As I've posted here many times, the best way to make the transition from 9 to X is slowly, over time.

When X was in beta I bought a cheap iBook and ran it along side my working computer, just to learn X and test things that I wanted to test on it.

As I got more comfortable with it I moved some of the things I was doing onto the iBook and then, over a year later I installed X on my working machine and ran a few things in classic.

I've not had Classic or 9 on my personal computer for over a year now. Of course, I'm in a very different place from some of you who have many AT legacy apps to support.

On who's to blame for slow migration, AT vendors or Apple I think it's a bit of both. Apple maybe needed to do more to help AT vendors along in the transition but then AT vendors have been going where the money is for years and the money is in developing for Windows because much of our community went for cheap machines years ago.

I admit it freely, I have always liked Mac OS for what it is: a well designed and intuitive OS that somehow fits my brain. I just can't feel the same way about using windows. So, I was lucky enough to not have to migrate away, ever.

I think many AT vendors who had invested heavily in supporting Macs thought Apple might get forced out of business and between that and the difficulty of migrating from 9 to X they were reluctant to dive in. I get that.

The entire industry is in flux now and even though Apple is doing quite well, part of the reason for this is the iPod, not simply wide adoption of OS X. Yes, there is spill-over and apple's market share in desktop OS's has doubled (from 2.5 to 5%) and at the same time Microsoft is looking a bit worn at the edges.

However, anything is possible now and because the very nature of computing is changing (phones are now the convergence tool) I think it's important for many of us to say fluid and flexible.

Yes, I'm still heavily invested in Macs and love my PowerBook and I hope that more AT and other vendors adopt OS X, but I also hope that some brilliant inventor is working hard in a garage right now on a tool that will end run all of this and become the next great thing.

Of course, if the next great thing presented itself I'm not confident that the AT community would recognize it.

Hey Richard! Thanks for posting here.

I am a big fan of all the work you have done over the years promoting how a PC can be of such critical use to people with specific learning disabilities like Dyslexia.

I am aware of your “just do it” approach (in moderation of course) and that you are pleased to be Classic-free on your newest machine.

Applying that advise to my current situation, I will just have to suck it up. I think Launcher will work under classic as well as anything. So I will put the Carbonized apps on the Dock, keep the ones that are well behaved in Launcher, and ditch the bulk of them.

Several of the titles seem to use Macromedia Director. Has anyone come across a trick to update these in particular? Naturally, I have tried without success getting help from publisher, nor Macromedia.

Richard, you ain’t kidding about AT developers being slow to recognize the next great thing, no matter how obvious to practitioners. Alternative keyboards and pointing devices were available in USB only five, six, seven years (and more) after the iMac debuted. When I first heard of USB, and read that Microsoft was working on support for Windows 98, my immediate thought was, “Wow, will that make setting up the lab sooo much easier! Multiple devices live! No rebooting to plug in a different keyboard or mouse! No need for software drivers!” One can still find devices for the blind with serial/PS2/parallel/media slot or proprietary floppy. USB does all of those functions of course. It is almost unbelievable how long change takes.

One thing I would love to know Richard: Has the Services > Summarize feature made a difference for you?

Hi Bruce,

if you're looking for a 'launcher' style interface in OSX you can select the Simple Finder. Go to System Preferences, and look at Accounts. Make sure you've got an account set for your daughter, so that she can log in and have her own personalised desktop, and if you set Parental Controls you can either list the programmes and system settings available to her, or go directly to choose Simple Finder, which may be the kind of thing you're looking for. (This is in 10.4 - the same thing is possible in 10.3 but I think it uses a different term than Parental Controls).

FWIW I also advocate the "migrate gradually" approach. My beige G3/233MHz was running out of steam. Well, it was as fast as when I bought it but it couldn't handle full screen movies and I really wanted to buy a camcorder!

So I carried on using the G3 but I bought a used G4/400MHz tower off eBay and installed "Panther" on top of OS9.2.2 (which I simply dragged and dropped via the network from my G3).

To give the G4 a bit more oomph I spent an unnecessary small fortune on a 1.4GHz Sonnet CPU upgrade.

I started to use the G4 occasionally for web browsing then loading photos and finally got a camcorder and used iMovies.

I was still using the G3 for a year but, recently, I bought another 2x1GHz G4 tower and transferred the G3 Hard Drive over to it. Now I still use all the same stuff but in "Classic" mode. That hasn't proved too much of a problem and almost all of my applications still work perfectly (and faster).

Oh, yes, I invested in a couple of additional 120Gb hard drives for the G4s to get some useful capacity. I also added a couple of external Firewire 300Gb Seagate drives which are virtually silent. I use SilverKeeper to backup my files onto these automatically.

I finally got around to giving the kids an OS X machine. Kid Pix 3X from software MacKiev is very nice! I did not retire the G3 iMac as I had hoped, but two machines are better than one!

I still find OS 9.2.2 to be better (for small children) in general, but mostly because much of the software is krufty. The iMac is set for 256 colors because lots of the educational games do not support better settings. I am not putting these packages on the OS X system! Most days, I wish Classic ran in a Window rather pretending to be seamless.

One motivation I had for switching was to get their AT working. I have a USB TouchWindow, KidTrac trackball, and Big Keys Plus keyboard on the kids’ OS X machine. The KidTrac and Big Keys are PS/2 so I am using a Pi Engineering USB adapter. None of this ever worked with the G3 iMac with Mac OS 9, and my expectation was that OS X would fix this. No such luck.

The TouchWindow looses calibration every time the Mac goes to sleep.

The KidTrac right-clicks instead of left-clicking (all three buttons).

With the Big Keys, I cannot change the Ctrl key to the command key without changing the default behavior of the standard keyboard (also attached).

Can anyone help with any of these three problems?

Thanks!

Any word on speaking dynamically pro for OS X?
thanks

Have you looked into Layout Kitchen? PCS is an option. It is half the price of Speaking Dynamically, but don’t let that stop you!
http://www.assistiveware.com/layoutkitchen.php