Accessibility improvements in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Apple recently announced that Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. Snow Leopard, will ship in September this year. I’m looking forward to it for several reasons, one of them being the accessibility improvements it will bring.

According to Apple’s Mac OS X Accessibility page, Snow Leopard has plenty of accessibility news, several of which will not only help people with disabilities:

VoiceOver trackpad gestures let you control VoiceOver from the trackpad
Improved Braille support means built-in support for even more Braille displays
Finally, full VoiceOver support for HTML tables
The rotor lets you use the trackpad to move through text as if you were turning a dial
Quick Nav makes it easier to control the computer using just one hand
Auto web spots interpret the visual design of web sites to figure out important locations on the page
Custom labels let you manually assign labels to unlabelled or badly labelled form controls
More detailed customisation lets you configure VoiceOver to better suit you

Lots of good news, though I would have liked to see ”Full WAI-ARIA support” on the list as well.

Posted on June 17, 2009 in Accessibility, Mac, Apple