First bite of the apple

Making the switch from a PC to an Apple Mac computer seems to be a bit of a trend among disabled people. Sunil Peck was a cynic; now he’s seen the light

For months I’ve been loathe to ditch my Windows PC and switch to an Apple Mac. It wasn’t just those Apple bores who bang on about how superior Apple is to PCs that put me off, it was the amount of time I knew it would take to learn to use a new set of programs and keyboard commands.

But following a series of sudden crashes and a letter asking for a £200 upgrade fee for my Windows screen-reading software, I decided enough was enough.

Several weeks on, and my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. It’ll be a while before I get near the level of proficiency I reached as a PC user over 12 years; it took me two days just to get through the initial configuration with the Mac’s built-in screen reader VoiceOver, which everyone else seems to find dead easy.

And yet, two weeks on, I’m surprised at how comfortable I now feel using email and Twitter and surfing the web.

That’s a lot to do with the many hours I spent fiddling around in various applications and pressing key combinations just to see what would happen.

I’m also indebted to the blind Mac users who give unpaid tech support on email forums and record audio tutorials on accessing the Mac from the keyboard.

Alex Barker, Advice and Information Officer at the charity AbilityNet and a Mac user for four years, tells me that Apple has also incorporated assistive technology into the Mac’s operating system for people unable to use the keyboard mouse or trackpad and who are partially sighted.

But he also says that, not surprisingly, there are still far more third-party solutions for people with other disabilities available for Windows compared to the Mac.

“I do a lot of work with people with motor neurone disease who use a package which is a switch-operated system to communicate and control your computer. At the moment, there’s nothing like it available for the Mac. But that’s not to say there won’t be in the future.”

From my point of view, Apple has to address the fact that I don’t know if an application is accessible with VoiceOver until I’ve bought and installed it. I bought an app from the App Store because it was completely accessible on my iPhone. But it doesn’t work on the MacBook.

But all credit to Apple, a mainstream company, for including a screen reader in its operating system. Although I struggled to get up and running at first, I’m not aware of any other blind user who did.

My advice to anyone thinking of making the switch is not to wait until your Windows PC falls down before you do it. Apart from anything else, it’s incredibly reassuring to know that you can revert to your PC if there’s anything you’re finding hard to do when you first start off with the Mac.