Apple Accessibility

I enjoy writing about Apple Inc., and its products because I know them, and because I follow the news and rumors from Cupertino pretty closely. The Mac blogosphere, however is pretty well heeled territory, and is populated with plenty of characters that are funnier, more diligent and more talented than I am. The sheer volume of what gets written about Apple, Mac and the iPhone is just so great that I usually don’t feel like I have much to add to the record.

Occasionally, however, I do stumble on an interesting tidbit that slips by everybody else, or doesn’t get covered nearly as well as I think it should. A recent example of this was as agreement reached recently between Apple Inc., the National Federation of the Blind, and the State of Massachusetts to make iTunes and the iTunes store more accessible to people with visual disabilities. It’s a little dry, to be sure, but the agreement, along with accessibility improvements in Leopard, and the addition of spoken menus in the 4G Nano, is part of a real and welcome push by Apple to make it’s core products more friendly to the disabled.

Happily, most users of Apple products don’t have the need to use any accessibility functions, but that fact has made the issue of usability for the disabled a dark corner that hasn’t been well addressed by the press, the blogosphere or, sadly, the company itself. Historically, the Mac OS has lagged seriously behind Windows for disabled usability. The Windows world has had for years, a variety of different screen reading, optical character recognition and other software that (with varying degrees of convenience) help the blind to do most of what the rest of us do on our computers everyday. The Mac side, for the most part, didn’t go much beyond some gimmicky voices that were supported sporadically and some very basic navigational ability in the OS. iPods, with the exception of the Shuffle, have been pretty much unusable to the blind since they were introduced, and the iPhone, because it is almost completely lacking in physical buttons that the blind rely on, is the most inaccessible cellular phone on the market for blind users. Perhaps most troubling, though, was the fact that Apple’s most used piece of software (iTunes for Windows), was impenetrable to Windows based screen reading software to the point of making it all but unusable to disabled users who were comfortably using most other software on their computers.

To be fair, the gap between blind accessibility on the Mac OS, and Windows wasn’t entirely Apple’s fault, nor did it really demonstrate a commitment my Microsoft.* Straight out of the box, Windows hasn’t historically been any more usable for the blind than the Mac OS. Most of the software that make Windows based computers usable by the blind is made by third party developers like Freedom Scientific, not by Redmond. In that sense, usability on the Mac has been the victim of low market share, which makes software development in general less desirable for the platform, since the user base (and potential customer base) is much smaller. I don’t have any numbers on it, but I also think that the historically higher price (or the perception of higher prices) on the Mac scared off the state agencies that often help fund computer equipment for the disabled. In short, accessibility software for the Mac has been scarce for the same reasons that most large, complicated and/or specialized software haven’t been available for the Mac--lack of sufficient financial incentives and bureaucratic intransigence.

Having said that, accessibility on the iPod wasn’t an afterthought, it was given no thought at all, and iTunes and the iTunes store weren’t much better.

Thankfully, that has been changing in the last couple of years. Apple has made great strides in filling the gap left by developers with VoiceOver, and the “Alex” voice included in Leopard is better than anything I’ve heard on the Windows side. Likewise, the new spoken menus option available on the 4G iPod Nano are a welcome addition.** The aforementioned agreement between Apple, the NFB and the state of Massachusetts is also encouraging because it promises to finally address the accessibility problems with iTunes on the Windows side, and to finally open up the iTunes store to the visually disabled as well. The latter will be particularly welcome, as it should allow the blind to independently access the audio content from iTunes U and purchase audiobooks from the iTunes store.

Apple’s journey to accessibility isn’t over, it hasn’t even achieved parity with Windows yet, but hopefully the positive steps we’ve seen recently are an indication of things to come.

*Amusingly, and I think indicative of the relative tone-deafness of each company, Apple’s accessibility options are in a preference pane called “Universal Access” whose icon is a standing and wide armed figure, apparently freed from constraints, while the Windows control panel in question is called “Accessibility Options”, and is indicated by a person shackled to a wheelchair.

**Interestingly, the spoken menus on the Nano don’t work the way most screen reading software does. Usually, the software will “read” text on the fly and translate it to spoken audio, but with the 4G nano, all text is basically pre-read on the computer that the Nano is tethered to, and a spoken audio file is produced and then attached to the .mp3 or aac file that it describes and transferred to the Nano. As a result, none of the “extras” on the iPod, like calendar, notes, clock, or perhaps most frustratingly, battery level can yet be used by the blind on the iPod. Also, if your iPod is tethered to a pre-Leopard version of the Mac OS, then you’re stuck with those gimmicky sounding voices--No Alex for you!

Poor Reporting Begets Poor Reporting

I’m guessing that we’ll see this making the rounds of the Apple blogosphere in the next few days and weeks. Environmental advocacy group ClimateCounts.org has released a new report ranking, among other things, the environmental impact of a number of major electronics manufacturers. There are plenty of gritty details to pour over, but what’s going to end up getting reported is that IBM took the top spot with a score of 77, while Apple was ranked last with 11.

Now first, I applaud the effort. Even with all the attention that has been gained for environmental causes over the last few years, big companies still aren’t doing enough to reduce their footprint. Large corporations are slow to change, regardless, and the kind of top to bottom change of outlook that solid environmental awareness requires is especially difficult to inject into a corporate culture that is, by its nature, driven primarily by the bottom line. What progress has been made is due, in part, to the efforts of groups like ClimateCounts to raise awareness and put some pressure on corporations to clean up their act. But...

There are a couple of problems here. First, the scores are frequently subjective and are sometimes dead wrong. Take, for instance, Apple’s score on item number 11. ClimateCounts asks “Is there top level support for climate change action?” That’s pretty subjective, but they at least attempt to break it down, awarding one point if “Senior level executive or Board members designated as responsible for climate issues”, and awarding two points if “Clear, public articulation of company’s views on climate by CEO and/or top management.” I’ll leave aside, for the moment, the question of whether “public articulation” of a company’s position really makes that much difference to real-world environmental impact. Apple scores 0 points in this category, despite a very public, and widely reported open letter from the CEO that specifically addresses the company’s eco-related initiatives. Did they miss that one, or does it not count?

Second, the methodology is seriously flawed here. ClimateCounts uses publicly available information to formulate scores. Where information isn’t available, they simply assign a score of zero. Now, I understand the importance of open reporting to environmental verification, but to assume that there is no effort or action in a particular area just because there hasn’t been a public reporting of it is kind of like assuming that nobody in your office cleans their bathrooms just because they haven’t talked to you about it. The result is a profile by ClimateCounts that doesn’t rate the actual greenness of companies so much as it rates the ability of ClimateCounts to obtain information on their greenness. This is especially important with a company like Apple, where innovation is central to the culture and secrecy has evolved to protect poaching from competitors.

IBM scored 77 in the ClimateCounts report , Nokia 37 and Apple 11. Is Nokia really more than twice as environmentally friendly as Apple? Does anyone really think that Apple is seven times worse for the planet than IBM? No reasoned analysis would come to that conclusion, but some group made a report with numbers and issued it, and the reporting is going to be that Apple scored an abysmal 11 points and is terrible on the environment, when the truth is that Apple is terrible at transparency (except in its products) and terrible at reporting on the environment.