23 things we want in Leopard

Um dos desejos expressos por Christopher Breen está relacionado com o futuro leitor de ecrã que incorporará o sistema operativo Leopard. Improve VoiceOver Apple performed a great service for the vision impaired when it included VoiceOver, a screen reader, in Mac OS X 10.4. Similar utilities were expensive and not intuitive to use. VoiceOver helped with the first issue—it’s free with every copy of the Mac OS—but it still needs help with the second. Apple packed VoiceOver with options; things should be simplified. For instance, VoiceOver’s Navigation tab carries three navigation options, four cursor tracking options, and two text selection tracking options. Before forcing this level of control on users, why not offer a couple of presets that configure VoiceOver in ways that most people will use? Also, the voices included with recent versions of the Mac OS are robotic. Companies such as Cepstral have demonstrated that you can create more natural sounding voices. I hope to hear some of those voices in Leopard. And when those voices do speak, I’d like what is spoken to be more immediately useful—for example, I do want to know the name of the button my cursor hovers over, but I don’t need to know that it’s “tab 2 of 5.”— CB