M12Y

New iWork ‘09 and iLife ‘09

6/January/2009 — ♣

Today, Apple announced updates to their iWork and iLife application suites. The new features are certainly impressive, and incremental, but we are uncertain at this time whether or not any accessibility enhancements are part of these updates.

Additionally, iWork.com became a public beta today. This suite of browser-based applications allows users to collaborate on iWork files over the Internet, and appears to be relatively accessible.

We will update further when we know more on the accessibility of these products.

New 17-inch MacBook Pro

6/January/2009 — ♣

Apple announced the awaited update to it’s 17-inch MacBook Pro notebook computer. The new model includes the same unibody aluminum design as the rest of the MacBook line, the same glass trackpad, up to 8GB of memory, both hard drive and SSD drive options, and extended battery life. The new model is the thinnest, lightest notebook of its size on the market, and is available for $2799 USD.

iTunes going DRM-free

6/January/2009 — ♣

The biggest news at this morning’s Apple keynote presentation at MacWorld Expo 2009 was easily surrounding iTunes, and is also the news that will be of the most interest to our visually impaired readers.

Starting today, a staggering eight million songs in the iTunes Music Store will be made available DRM-Free, with the remainder of the catalog to follow before the end of March.

DRM, (Digital Rights Management), is a mechanism by which digital content purchased online is protected against unauthorized distribution or piracy. The scheme never worked well, and resulted in penalizing honest users while doing nothing to stop true content pirates.

You can upgrade your existing iTunes purchases o DRM-free versions at 256BPS, (twice the quality of standard iTunes content), for $.30 per track, or 30% the price of an album.

Additionally, Apple announced that variable pricing will also be introduced into the iTunes Music Store beginning in April. Songs will be priced at either $.69, $.99, or $1.29 per track at that time.

iWork ‘09 Becomes Accessible with VoiceOver

6/January/2009 — ♣

The new iWork ‘09, which Apple released today, sports a slew of new features, but the most impressive to VoiceOver users will be its accessibility.

Apple’s come through for visually impaired users once again. This powerful productivity suite has been beautifully set up to work well with VoiceOver. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote all work well. Users can even choose from the various templates included with the products, each of which is labelled with helpful descriptions.

We believe that there will be a learning curve for those used to creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Windows with Microsoft Office, but at this time, it appears that iWork ‘09 is fully accessible.

Once again, we’d like to thank Apple for their commitment to accessibility.