Making the move to Mac

It seems that increasing numbers of disabled people are making the move over to Mac. Having just done so himself, Ian Macrae looks at why this might be

My decision to change to a Mac, after having for many years used a PC with a screen reader to give me Braille and speech access, was made partly for access reasons, but it was also a political decision.

I was, as you might say, voting with my fingers.

The fact is that Apple has stolen a march on its competitors by building in the access solution to using its products from the ground up.

In other words, on the Mac, as on the iPhone, you’re working with access tools that are integrated with the operating system instead of ones that are bolted on and, all too often, at odds with it.

And that’s where the politics comes in. Like any other would-be computer purchaser, it’s possible for disabled people to go into a store and check out the usability of Apple products simply, in the case of their computers, by knowing, or having someone tell you, a single keystroke combination.

Press the command key with F5 and any new Mac computer will start talking to you. You just can’t believe how liberating an experience that is.

In other respects, I was in a luckier situation than many other people. The company agreed to lend me a MacBook Pro for the purposes of familiarisation and review. They also let me have the machine for a sensible loan period of two full months. I was also able to take advantage of a number of online learning resources: in particular, a series of pod­casts produced by David Woodbridge of the charity Vision Australia. Although relatively limited in their scope, these short demos not only taught me the basics but gave me confidence in using the keyboard and working in the Mac environment, which is quite different from the Windows one I was used to.

Friends and colleagues had told me that it would be a steep and rather scary learning curve. Scary it sometimes was, but it turned out to be easier than I’d dared to expect. Once you get into the Mac way of thinking, doing things actually seems much more intuitive.

People may argue that Apple computers are too expensive, and on the face of it, they are. But in considering cost, it’s worth factoring in having to buy additional access software for a PC and the fact that you don’t need to buy virus protection for a Mac.

Mac users also say that their machines have longer life than the three years expected of a PC.

It’s all well and good, though, enjoying the new-found freedom that Apple’s loan had given me. But what happened when the two-month loan ended? Well actually, before it ended, I’d already bought my own MacBook Pro and I’m using it right now.