Disclaimer: I don’t speak for IBM on this site. I work for them doing accessibility stuff now, and I was an Apple Certified Trainer in my previous job, and I’ve written about accessibility for years, so this is right up my alley. But that’s it, don’t read any more into it.
Not much useful public information yet, but Apple announced at CSUN that the next version of Mac OS X will bundle a screen reader. There’s an introductory MacCentral article, an old BusinessWeek article from last fall (rebuttal), and a passing reference in an interesting but mostly unrelated MacDevCenter article on the history of Mac speech technologies.
One thing is for sure: this ain’t no Talking Moose. It appears to be an attempt to build a comprehensive accessibility solution for blind users to use Macintosh programs. That means letting you know what’s on the screen, what window just opened and what it’s called, what text box has focus and what its label is, and so forth. Down to the most minute detail. Imagine turning off your monitor (or closing your eyes) and using a Macintosh. Are you there yet? Yeah, it’s complicated.
On every other platform I’ve studied (and I’ve studied them all), allowing this level of access to what’s going on in applications requires code changes to each application. The operating system provides an accessibility API and does the grunt work of making standard controls accessible (text boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, windows, scroll bars, menus), but applications that use custom controls will need extra code to tell the OS what they are, how they can be used, and what their current state is. Apple is infamous for using custom controls in the iLife apps (2, 3), so they have their work cut out for them. They may use internal knowledge to handle iLife’s custom controls, but other applications that use custom controls will almost certainly need to be rewritten to support the new accessibility API.
Which brings me to my question: what is the accessibility API? How will it work? When can I see developer documentation? I haven’t talked to my manager about it, but I can imagine that IBM might be interested in making sure that certain applications work with Spoken Interface, specifically Java applications, specifically Eclipse, which currently works on Windows by wrapping native controls and calling the Microsoft Active Accessibility API, and on Linux by wrapping native GNOME widgets and calling a similar API in GNOME called GAP. (More on Eclipse accessibility (PDF))
If anyone has any more details on how Spoken Interface is actually going to work, and what sort of application changes (if any) will be required, please email me at mark@diveintomark.org. Whether or not my employer cares (and I’ll find out soon enough), I certainly do. This lies at the intersection of two of my strongest passions: Macs and accessibility. Yesterday they were separate passions; soon, maybe not.
Update: several kind readers pointed me to Apple’s new Accessibility Reference Library, which documents the existing accessibility features of Mac OS X.
Some good starting points:
Thanks, I have lots of reading to catch up on.
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