I don’t usually share meeting announcements, but the Naples MacFriends User Group (NMUG) has a particularly interesting presentation that they’ve invited TidBITS readers to attend for free. On Wednesday, 3 September 2025, at 11:30 AM EDT, Mike Shebanek will be sharing stories from his 19 years at Apple, from 1994 through 2013. Throughout his Apple career, he rose from Senior Systems Engineer to Senior Product Manager and Product Line Manager in Apple’s Worldwide Product Marketing group, leaving his mark on numerous groundbreaking products. He worked on the original iMac and other iMac models, helped transition the Mac from PowerPC to Intel processors, managed projects like Rosetta and Boot Camp, participated in the launch of the original iPad, and spent five years as Apple’s head of Accessibility. His most lasting contribution may be his invention of the VoiceOver screen reader, which has made Apple devices accessible to visually impaired users. No membership is required, but you must register to receive the meeting link. Questions may be submitted in advance.
Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend, but hopefully there will be a recording and/or commentary from other atendees.
Certainly my view is that VoiceOver was great when first introduced, because a lot of feedback was received and acted on. Nowadays, especially on macOS, I regret that it is the chief—perhaps the only—source of my hesitation in recommending Macs to new blind recruits. I hope this changes, but I suspect that post-iPhone, Apple are too ossified to care about the finer points of accessibility on macOS. Which is a terrible shame, because it’s still a great platform in many ways, and Apple’s PR image around accessibility would be a great deal easier to defend if Apple put in the QA and development effort required, instead of regarding it as a nice-to-have, perhaps for compliance reasons. For example, iPhone Mirroring was not accessible when first released to the public.
If you’re keen, he’s also appeared on Double Tap, and probably elsewhere as well, to talk about his time overseeing accessibility. A real honour to hear from the Apple side of the story, about the tools I use every day. They were, unquestionably, trend-setting for the time.
Thank you so much, Adam, for announcing this event on TidBITS.
It was fascinating to hear Mike Shebanek’s perspective on how Apple “built insanely great products” back in the day. Just hearding the story about how Jobs detected the wrong variant of the Garamond typeface in a slide deck almost was worth the (very low ) price of admission all by itself.
I just wish the conversation would have touched a little bit on today’s Apple, and how (if at all… ) the approach to creating new products in Cupertino has changed in recent years.
On a side note: What a breath of fresh air it was to literally have a plain conversation without any visualizations, let alone a slide presentation. Made it all the easier to really immerse oneself in Shebanek’s outstanding storytelling.
P.S.: For those of you who didn’t attend: a recording of the event is available online. And it’s well worth investing the 1 hour 15 minutes it takes to watch the whole thing, if you ask me.
) price of admission all by itself.
) the approach to creating new products in Cupertino has changed in recent years.