Accessibility

Hearing

Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard provides a variety of features designed to assist those who have difficulty hearing computer speech, sounds, and alerts.

Visual Alert

To let you know that the system or an application requires your attention, you can have Mac OS X Leopard flash the entire screen instead of playing an audio tone as an alert.

iChat

An Internet-based text, audio, and video conferencing application, iChat lets you converse and work with others even when you’re miles or continents apart. iChat works with AIM (the largest instant messaging community in the U.S.), MobileMe, Google Talk, and Jabber. With iChat, you can interact with buddies on either a Mac or a Windows PC in text, audio, or video chats.

Because it uses the advanced, wideband AAC-LD audio codec (coder/decoder), iChat delivers the clearest possible sound during audio chats. Sampling a full range of vocal frequencies, iChat sounds great with any voice.

Mac OS X Leopard also introduces a number of enhanced text messaging features to iChat, including the ability to:

• Log in to multiple services simultaneously
• Manage multiple chats as tabs in a single window
• Forward SMS messages
• Transfer files to a buddy during a chat session

Thanks to its high-quality video frame rate, iChat is ideal for those who communicate using sign language, making it a perfect candidate for use with the hands-on video relay service at HOVRS.com. As a participant, you can clearly see the finger and hand movements of others taking part in the chat. That allows you to communicate from afar with the same range of emotions you would use if in the same room with other chat participants.

Closed Captioning

You can easily set QuickTime Player and DVD Player to display open and closed captioning. It’s a simple two-step process: You enable captions in System Preferences or the application’s preferences, then have them displayed onscreen.

If you download captioned content from the iTunes Store, you’ll be able to play it back with captions on iPhone, iPod classic, iPod nano (4th generation), iPod touch,and Apple TV; in QuickTime player (for Mac and Windows); and in iTunes (for Mac and Windows).