Leopard, the new version of the Apple Mac operating system (10.5). arrived today and I have installed it. This blog will be my experiences with it over the next few days, the good, the bad (if any) and the indifferent.

Installation

The installation of the upgrade was very straightforward, insert the CD, click a few buttons—all possible without the mouse—and wait over a long lunch, the first stage is checking the installation disk and that took 30 minutes, which was a bit of a surprise, the rest of the installation took about the same time.

After the installation everything was as I had it set up before. Well, not quite everything; crtl+f2 and ctrl+f3 (to get to the blue apple and the hidden dock bar) had both been disabled (which is the default setting).

Finder

The first bit of good news is the navigation around the finder tree structures now works the way you would expect it to. If you are in the middle of a folder with lots of files and you press left cursor it takes you to the folder itself and clicking left cursor again closes the folder (just like Windows) Tiger worked differently (I suspect it was a bug) and was a real pain. Unfortunately the other 'bug' in this area is still there. If you want to choose a set of files you cursor key to the first one of interest then holding the shift key press the down cursor key and more files are chosen, unfortunately if you click once too often you would expect to be able to use cursor up to remove the last file; this does not workin fact what happens is that a file is added to the top of the list, which is no use to me at all.

While in finder press the apple button and 4 to see the new Cover Flow feature of Leopard. This shows a flow of thumbnails of the cover pages of each document making it very easy to find the right document, pressing the space-bar expands the thumbnail making it quick and easy to check the document. Page up and page down allow you to scan the whole document. All of this works without a mouse and speeds up the process of finding and looking at files so I think I will consider this an accessibility improvement.

Mail

According to Apple the big news for mail is you can change the stationery, this is a nice to have and quite fun but is really just a bit of fluff in comparison to the other changes. The big changes are to-do lists and improved formatting.

In my view the big advance in formatting is the ability to easily create simple and numbered lists in a note, I was trying to do exactly that a few days before Leopard and it was a pain, I had to create the numbers and there was no easy way of getting the list entries to indent properly. With Leopard it is just clicks away (format, lists, insert-) and you have well formatted list and sub lists. There are other things in the formatting which are worth looking at.

The to-do list may revolutionise my life. I can now create a to-do related directly to an email message. So if I send a message asking someone to do something (which I do quite often) I can now set a to-do to chase them in a weeks time, if I have not heard back; at the moment I have to rely on my memory to do that and it does not always work.

I think I will be using this feature a lot but there are some significant accessibility issues. To put it bluntly if the human interface to this feature had been specifically designed to be inaccessible it would not have been much worse. My list of issues is long and detailed so I have put it at the end of this blog.

This is all a real shame because it suggests that Apple do not take accessibility seriously on a continuous basis.

Help

If you click on help the first option you are given is search, if you type in a search term such as copy it will give you a list of copy facilities in the program you are in. If you cursor down to one of these options it will open up the relevant toolbar menus and pressing enter has the same effect as the toolbar entry. This is a very quick way to get to features you do not use very often or you did not know about at all. If a feature has a short-cut key then this is on the toolbar entry, so this is a quick way to learn relevant short-cuts rather than trying to memorise a very long list.

I would add it to my new accessibility features list except that voice over does not read out the entries in the help list. In fact I cannot find out how to get Voice Over to read out any of the help information which is a major accessibility issue.

Conclusions

Some of these new features improve usability and hence accessibility but the failures suggest that accessibility is still not in the DNA of Apple.

Accessibility problems with to-do

Earlier in this article I complained about the inaccessibility of the to-do list function, here is my list of issues:

1. To add a 'to do' to an email you have to mark a section of the email then click on the todo button. Both of these actions are only possible with a mouse: mouse-only equates to not accessible.
2. Having done that the information pops up above the note in a very quirky type face that I would not include in an accessible solution.
3. To the left of the text is another button, accessible only through the mouse, that allows you to add extra options; crucially, a due date.
4. The options are displayed as a small light brown text on a yellow background which I suspect does not pass any of the colour combination tests.
5. Not exactly an accessibility issue but I was surprised that I had to type the date in rather than being given the option of choosing a date from a calendar.
6. We then look at the to-do list and first a bit of good newsthere is keyboard access to sorting the list by column (due date, priority etc.), and for choosing the columns to display. I think this little bit of accessibility has crept in because it is functionality from other parts of mail and not something designed for the to-do feature.
7. Each to-do has a title and on the left hand end of the title is an arrow, clicking on the arrow takes you to the source email. But you can only click on it with a mouse.
8. When in the the to-do list you can edit the entries (change the due date, change the priorities etc.) but again you need the mouse most of the time, If you tab into the due date and cursor up and down, the date changes. You can also type in a new date, which is good enough. However, if you tab into the priority field you cannot change it except by using the mouse.
9. I also tried using mail with Voice Over, the built-in screen reader. It allowed me to read and navigate around my mailbox quite effectively. I still need to learn more about how it works but one thing I have noticed is that I can navigate around mail better using only the keyboard with Voice Over on, so I am thinking of switching the volume down so I can avoid using the mouse. The one bit of navigation that does not work is moving to the to-do list.

Dutch Translation

Nieuw Computer Magazine (NCT) have published a Dutch translation of this posting.