Friday, May 28, 2010

Just Push the Button

On my desk sits the “Easy Button” – you know the one (from Staples). When pressed it says (with a touch of surprise in a kind of funny, raspy voice) --- “That, was easy!”

Most things can be done in one of two ways, the easy way or the hard way. Still we tend to default to the expectation that some things, like technology, have to be difficult, and then forget to look around for the easier approach.

Recently I have been seeing this phenomenon manifest itself in this very blog. The posts about experiences with my iPhone and iMac (and next, iPad) have generated interest from readers to do the same, and to contact me with an enthusiastic thank you, or a request for some more advice.

I am delighted to receive the comments and questions but wonder if they are missing their easy button.

The correspondence relating to my blog posts, almost all, comes to me via email. Now that is not the easy way, there is a box for your comment, right below the post. On the other hand, finding my email address, which must be searched around for, is a lot more trouble. Yet, nearly 100% of my correspondence comes in via the hard way.

I am also getting comments and queries about accessibility training for Apple products. My answer is “the easy way of course.” Sign up for One to One Training at the nearest Apple Retail Store. Any other way is the hard way. There is nothing better than one year of unlimited training sessions for $99. There has never been a better value, and there is no better training. They just make it easy.

Look no further, you are holding the button!

1 comment:

  1. I have the ipod touch, and I am not impressed with "voice over" at all. The speech is nice and clear, yes, but the learning curve involved with using voice-over without the devices usual jestures has been extremely challenging for me. I find myself quickly turning on and off "voice over" just to use the device frequently, and thats for a person with a little bit of vision, near total but not quite. I can't imagine using "voice over" without any vision at all, I wouldn't be able to do it, even as technical as I am.

    Clicking on icons is about the only useful thing I can do with voice-over. You can't type with voice over very good because you have to double-click very quickly to get a key to select, which is a very slow process and I can't always get to function very well, so I am not a fan of voice-over at all for the iphone / itouch. the speech synthesizer is good yes, but not the guestures, or lack there of when voice-over is enabled.

    ReplyDelete

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