Assistive tech puts Apple ahead on price

Mac OS X and compatible Alva wireless bluetooth braille display.

One of the attendees at the recent CreativeTech conference in Auckland was Britta Offergeld, an Adaptive Technology Consultant at the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind in Wellington.

Britta was there to check out Apple's devices in general, as she is aware that Macs out of the box are great for people with disabilities.

Britta's training is as an engineer, and she was one of only four girls in a class of 56 - four girls was considered a lot.

She actually specialised in electrical engineering but while doing so developed an interest in programming. She has worked as a computer support person and as an electrical technician before finding what she describes as her 'dream job' at the Foundation. Britta already had an interest in assistive technology and had been playing around with assistive devices in her own time when she saw the job advertised.

We discussed how computers and devices help people communicate - information streams are fundamental to our society now.

"We get a lot of people who don't know we offer free computer classes. We get people inspired to learn Skype because they want to keep in touch with their grandkids." Then they find out more about computing in general.

She thinks that because the government in Wellington is very Office 2003 and Windows XP-based (still!) that's why Macs haven't made the same inroads into consumer use there compared to, perhaps, the rest of New Zealand.

But people are asking the Foundation about Macs, since they're reasonably assistive out of the box. So the Foundation is looking for more information about Apple.

They have been wondering how the Foundation could possibly raise the money to invest in some work-related Macs, or whether Apple does anything for institutions like the Foundation.

[I actually don't know - Apple allows educators and students a tiny discount, but I don't know if there's any price-mercy shown institutions doing worthy things. If anyone knows, do tell.]

One opportunity that came from a discussion Britta had at CreativeTech was the idea to rent a Mac for trial via Dennis Lally's Rentamac company. Then they could try one for a month so people could give it a go at their leisure.

Foundation staff could explore the assistive features of the OS at the same time.

"Talking about the iPhones, iPods and iPads, every single visually-impaired person who has one raves about it. The fact they're Flash-free is actually an advantage. That's because Flash tends to be quite inaccessible for blind people. It's interesting how disadvantages for us - sighted people - are actually an advantage for them. For example: I had a guy who was trying to access a job site in the US. One of the buttons on the website wasn't a clickable graphic, not a link, not a button ... it was just there on the website. It was completely inaccessible from the keyboard. But on an iPad he could feel around and find that button, which was 'upload your CV'.

"And also all the apps - here in Wellington, we've got WellyBUS from where you can download the timetables and know when the buses come."

"What people used to do was use the camera in their cell phones with a scanning OCR thing that reads it out to them. Instead of doing that, now there's a free app that just tells them when a bus is arriving."

There are also handy scanner/OCR apps for just a few dollars each, like iScannit and iScanner, but "If you get the K&FB Reader, which is a device made by another manufacturer, that costs six grand!

"One of the exciting things about iPhones and iPads is they allow you to use VNC into places, like Remote Desktop. I found an app called PC2Me+ that presents a user with their computer folder structure, and it works with VoiceOver, so they can actually open documents now and read them out, whereas Remote Desktop was very image based. It's one of the first accessible pieces of software. It's exciting stuff and everyone around here is talking about how cool these devices are."

(PC2Me+Files is $13.99; PC2Me Local is $5.29 for iPhone and iPad.)

"If you get a Nokia cellphone with Talks software (by Nuance), there are cool applications that can run Talks, but most of them are inaccessible. You're basically asking the user to download stuff and try them out, and most of them don't work. So people say 'these applications that run the Talks software are really cool, but we can't access them.' Whereas on an iPhone, the likelihood of being able to access stuff is pretty high, and besides, if you throw away $2 on app that doesn't work for you, it's not too big an ask."

Britta recounted taking a client to download a ringtone from the 2degrees website for her phone. Since none of the icons read out, it was too hard and they gave up. "It shouldn't be like that."

Parts of the Foundation in Auckland used to be Mac-based, but they're not any more. Reasons seemed to include changes of staff and expense, but back then, when I wrote about the Newmarket HQ for Macguide magazine, the assistive tech in Macs was considered a huge advantage for costs reasons. That's because fitting a cheaper PC with hardware and software to become more assistive put it well above the price of an out-of-the-box iMac - and this is still the case.

But things might be changing. "My big manager, who's blind, just loves his iPod touch. When I started working here he went through all the features of it, and what he uses, and I found it really interesting."

But "If they can port these applications to a Windows Phone and make them just as accessible - from our users' point of view, they don't care what the platform is, as long as they can get at it. And at the moment, that's the main advantage of Apple; that instant accessibility."

And if Microsoft can build something as effective as the App Store ecosystem, with the far greater reach Microsoft has, Apple could be in for a run for the money.

"Microsoft's also trying actively to make Silverlight accessible, I know that."

I remembered what the Microsoft spokesman said last week: 'This is the phone that worships you, rather than the phone that you worship.'

However the market turns, I applaud Apple's long-standing policy of wrapping assistive technologies into its devices and computers.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com