Mac UI Design Rocks

[da]

Mac's design for "Accessibility" features are awesome.

First, I use screen-zooming all the time. alt-mac-equals to zoom in, alt-mac-minus to zoom out. But for some reason it's turned off by default: (Preferences -> Universal Access -> Zoom -> turn zoom on)

Second: speech recognition. It's a fun toy, at least; It can navigate screens and windows reasonably, though I'm too impatient to rely on it.

This morning's discovery, the reason for this post: any application can be apple-scripted; the GUI can be worked via programming. This includes reading or setting the values of any user-editable field on the screen.

In more practical terms, even if (say) I can't convince the developers of Cha-Ching to add an applescript interface, I could write a simple Quicken import right now. Using features which were built into the OS to provide accessibility for people who can't use the regular GUI. Thank you Apple.

More details about GUI Scripting here.

Comments

[sachmet.livejournal.com]

Also, with the release of 10.4.8, you can now hold Control and use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out, or if you have a later PB/MB/MBP, you can hold control and use two-finger scrolling to do the same thing.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

if you have a later PB/MB/MBP, you can hold control and use two-finger scrolling to do the same thing.

That's really cool. Thanks, I didn't know that!

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, most people who actually *need* the accessibility features, say because they're blind, seem to think that they suck. I don't have the details, but I gather that one of the beefs is that many of Apple's own applications use special trickery to disable lots of the accessibility features or use special trickery that as a side-effect happens to not work with the accessibility features.