I am legally blind and my husband is totally blind. I have an iphone that I like a lot and my hubby is coming along nicely learning to use vo. He currently has a pc that I know is going to die soon and we will need to replace it. He works for a local church doing event planning/facilitating and pastoral teaching and blogging. We had trouble with screen readers of late and have decided to switch to apple. I am curious as to what route we should go. Would a mac be more conducive to his needs or can an ipad do what he wants. He does a ton of email and word processing. We are fundraising for the equippment so I need to know what to rally for. Any thoughts? I would also like to know some pros and cons to owning either device. Thanks.
By Histears4u, 1 September, 2015
Comments
Mac vs ipad which to choose
Hi probably each voiceOver user going to give difference opinion.
In my cace I will be going give some advice to you , spend some time reading and take your own decision..
there is a free book that you can download from iTunes via iBooks
Mastering the Macintosh with voiceOver
the link is below
by Tim Sniffen https://itun.es/us/JTkM1.l
Happy shopping.
IMHO go for the Mac
Hi,
If it were me, I would go for the Mac since a lot of word processing will be needed. The touch screen keyboard is much slower than a physical keyboard, and if he is a touch typer he will want to use a blue tooth keyboard with the iPad.
An iPad can do word processing but not nearly as easy as a Mac. Cut, copy and paste is much more dificult on an iPad, for example.
Also, since your husband is using a PC the full computer will be a more familiar experience.
Do you have an Apple store near by? Call them and ask for their accessibility expert and go there and play with all the products.
Whatever you choose there will be a learning curve. This is why I kept my PC while I learned the Mac.
If everything else .... Well
If everything else .... Well the Mac can give you the possibility to install Windows inc ase the adaptation does not happen the way you expect it to but a Mac might be more expensive.
I would go for a full computer solution. But in the other hand portability might be an issue and iPads are more portable ....
Try to plan the cenarius you use the most and put the two options on top of those to see what works better and make your decision based on it.
Mac
Lots to consider. We do plan to keep the pc while we learn the mac. We are tossed as we do like win 10. However the cost of a good screen reader for a pc jacks the price terribly. Not sure what to do here. My options are as I see it to get a mac, get a pc and buy a screen reader. The ipad is out as he types all the time and does a lot of writing. The info helps now I have to decide whether it is prudent to switch from pc to mac. Thanks for the help.
I nade the switch
Hi,
As I mentioned earlier, I made the switch to Mac a couple of years ago.
My frustration with Zoom Text was a driving force in my discisssion.
I have some vision so I rely on the Mac's Zoom and speech features, and do not use voice over.
The speech feature is in the right click menu and allows me to highlight text, and then have the Mac speak the highlighted text. I have since set up a hot key, so I do not have to go into the right click menu every time I want to read something.
This is exactly how I used Zoom Text on the PC. The Zoom Text program was $600.00 and required additional upgrades at $150.00 each.
My Mac mini cost me $579.00, and all accessibility features are built in.
All upgrades are free, although I do not know how they could possibly improve it. everything works flawlessly. I am glad I made the switch.
I have an iPhone, an iPad Mini Apple TV and my wife also has an iPhone and an iPad. All our Apple devices integrate with each other with out additional software, which is another plus.
Please note, The Mac Mini is only a CPU and does not come with a monitor, USB keypad or USB mouse...but I already had these from my PC.
I still keep the ild PC, their are some harmonica and guitar programs I use occasionally, but 99% of my desktop work is done on the Mac.
I have both the PC and the Mac hooked up to one monitor and one keypad via the use of A B switches. I have a mouse for the PC and the Apple Magic Track Pad for the Mac.
Good luck,
PS, I also have an Acrobat CCTV camera hooked up to the same monitor.
One other thing to keep in
One other thing to keep in mind, there are rumors that iOS9 will have a lot of new keyboard commands if you use a bluetooth keyboard with your iPad. Supposedly they will make editing a lot more Mac like, so then you'd have a really portable solution if you don't really need all the power of a Mac. I hope they bring this to the iPhone as well.
That would theoretically be awesome, but I don't know how VO would figure into it I. E. things like spell checking wouldn't be as easy as it would be with OS X's system-wide spell checker. Here's hoping Apple makes that easier with VO in iOS.