VoiceOver Screen Reader for Apple Macintosh Leopard

(reviewed April 2008 by Andrew Downie)

Background

The Apple OS X v10.4 (also known as Tiger), released in April 2005, included the first implementation of its VoiceOver screen reader. With the release of v10.5 (Leopard) in November 2007, VoiceOver has been further developed.

VoiceOver Summary

Unlike screen readers for Windows, VoiceOver is built into the operating system and is free (Narrator, included with Windows, is, at best, a very rudimentary screen reader). VoiceOver employs Apple's high-quality synthetic speech and offers text magnification. A number of electronic Braille displays are also supported.

VoiceOver can be set to start automatically from System Preferences. Importantly, one option is to have it start at the login screen, thus facilitating entry of username and password. Adjustment to a wide variety of parameters can be made on either a temporary or "permanent" basis. That is, temporary settings are lost when turning off VoiceOver or shutting down the computer, while permanent adjustments are retained until the user changes them again. Parameters that can be customised include voice(s) to be used, speech rate and level of spoken punctuation, text size and tailoring of keyboard combinations for issuing some VoiceOver commands. Customised settings can also be copied to another computer, thereby providing the user with a consistent interface on multiple machines.

The User Experience

It is stressed that the reviewer has limited knowledge of the Macintosh operating system. Access to the test machine was also limited, both in terms of session time and frequency. Therefore, not all of the VoiceOver benefits have yet been fully explored.

One feature common to screen readers is their employment of keyboard commands. Due in no small part to the different environment, VoiceOver's commands are somewhat different to popular Windows-based screen readers. People coming from a Windows background must therefore undertake a considerable amount of relearning. This process is greatly assisted by inclusion of two features. The first is the keyboard learning mode (ctrl-option-k) which announces the function of each key combination. The second is the Commands Menu (Command-h), which provides a list of available commands for the current situation. An excellent manual is also available from http://www.apple.com/au/accessibility/voiceover/downloads.html in several formats including MP3 audio, correctly structured PDF and grade 2 Braille. The manual in PDF form was put onto the test machine and this proved useful, both by way of information acquisition and for practising navigation. Unlike Windows-based screen readers, it is often necessary to issue a command (control-option-shift-down arrow) to begin interacting with content and another (control-option-shift-up arrow) to finish the interaction. Until recognising the situations where this process is necessary, it was not possible to access the table of contents in the PDF manual.

andrew.downie pisland Software supplied with Macintosh computers is specifically written to work with VoiceOver. This is well demonstrated by TextEdit, the default Macintosh word processor. Feedback on document layout, including text size and attributes is available. Words shown as misspelled by TextEdit are also reported by VoiceOver.

Performance with Safari, the Macintosh web browser, is not as impressive. While basic web access is provided, features now commonplace on Windows-based screen readers are lacking. These include facilities for reading data tables and jumping to elements such as paragraphs, headings and lists.

A limitation of VoiceOver is lack of keyboard control of the mouse pointer. Other screen readers offer movement by such increments as character, word and line and can restrict movement to within the active window. Especially for exploring screen contents and/or for dealing with difficult layouts, this can be an important facility.

On the other hand, VoiceOver does offer magnification of screen contents. This can be helpful to those who have some useful residual vision. The combination of speech output and visual display is also valuable to those who have visual reading difficulties.

Summary

While not yet as powerful as screen readers developed for the Windows platform, VoiceOver will be very effective for some people. It seems especially suitable for those who wish to augment the visual display with synthetic speech output, but should also benefit those who have little or no vision wanting to use the computer for word processing, email and basic internet access. The availability of screen magnification is also an important feature.

The inclusion of VoiceOver as part of the operating system is noteworthy. Any Apple Macintosh with the current operating system is immediately available for use by people requiring speech output and/or screen magnification. Furthermore, most screen readers for Windows cost between $1,000 and $1,800. Cost of upgrading these can also be considerable.