I would appreciate any info that you may be able to provide in these matters.

Thank you for your time regarding this matter.

Sincerely,
Christine

“Guys”, not “Buys”; excuse the typo. 🙂

I hope everybody is well and happy, and here are a few comments from me regarding Ep. 34:
• Widgets in Notification Center are indeed a very cool thing. I have played around with some countdown timers, I think the one that worked best with VoiceOver is called Countdowns. What I like even more is the App Tap to Share which brings the opportunity to post to Facebook and to tweet back into Notification Center as a widget. Nice one! 🙂
• You talked about the new ‘instant hotspot’. I had major difficulties getting this to work; I followed all the steps that are listed in the iMore tutorial, etc. but nothing worked.
Recently, I went to the network preferences on my 2012 MacBook Air and created a new ‘location’. Before I added WiFi, Bluetooth and iPhone USB again, I checked the connectivity in the status bar, and, wahay, my MacBook was using my iPhone 5S as a hotspot. This might be helpful for others who have problems getting this to work.
• Now that the above recommendations have hopefully got me into the good books, I can make a comment that you will probably not like very much.
You ranted about people’s rants in mailing lists. Yes, I agree, complaining in mailing lists without making Apple aware of the issue won’t get the problem fixed any faster. I organize emails by threads, and it is my own decision whether to read them or not. I cannot make this decision when listening to the TripleClickHome podcast which I have grown to like so much. I listen to every new episode in happy anticipation of interesting apple news; but I don’t have the choice whether or not to listen to yet another OffTopic Braille debate.
Let people rant in mailing lists. We all know the placebo effect: people are good for people. And guys, I don’t buy the “We couldn’t even have that debate 10 years ago.”-argument. Of course, it is nice to have access to mainstream products at the same time and the same price as everyone else, but there is a “but”. Apple don’t make a secret out of their engagement in accessibility either. Tim cook praised Apple not so long ago for it in their shareholders meeting. If a company puts this into their advertisement leaflet, customers can expect things to go right and have the right to complain if they don’t. Apple’s accessibility is not a byproduct, it is part of their portfolio.
We all remember VoiceOver’s Page-2 issue in Text Edit and other word processors last year when Mavericks was released. One member of the TripleClickHome team, who happens to be familiar with beta testing, told me last year that it is indeed a bit pathetic that this bug still existed in the release, for it had been reported to apple from a very early stage of the Mavericks beta. The bug was later fixed but is now back in Yosemite. And you tell people not to rant?
• I and a number of others have repeatedly reported a major VoiceOver bug that was introduced in Pages 5.2, i.e. when highlighting text with CMD+shift+DownArrow and crossing a page break, the text on the previous page is no longer highlighted. A gentleman from AppleCare said to me on the phone about 4 weeks ago: “Oh yes, I see, you have reported this to us in March….and May…and July…”. Pages is claimed to be Apple’s professional answer to MS Word. I, as someone who uses Pages for research and professional work, have the right to rant about such dilettantism. Fixing this is very unlikely rocket science. I have reported this through AppleCare on the phone, so the person could actually hear VoiceOver, I have reported it via e-Mail to Accessibility@Apple.com and also through the feedback form on the Apple website. Nothing has been done.
I am all the more surprised that I have not heard about this bug on tripleClickHome. Am I the only user who copy-pastes text in Pages?
I shouldn’t have to be thankful to Apple for making MacOSX and iOs accessible, and I can expect that something that has repeatedly been brought to their attention is fixed in a timely manner.
• I have also brought to Apple’s attention through various channels that bringing support for RTF documents back into Pages would really be a good idea. You guys might not be aware of this, but many publishing companies for academic work request manuscripts for publications in RTF format, because it is so universal. If you work in a Windows environment in your job and look forward every day to going home to your MacBook, quite frankly, the public don’t really notice this. It is the academics who teach in universities, go to conferences, have their MacBook beside them when speaking to audiences of potential future Apple customers. I have spoken in front of audiences of 60, 80, 100 people and have been asked about my MacBook afterwards. “A blind person with a Mac? How does that work? That’s cool! I never knew this!”
I repeat myself: I should not have to be thankful to Apple for VoiceOver as long as I am an advertisement banner for them. And I can expect to be taken seriously.

Let me finish by coming back to the point that we couldn’t have had this debate 10 years ago. Imagine a law was introduced prohibiting the use of cars on a Saturday. Surely, the average American who walks less than 350 yards per day, would rant about this to other average Americans who also walk less than 350 yards per day. Would somebody say: “Come on guys! Be thankful we can use cars the remaining 6 days of the week! We wouldn’t have been able to have this debate 130 years ago, when there were no car!”

Buys, I love your podcast, have been listening since Ep. 2. I really wish you would focus a bit more on Apple, i.e. the topic of the show. I am an Apple customer and, quite frankly, don’t really care much who still uses Perkins braillers. there would be room for this in a Blind Nostalgia podcast. 😉
And I wish that you cut down on making me feel as if you are above other blind people. You are no better blind people than everyone else. People may rant in mailing lists, but you will have to accept the criticism that you give listeners the impression that you abuse your popularity for your own rants.
Guys, please get back to the roots!

I look forward to Episode 35 and, until then, I say
Goodbye and Greetings. Markus