Help us make OmniOutliner accessible

The Blog

by Ken Case on October 2, 2012

Accessibility is important to us here at Omni, and we have a long history of supporting accessibility in our apps. (In 2002, we added speech recognition to OmniWeb so you could surf the web using voice commands and ask it to read pages back to you using text-to-speech—even before the operating system itself was accessible.)

Unfortunately, we’ve fallen behind in our support for accessibility over the last few years—on both Mac and iOS, but particularly on iOS. Until our apps are fully accessible, we won’t consider them complete.

To that end, we’ve been working on making OmniOutliner for iPad accessible. As anyone who has used an accessible app knows, good accessibility design goes deeper than just slapping on some accessibility tags. Once we’re sure we’re on the right track with OmniOutliner, we’ll move on to making OmniFocus accessible.

Our internal QA team has reviewed the work we’ve done so far, and we think it’s ready for some external beta testing. We can’t post public beta builds of our iOS apps, but if you’re interested in joining our private beta-testing pool please contact us at omnioutliner-ipad@omnigroup.com.

Thank you!

Comments

There is another kind of accessibility that I know you are also hard at work on, and that is synchronization between iPad and Mac versions of OmniOutliner documents. Any idea when we enthusiastic users will have a truly functional, cloud-based ability to just pick up wherever we left off somewhere else? I find myself NOT using OmniOutliner as much as I want because certain documents are most useful on my Mac and others on my iPad. The current solutions to transfer them back and forth just leave too much to chance, always having to remember to save to a server or forward by email. If there is already a more elegant, workable solution in place, please let me know! I know the synchronization process is not an easy one, but you have a LOT of people hoping you get it solved sooner rather than later!

Bruce Williamson

10.02.12 5:19 PM

A key part of accessibility is the ability to see something. The Omni group move towards faded pastel type colours on a faded background, as exemplified by the Omni website, is a key example of how to put a website together which is harder and harder to read. Your home page is any many respects unreadable, as it is just a faded set of colours with no contrast to improve legibility. So, get the basics right Omni, instead of falling prey to the user unfriendly form over function trend to make everything appear faded. A substantial, proportion of your users wear glasses, and you are making it harder and harder to even bother with your website. By the way, orange due tasks on a white background in the iPhone app is another example. Check the Things black on white approach compared to yours. Rant over.

William Newton

10.02.12 6:25 PM

A “View/Zoom” feature is desperately needed in OmniOutliner for both vision challenged people and regular people with high-resolution monitors. Many has been the time when I wanted to visually increase the size of my document without changing its actual font size.

Chip Anderson

10.02.12 8:45 PM

What really matters is collaborating the Mac and the iPad versions of OmniOutliner. It is needed same way of working with styles and cloud synchronization. I bought OO for iPad immediately when it appeared on the App Store and hoping to be able to edit existing documents in my iPad and then on Mac and again. Existing methods are not suitable, so it is indeed impossible till now.

Alexey Kletsel

10.02.12 11:55 PM

Omni Outliner sync… when? I keep forgetting to import the new version and do work for nothing! At this point, it would be more efficient to simply remove it from the iPad :(

I love it, and all the other Omni products I have, But Jeeez! How many more years??

Can’t you outsource that project?

Gerard

10.04.12 2:58 PM

Can we stick to the agenda and not get sidetracked with some own hidden agendas, please.

Danny

10.05.12 5:03 AM

Come on, guys. Accessibility is an important feature, but this app is DOA on basic features whether it is “accessible” or not. The ability to zoom the view—critical to accessibility—has be bemoaned for at least five years. Complaints about it have been all over your reviews. Since the excellent iOS version appeared, the lack of sync between iOS and OS X versions, no matter the difficulty of implementation, made me give up completely.

I mean, really. You guys are beginning to look like fools. Sorry. I used to love OmniGroup. I know you have the ability to execute because you have some great stuff. You must really hate OmniOutliner to treat it so badly.

Dennis Austin

10.07.12 9:53 PM

This voice recognition of text to speech was really helpful a feature. Collaboration with Mac and iPad version is the need of the hour so try focusing on that.

Melissa Rogers

10.08.12 10:22 PM

I’ve found a simple way to sync OmniOutliner between Mac and iPad. Just saving everything in OPML and in Dropbox, and use CarbonFin Outliner on iPad and OmniOutliner on Mac.

I know .oo3 is a lot more complex than OPML, but this works for me.

mudkip

10.11.12 2:46 AM

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