Why not get the Mac Mini? You can connect your TV to the Mini and it will be way smaller than an iMac. It will also cost you less. I love my 2006 one, even though it won't run anything past Snow Leopard. Anyway, that might be a better option for you. YOu could get the baseline Mini for $500. I'm not sure what that converts to in UK pounds. The newer minis have an HDMI port, so just use an HDMI to VGA adapter to connect to your TV. This is just my thought on this matter. I don't know why a blind or low vision user would want an imac anyway. I should say that the Mini does require an external keyboard and speakers. The Mini has a built in speaker, but it sounds horrible so I'd connect external speakers. The Mini is small enough to fit nicely on a desk or anywhere you can think of. I'm actually considering getting myself a modern Mini at some point. From what I can tell, the newer minis are thinner than mine but don't include DVD drives. Then again, I don't think any modern Mac has a disk drive anymore.

The mac mini might be a good idea if I had more space than I do, ie, space for two tvs and sets of speakers but that is not the case, and I'd need to disconnect my xp box, and external speakers to use it and reconnect them whenever I wanted to use my xp machine which would be a major pain in the kneck.

The mac will be limited to one table basically, so it's got to be either a mac book or an I mac with everything complete, and a mac book would make anything screen related I wanted to do rather difficult. I do after all do things like watching game play videos on youtube, and I don't entirely discount the possibility of getting an external dvd drive in the future, or of using a service such as netflicks or bbc I player.

As to contacts just to be clear, phone contacts and e-mail contacts are two different things. I obviously use my Iphone to phone people, but because I don't usualy have my external keyboard with me and don't want to write long e-mails with the on screen keyboard, I have no e-mail contacts on my Iphone at all, all of them are in outlook express, and many are people or organizations I either don't have phone numbers for or wouldn't phone anyway such as the entombed and audeasy mailing lists.

Indeed I only bothered setting up e-mail on my Iphone because I wanted to output data from Kodp on it .
As I said, I'm not a big fan of auto complete, sinse I would rather choose whom I actually want to send an e-mail to rather than being reliant on the computer getting it right, this is why I like outlook express sinse to e-mail someone I just hit tab once and then up and down arrows or the first letter of a name, and why the hell silly microsoft removed this in post xp windows I don't know, again, modern proclivity for filling the screen with sprawling data rather than nice tidy lists, or at least giving you no choice about how data is displayed.

That is why I'm wondering about the contacts list on mac.

How you organise things is up to you. You could either have two lists, each maintained on separate devices or, more likely, you sync both to iCloud and end up merging them. Contacts do not have to contain any particular data; if a contact has no email address, or no phone number, then you simply don't do those things with them. And you can create groups to organise them into.

Just stop worrying and learn to love the Mac.

I suppose it's possible that you didn't get the "How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb" reference. In any event, yes, you will indeed be pursued from your bedside by the Mac faithful, wielding pitchforks and torches and praising the Messiah Saint Jobs, his greatness, his holiness, his majesty, the most generous, the almighty and the all-merciful, until you have been converted. Be afraid. Be very afraid ...

OS X is an up-to-date OS. Web browsing and email are among its functions. Therefore it will do what you want. You can return the Mac if you find that you can't live with it for some reason. I honestly don't believe you have anything to worry about. Any perception you may have about the platform or its users doesn't change that, although, FWIW, I'm not very impressed by fanboyism (of any ilk) either. If I had a motto for Apple, it would be that I love the products and hate the company. The Mac has its upsides and its downsides, and is my primary OS. I use XP in a VM for any Windowsy bits, and I haven't booted into Windows now for ... oh, I was last in there a few days back, just to update the VM before going to Turkey. And yeah, even the iPhone was a new experience for you when you bought it, which you ultimately learned.

So, stop worrying and learn to love the Mac.

Yes, you just press the button to add contacts while tabbing through the composer and you get the standard contact chooser. That is a table that you can navigate, and if you type into the search field, the table constricts to just the results. I never use it myself because autocomplete actually works for me. You will be told what gets autocompleted; you can press backspace to remove the autocompleted text, or continue typing to change the selection or abort. Just like iOS, you know. For my part I just remember email addresses, and it autocompletes those too.

Yep, agreed on Apple as a company, indeed that is part of why I hate Itunes, and Apple fanatics I find sort of worrying in how they even are devoted to all of apple's legal jargon as well.

Bare in mind I have a lot! of contacts sinse there are people and organizations I keep in touch with via e-mail, and sending the wrong mail to the wrong person could be bad. Auto complete never seemed to do it, likewise sinse there are some people and organizations I only contact intermitantly it'd be a bit impossible to remember all their e-mail addresses, that is why I'd like a contacts list, but if the search box can be restricted to letter it will work out, though I still don't see what is wrong with the good old outlook express dropdown list .

@Chris, remember that I've been using supernova which has a lot! of unexpected little functions. I'm not turning this into a vo vs sn debate, just pointing out I'm more than used to screen readers I can play with that have different ways of accomplishing the same goal and different customizations, indeed it was the difficulty to customize even a basic thing like amount of information spoken that was one of my major issues when I spent a day with jaws, (it apparently is possible in Jaws, but having to traul the obscure settings was sort of insane).

Glad to hear that there is a way to copy links etc, sinse that was something I was wondering about, also it's interesting sinse one chap I spoke to about a mac said that he disliked how there wasn't! anyway to navigate headings, edit areas and whatever, but sinse I'd already found how to do this on Ios I assumed that there would be a way to do it with vo on a mac which he'd just missed.

