Can I get a direct line to an Apple engineer?
Hello, this is Stephen.
I have been completely blind since birth, but never the less I have been teaching myself computers for 12 years, and in that time I have learned a lot and now can fix computers.
I have ideas for how the accessibility could be made better on the Mac. Now, as Apple tells all their customers, you can just go to apple.com/feedback. However, I have been providing feedback through that page, but I feel that my feedback is going in 1 ear and out the other.
Since I have to use voiceover in order to use my Mac, some of my ideas for how it could be better are:
1. Voiceover feedback in the startup manager, holding option during startup.
2. Sound and voiceover feedback in safemode.
3. Voiceover feedback at the starting screen of internet recovery that says choose a network.
Now, just so it doesn’t get mixed up, I know that voiceover works in internet recovery. But it doesn’t work until the Mac has been connected to a WiFi network and the recovery software has been loaded into RAM.
I’m talking about the way you choose at the network screen when you start internet recovery for the first time. Now I know that there is a way around this by using an Ethernet connection, but obviously the MacBook Air does not have an Ethernet port.
I have also tried buying a USB to Ethernet adapter and then had my mother, who is sighted, tell me what was happening on the screen, and it still said choose a network, even though everything was connected properly.
4. Better accessibility with installing windows using BootCamp.
Let me explain... I have a 2017 13” MacBook Air, which does not require a bootable USB drive to install MS Windows. The point I’m trying to bring up here is, when you get to the Windows installation phase, there is no sound. Microsoft integrated narrator support for the Windows installer. But because Windows doesn’t recognize the sound hardware on the Macs, even if narrator is on there it still is no sound, and you can’t hear narrator.
The bootcamp drivers don’t get installed until after Windows has been installed. So I feel like Apple could change the sound card on these Macs in the future to one that Windows can recognize, or they could have it to where the drivers get loaded before BootCamp assistant reboots the machine, that way the Windows installer would recognize the sound hardware and then I would be able to install Windows without any problems.
I feel like all these improvements would benefit all blind users, as of right now because these areas aren’t very accessible I’m unable to use these features.
So getting write down to my question, do any of you know a direct line to an Apple engineer so I can discuss these things with one of them directly?
Again, like I said I feel like the feedback I’m providing on Apple’s feedback page isn’t being heard, and I feel like being able to speak to an engineer directly would be better anyway because I would be able to go into much more detail with them over the phone then on that feedback page.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.