiceOver, now in its third iteration, is spectacular. If you’re one of those folks who just wants to cut to the meat of a review, I’ll give you that here. I’ll spend some time going over some of VoiceOver’s biggest changes in Snow Leopard throughout this review. In respect to VoiceOver, OS X’s built-in screen reading solution for the blind and visually impaired, they understated them a great deal more. Well, Snow Leopard’s here, and Apple may have understated things a little. Most of the changes, they told developers and the press at their World Wide Developer Conference in 2008, would be under the hood, as it were. Instead, they wanted to "press pause" on new features, and spend some development time perfecting the already impressively rich feature set of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. They made it plain that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard would not be a version that was overflowing with new additions. This time around, Apple did things a bit differently. In the past, these releases were brimming with shiny new features for both everyday and tech savvy users to sink their teeth into. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard With VoiceOver 28/August/2009 - ♣ The Cat’s Out of the BagĮvery year or two, another big cat bounds onto the Apple tech landscape in the form of a major revision to its Mac OS X operating system.
0 kommentar(er)
