Happy Birthday VoiceOver
— ♣On 29/April/2005, Apple Inc. released Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, the first commercial operating system with a built-in screen reader: VoiceOver.
A lot has changed since the introduction of VoiceOver. Here are some highlights:
- The creation of the Mac Visionaries community of visually impaired Mac users
- The birth of the Screenless Switchers podcast
- The introduction of Mac-cessibility
- The release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with VoiceOver enhancements
- iTunes introduces Closed Captioning in movie downloads
- NFB publishes their first flawed review of VoiceOver in Leopard
- Apple presents at CSUN
- Apple’s access efforts gains mainstream attention on MacWorld
- Apple extends its educational discount to students of Hadley School for the Blind
- AFB erroneously claims users can’t sync music with iTunes and VoiceOver
- OpenOffice gains Mac accessibility
- Full VoiceOver support is announced for iTunes
- iPod nanos gain speaking menus for accessibility
- Apple teams up with GW Micro to improve accessibility of iTunes in Windows
- Apple launches official accessibility site
- Apple and NFB reach agreement on iTunes access
- AccessWorld publishes a more accurate review of VoiceOver
- iWork becomes accessible
- The Mac-cessibility Round Table podcast is launched
- Apple announces and releases the iPhone 3GS with VoiceOver
- The VIPhone community is born
- NFB publishes a highly inaccurate review of VoiceOver, prompting community responses
- The Mac-cessibility Network is launched
- Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is released with huge improvements to VOiceOver
- iPhone OS 3.1 is released with enhanced access
- Assistiveware releases Proloquo2Go for the iPhone
- Digidesign demonstrates upcoming access to ProTools
- The NFB publishes a more accurate look at VoiceOver
- Apple unveils the iPad, which includes the same access features as the iPhone
- iBooks to include VoiceOver accessibility
- iPad is released with spectacular accessibility