A friend told me about an app today that I wanted to try called iTerm2 for the Mac. This app is a terminal replacement app that lets you write to the Macintosh terminal and execute commands with text. While this is a developer based app I feel it is worth mentioning here at the iAccessibility report as we review all sorts of apps for different platforms.

How does iTerm2 work?

iTerm2 for Mac opens an area where you can write commands to the computer just like the built in Apple terminal application. The advantages of iTerm2 is that it allows for recappable hotkeys, and for the user to open more than one tab, which the terminal app does not do. There are probably many more features to this app, but these are a huge highlight to its benefits over the built in app.

Accessibility

So the big question is, Can VoiceOver work with this app? The surprising answer here is yes. When I opened the iTerm2 app I turned on VoiceOver and VO read the entire screen to start. VoiceOver would then read back what I typed, and then would read the output to that when I pressed enter to execute the command. This is very nice when you try to list the contents of a folder or when you are doing something that you need to have read immediately. For low vision users the app is in white on black to start, so it is a very high contrast solution for low vision users.

Conclusion

While there is already a built in app for administrating the computer from the command line, iTerm 2 provides more features and the ability for power users to work more effectively. This app also offers more blind and low vision users the ability to use a terminal app with high contrast and VoiceOver support.