Like humans, accessibility aids are imperfect
Don't get me wrong. I love my Apple products. In fact, there will be upcoming posts raving about how great they are, and I'm not just saying this because my husband is an Apple geek nor because I have a need to fulfill the Mac user stereotype. I say it because Apple products with their VoiceOver feature are, as a whole, the most advanced in accessibility functions for the visually impaired. But like all things of this world, VoiceOver is not perfect. Or is it me as a human being that's not perfect? I'll tell you the following story, and you decide for yourself.
I am part of this network that often sends announcements to their members via email. The emails are always from Donna Tripley, who I assumed was the network's PR rep. The network is small and emails from them are sparse--I maybe get one once every two years. I don't know most of the people in it personally, so imagine how surprised I was when the other night, as I was sifting through Twitter on my iPhone, I read a tweet from a fellow grad student. It read: "I hate getting emails from Donna Tripley..."
What? I thought. Donna Tripley sounds so familiar. Isn't she that network rep? Is my fellow grad student part of this network too?
I was a little giddy--you know that feeling when you find out you're somehow connected to someone in more ways than one. But because I hadn't seen the name Donna Tripley in so long, I wasn't sure if it was this network or something else that my schoolmate and I had in common. So naturally, I decided to google Donna Tripley to see which organization she worked for. What would we do without Google nowadays?
Unfortunately, "Donna Tripley" returned no notable results. So I returned to the tweet to check on the spelling of Ms. Tripley's name. Perhaps I spelled her last name wrong. I scrolled over each letter of Donna's name using VoiceOver's character mode, starting with her first name, and guess what I discovered?
Donna Tripley is really spelled "donotreply."
That's right, all this time I'd been getting automated emails from a "do not reply" account, I thought it was a woman named Donna Tripley. All because VoiceOver is not perfect and read aloud the words to sound like a name, a Donna Tripley to be exact. Sigh.
I told my husband who couldn't stop cracking up at my foolishness. But I beg your pardon. Is it my fault, or VoiceOver's?