"That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web." Interesting that they would mention Flash's Achilles heel in that its history has been littered with weak or broken accessibility. On the Mac platform, which includes a full screen reader and keyboard navigation system built into the OS, Flash is entirely inaccessible. On Windows, if you embed flash so that it works with DHTML layers (set wmode) it also becomes inaccessible. Even if it is embedded in a page running on a Windows browser, most developers don't know about or discover how to set up attributes to, say, label a button or control as to what it does. Those options are buried in the IDE UI and turned off by default (or at least they used to be). Even if a developer cares, at some point that custom slider constructed from boxes with mouse tracking and such needs semantic markup to identify what it is - the ActionScript equivalent of the w3c's ARIA. Adobe says they are working on it but when? Sure HTML5/CSS3 is pretty green, but there are real implementations out there now in mainstream browsers. By the time Flash catches up, will it matter?

Likewise AIM for Windows still supports real-time IM. It's a real boon to the deaf community as it works much like a TTY device, but without needing special hardware or relay services. Just hit control-R to get going. More detail from this 2008 article: http://tap.gallaudet.edu/text/aol/ from Gallaudet University who helped develop the technology.

Ditto. I also use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse so I can control things well from the couch. It can output pretty much whatever video format you need short of NTSC/S-Video (at least on newer Minis which dropped those ancient formats). For that I just got a cheap $30 VGA to S-Video downconverter which is powered off one of the USB ports.
I also have an eyeTV USB digital TV tuner connected to a simple $30 antenna in the attic which gets high-def on many channels and canceled cable (at least the non-broadband internet part). Has all the usual stuff like EPG, DVR and sharing out the recorded files for various devices over the network. We just don't watch much tv so basic abc/cbs/nbc/pbs etc was just fine for occasional live events. High-def images from the olympics were really nice and many channels have the 5.1 audio as well. Everything else is movies or streaming video from youtube or hulu. I just search youtube for robots or construction trucks and the boys get all excited.
Most folks don't realize that Macs for quite a few years now ship with digital audio output in their headphone jack so all you do is get a mini-TOS-Link to whatever your home theatre optical input is cable. I picked up one cheap on newegg, plugged it in and instant great sound off the Mac.
I also got a nice wireless USB game controller to run SDLMame along with the mamepgui frontend. Want to be sure my boys learn their up/down/left/right the correct way - by playing classic video games :) Of course my old copy of 4x4 Evolution looks nice as well.
RipIt really works well so I don't have to keep hunting down the 20 Trucks DVD on the bookshelf every time the boys want to watch or worry that it might get scratched/mangled. Just put a folder in the Movies folder named Twenty Trucks, drop the video_ts from Ripit in there along with a picture called Preview.jpg and FrontRow works just fine.
Loaded up the CD library into iTunes and then loaded the free iPhone remote app to control it from anywhere via wifi. I can also use the old Apple remote I had laying around from a laptop or the eyeTV includes another remote. Bad part with the eyeTV is the receiver is actually on the USB dongle itself, usually hanging down behind the mini, and doesn't make use of the mini's IR receiver on the front. The eyeTV also has an FM Tuner but I don't make much use of it. Nice to pull that signal off the attic antenna though so it is clear when I do pull it in.
We also threw our digital camera images in iPhoto which seems to make it more accessible than dragging out the old laptop anytime we want to show a group of friends.
In general everything just works and there is enough free/OSS stuff out there to address anything Apple didn't already put in the box. I bought the machine for this purpose so I got max RAM and CPU since the thing is a pain to crack open later. I skimped on the hard drive since I can always plop an external firewire drive on it when the built-in drive gets full.
I put icons to all the major apps on the desktop and set the image size to max making nice big clickable targets when not using Frontrow. My wife finds that easy to use and easier than the multi-input multi-remote setup we had before. The old DVD player is going to a worthy charity.
Now I just need that high def projector and a motorized screen with 12v trigger so it all wakes up together :)

I have kept my parents and brother's family on macs for years. I live several states away and while I do get calls, they are higher level application usage questions rather than fix the plumbing types of problems. My wife moved over from a Dell to a Macbook a few years ago for similar reasons. I just loaded Firefox, Thunderbird and Office on her Mac and she was right at home. It really has worked well and with used hardware the cost for my sanity has been relatively cheap. The macs are like toasters and telephones; in general they just work.

My VOIP service has an automatic rollover to my cell if for some reason they lose contact with the box in my basement. Before I got a UPS this was handy for power outages. Of course that also meant I got voice spam coming to my cell for that time period. I could also leave it to just rollover to voicecmail which then gets sent to my email as a wav, so I'd still get inbound calls. I could also, via the web interface, forward the number to anywhere else. Sounds like his VOIP service was not very robust. There's a lot more than just being able to make a call over your internet connection.

One time I had to make a personal long distance call while at work and had forgotten my cell. So I went on the web, forwarded my home voip number to the long distance number I wanted to reach. Then I called my house from work which rolled over to the out-of-state business I was trying to call. When the call was over I just turned forwarding back off. Nice.

Under the hood all this does is shift traffic from the dedicated routes from one handset to another to the packet switched data networks that handle voip and other internet traffic. The big telcos still charge a pretty penny for the OC-192 connections that make it all go. The difference is that before they would have to dedicate a T1 of capacity for every 24 lines of communication. Now we can multiplex lots more "channels" per gigabit. So for every 1000 canceled phone lines there is another order for x more digital capacity, but x is much smaller than the capacity canceled. So we should eventually have capacity freed up in the system because of the switch away from dedicated lines, if it weren't for that pesky non-voip internet traffic filling up all the pipes.

As for me and my VOIP I'm loving it. My paid for service has all the features I want (Voicemails sent to my email, blocking anonymous users, call forwarding all configurable from anywhere on the web etc) and is costing me half what Verizon used to charge for a 'real' line. Plus I can take the voip box anywhere and get/make calls. On a trip to Singapore my wife could call her sister in the states the same as from home. Nice.

Just because it was on the Mac doesn't mean it wasn't a great series of games.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy
Lots of innovations made there by the Bungie folks before they were bought up my Microsoft and ported Halo from the Mac to XBox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie_Software
Halo was introduced at MacWorld expo in 1999
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ2yvWl9nQ

It is unfortunate that the authors chose to ignore Apple's work in this space with their excellent VoiceOver (VO) accessible technology which gives full access to the OS and applications. Because it's built in to every OSX 10.4 and 10.5 machine a blind user can set up everything themselves without sighted assistance. This also makes it a screen reader with the largest installed base; more than Jaws or WindowEyes. In a classroom setting there is no longer the need for the "special" machine for the "special" student, enabling a more mainstream approach. The on-screen feedback also lets sighted and blind users collaborate more easily because the visual user can see what the blind user is doing via the keyboard. Got a USB braille device? Just plug it in without having to install drivers. Got a lot of VO preference settings? Save a profile to a thumb drive and then instantly activate those settings on another machine by just plugging it in.

As mentioned in the article, accessibility technologies such as screen readers are not cheap. Getting a Mac with VO can easily offset the supposed premium price of this hardware. Alex, the VO speech synth is really one of the nicest sounding ones out there with simulated breathing and clear annunciation. Anyone can give it a try by hitting Apple-F5 on a current OSX machine.

I guess OSX is not a major OS or VO is just rudimentary, or the writer is just wrong.

There was a nice rebuttal on Lioncourt.com

Apple's innovations are not constrained to the iPhone/iPod/MacBook/OS realms. Sure it has it's quirks and glitches, but to not even get a mention is a serious error of omission.