Hello,
Warning ramble alert:
Well I only have heard one podcast so far on a general purpose podcast site which had some visually impaired people talk about their iphone 3gs experiences, i still need to listen to more. How it actually works is that apple has put a screenreader called voiceover onto the iophone, it is actually part of the operating system so many apps are accessible by default or it is very easy to make them so. You use the touch screen (yes I was skeptical about this too) just like a sighted person, you use gestures. I havent read all about it yet but everyone can try voicover since every 3gs hs it and it does not change anything about your system, you can turn it on or off, its just another app. I guess there is a manual somewhere an dI want to hunt it down and read all about it preferrably on my pc though.
I can now udnerstand that the screen would be possible to navigate with a touch screen, i still wonder about typing though but I am getting reports from blind people who are able to do it....
This is all so very exciting to me since other phones, symbian or windows mobile, with a screenreader which you always have to buy separately and costs 300 euro and is not transferrable from phone to phone, are MARGINALLY accessible at best so this really is arevolution and I feel really excited about this. I am so happy i mailed apple accessibility after i visited an apple store on wednesday and was quite disappointed at that tim ethat i could not use an apple macbook pro immediately. Yes, there is a learning curve to use voicover if you are used to windows but apparenlty it works quite well. I will certainly go back to that store in a week or so AFTER having read the manual this time.
Yes you heard that right voicover come sstandard with mac osx on all mac computers so all macs are accessible to visually impaired people right out of the box, that is so totally unlike any windows machine. Screenreaders normally can cost something lik e800 euro and you have to install them separately from windows and just HOPE that they will work with your particular video card. Also application support on windows is not so good as on the mac since the screenreader is not built into windows and it is more difficult to make stuff accesssible when this is not the case.
Greetings, Anouk,