The "
The hole "uptodate osX" goes in the category of computery wootery, ie, technical stuff I don't care about.
I still own a Snes and I don't own a Wii, why? because I have lots of low vision accessible games on the Snes and the Wii has evil menus of doom and very few low vision accessible games, even though in terms of capabilities an processing and all that techy wechy the wii out strips the snes by orders of magnitude.

That's wy I'm interested far more in things like how e-mail works, how the internet works etc, ie, what it does for me.

I actually wish companies took this approach more often, or at least microsoft did, but there you go.

Supernova is a good baseline, actually, in that, like Mac, the movement between interaction and exploration is basically frictionless. Tab works, but you can still navigate. Text entry works without you doing anything. You can switch between using the cursors for moving the insertion point and using them for VoiceOver easily. It's really very slick. Unlike in Supernova, though, it is explicitly allowed that different cursors be in different places simultaneously; one doesn't necessarily always need to be tracking the other. And the interaction model gives you a much more hierarchical understanding of the GUI.

Yeah, you'll be alright.

The browser and email client are up-to-date. I have to imagine that that's why you want them: if your XP machine's browsers and clients were up-to-date, you wouldn't. QED. Of course you won't see it like that--merely as a means to an end--but that's actually the general ethos of my point, which is that a lot of the important changes that you need in an OS are incremental. Obviously we'll help you get maximum use out of the computer for your actual work, but the job would be much harder if, say, Safari didn't work with all the latest sites. Which, happily, it mostly does.

Lack of flash could be   annoying, sinse I have seen flash protocols and sites that work and one of the things I wanted access to was some of the flash content within games, though it is true lots of sites have moved to html5 instead, (even youtube).

One thing I would like to know, is why arrows to go just get standard physical navigation out of a webpage didn't seem to work, also why vo seemed to divorce the reading of the page from navigating it, ie, when i  tried to just physically read down the page it didn't work, but when I went between links it did. There are lots of occasions (especially in more complex internet games), where I don't necessarily want to either read the hole page or even the links and headings, but a portion of the text. For example on this forum, if I wanted to see how many replies each topic had I'd heading my way through (or use links), and hit down arrow on each heading to read last replied, number of posts etc.
Vo didn't seem to intigrate this sort of physical movement and movement by object half as well, indeed as I said when arrowing down the page I actively got stuck on google's image for downloading chrome which was weerd.

Since you mentioned Chrome, that browser happily does quite well on a mac I hear. Chromevox is "not" required, unless ya wish to use the "Google Drive" suite of apps.

Flash in Chrome will be dropped in septembr however.
Unsure if it can be reenabled, but its definitely going bye-bye by default.

I don't know what you mean by "virtualize the hole webpage as a document" sinse Supernova doesn't do that. All Supernova does is read what's there, though whether it handles the objects as rows or columns depends upon how it is set, hence my question about intigrated physical movement around the actual page vs links sinse as I said I often have to read information around the headings and other land marks on the page, rather than just navigate in between objects, indeed if I get to a page I've not visited before I'm far more likely to navigate around physically with the arrows than just try hammering the tab key or going down the headings and links, sinse that way I get a general sense of the layout before I start skipping through it.

Whether this Vo curser does the same thing I don't know.

I don't really have any interest in chrome, I just noticed that when trying to arrow down the google page to read search results on a mac for some random reason I could not down arrow passed the image link that was advertising google chrome, whether this was because it was an image or just because I wasn't using this vo curser I don't know.

As the article Trenton linked to says, Windows screen readers build a model of the webpage in memory. This is especially true in internet explorer, where after the browser finishes loading a page control passes to your screen reader, which then essentially rebuilds the page from scratch by reading the HTML code of it. This is why you often get messages from a screen reader that the page is loading even though visually it's all finished, and also why websites can look so different depending on the screen reader used. In other browsers like Firefox, Safari or chrome, the screen reader gets information about the page from the browser, not by parsing it itself which is a better approach for the most part.
VoiceOver has 2 web navigation modes. Dom and Group. These can be switched with a hotkey, and starting with 10.11 you will be able to assign webpage specific settings. The difference is that DOM mode displays the page top to bottom as it's written in the HTML code aka 99% of screen readers now, while group tries to give you a more visual overview. This mode sometimes requires more interacting, EG you may see a navigation bar show up as a single item, but some people prefer it over DOM navigation.

Flash was just a thought, but as you said it's use is dropping off, bbc i player was just an example and honestly the only use I can think of for it currently is watching the next series of new who sort of vaguely as it happens without waiting to go back to my parents sinse really if I was still interested in the bbc I'd still have a tv license, which I haven't done for around 7 years now .

My only issue with navigating by quick nav as I said, is physical movement on pages and interactions with none standard controls, both of which I play a lot, sinse both are useful things in supernova, but both are also things that come up extremely often in testing browser games, sinse people like to create custom code rather than using standard html objects like links and buttons and such, I also wonder how vo handles mouseovers, sinse they're another frequent thing that comes up in games, not an issue in sn.

I am sure muscle memory will work as far as just learning new commands goes, indeed as I said in Sn I more commonly use the physical movement as opposed to standard commands anyway, but the last thing I want to do is find I lose functionality as far as browser interactions go, especially where game testing and controls are concerned sinse that is obviously something I do a lot.

I actually did once try to download chrome and chromvox for my Xp machine just out of mild curiosity but again  stupid google had such an annoying site that kept harping on about the bennifits of chrome without giving me a sensible download link, I gave up after about ten minutes (sinse I wasn't that bothered anyway), it struck me Google had caught the malinche disease of so much advertising on how great their product is they make the sodding product hard to find.
Whether that has changed now I don't know (this was last year), but as I said, I'm a bit meh on the hole chrome thing anyway.