Larry and all, I've lefft parts of your message intact below and
placed inserts in it marked with dp both for your benefit and the
benifit of others. Those of who have been using The Mac for a while
now have hit the wall you are about to climb. It takes about three
weeks to a month to reach the plateau on which I now sit and with my
inserts below, I hope to provide you and others a leg up.
1. According to the VO manual,, hittting VO keys and A should have it
read forward from the point of tthe curser. In reality, it reads the
current line and then skips back to the top of tthe window, leaving
intteractiion with html content and sttarts reading the menu bar
items, back,, forward, book marks, Etc. VO needs a commmand where it
truly reads from the curser location forward. I also tried VO keys
and W and got a similar response.
dp First, take the bars out of the window, make sure you are
interacting with the html content by pressing shift with down arrow
and the vo keys. Try command with a and or command with w. It does
not always work, in fact, the only time it truly works is if your
window is full of plain text and the manual does say text.
2. My only option for skipping links appears to be arrowing past them
indiviidually. That's really a problem when you are on a link rich
page. . .
dp There are three things you can use in safari and with VO which are
of tremendous assistance once you get the hang of them. One is group
items in web pages found in navigation in the voice over utility.
another is the links list and the other is the elements list. With
group items in web pages, moving right and or left will take you
different places than moving up and down depending on whether there
is some place available to go. I've never seen such power anywhere
else. In the links and elements lists, you can type ahead if you
know a string for which you are searching and the list dwindles to
matches. I've never seen this either.
3. If you can'tt give me a page down option or a command to just skip
past links on a page, how about making the arrow keyys truly
workable. If I hit arrow down or up it should move up or down a
linkk, not move left to right over links. Similarly, if I'm in a
list of single links and right arrow I should be able to move out of
that list over to what is in the frame or list to the right.
I'm just getting at ease of navigation here which is just problematic
with Safari.
If you are truly working with frames, you can jump from fram to frame
with vo but if what you are saying is what I think it is, you're
probably on a pretty page that unfortunately is not marked up for
good navigation. Yes, I know that there are ways that could be
explored to mittigate this, but we already have some quite powerful
tools to work with it. Give it a little more time.
On Dec 27, 2005, at 12:17 PM, David Poehlman wrote:
What specific issues are you having with safari?
-- Jonnie Apple Seed
With his:
Hands-On Technolog(eye)s
On Dec 27, 2005, at 1:49 PM, Larry Wanger wrote:
Hi,
My questions have beeen raised I guess in the email I sent a while
ago. Other than accessing word documents in Text Edit, I've not
found anything to open Excell documents and can not access news
groups. I just tried to download OSXNews and for the life of me
can not get it working. I downloaded it and an icon appeared on my
desktop. I tried to open that and got a foldder with different
files in it. I can not figure out how to install it and can not
find oa help file on the web site or in the filees that downloaded
so I'm unsure what to do.
It was suggested that II have a PC and a Mac available for me to
use. I am doing that and will continue to do so. However, its
just kind of botthersum to do so. If I could just get subscribed
to the newsgroups I need then all would be much better. having
access to Office apps or tto iWork or Appleworks would be really
nice but that isn't going to happen.
Right now if I could gett some help with this OSXNews program and
get that up and running that would be ggreat. Long-term, having
some assurance that Apple is going tto come up with some ways to
make VO a better product it would be great. Frankly, I think web
access with VO stinks badly and I can't figure out how the let it
go at this. Just some simple steps would dramaticly improve this
program and I'd like to talk to someone over at Apple about this
without being told I need to fork over $200. man did that piss me
off!!! I can't stress that enough!!! I just can't begin tto
understand how some moron over there at Apple thinks it necessary
to charge that much for me to dialogue with them about some user
type issues and to get some specific help. Itts bull. If I didn't
have to wait on hold for 15 or 20 minuttes I'd call right now. I
will blow a gasket though if I set there on hold that long. I will
do it though.
On Dec 27, 2005, at 11:12 AM, David Poehlman wrote:
What is so hard about os x news? also, why do you have to
completely kill the pc? Why not just use a pc for what you need
it for and the Nac for the rest?
What kinds of usage questions do you have?
--
Jonnie Apple Seed
With his:
Hands-On Technolog(eye)s
On Dec 27, 2005, at 12:45 PM, LARRY WANGER wrote:
"I find it interesting that you insist you can't do
things that folks have repeatedly stated is perfectly doable."
I'm unsure of how to respond to this. I've tried suggestions that
folks have offered. However, some of those have involved learning
how to interact with the Mac in terminal mode. Just another layer
to learn and work through and frankly getting a new computer and
switching operating systems to a format widely proclaimed to be
far better than Windows should not involve so many more steps.
You may pass this off as someone who is not a tech oriented person
or someone who just doesn't understand computers who tried this
and decided it didn't work. The truth is I've spent many hours
and worked very hard to find solutions and make this work. Like
it or not, I had far fewer problems when I was using Jaws and
Windows. Yes, security was a concern and Windows just presents a
lot of problems but the trade-off is that I was able to use it
effectively.
Check out my blog at http://lsw999.blogspot.com/
Larry Wanger
----- Original Message ----- From: "Travis Siegel"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac
OS X by theblind" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2005 10:37 AM
Subject: Re: The $199 question
OSXnews works just fine with voice over, and it's download page
isn't difficult at all to navigate. It's been mentioned here
before multiple tines. I find it interesting that you insist
you can't do things that folks have repeatedly stated is
perfectly doable.
But, to each his own.
However, I find the procare thing a bit disturbing. When I got
my mac, I was clearly told that procare would cover amy
questions I might have, including voice over related ones. I'd
call apple back, and ask if what you were told is true, it's
possible the person who said that wasn't properly informed as to
the current state of affairs.
On Dec 27, 2005, at 12:17 PM, LARRY WANGER wrote:
Well, one of the very apparent differences between my past use
of Windows based screen readers and my new experience with VO is
kind of surprising to me. There just isn't support available
from Apple.
Here is some background.
I've asked a few times about different programs that I could use
to meet my needs with my Mac and access to class newsgroups
that I use in conjunction with courses I take as well as
insuring that I have access to normally used file formats like
Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You guys have offered some good
suggestions. I can use text edit for word documents. I should
be able to use iWork or Apple Works as well for many of these
purposes but I've tested both products, Made by Apple I might
add, and neither works with VO. Additionally, I was able to
activate the Office 2004 test drive that came on my Mac and
none of the applications in that suite of programs was
accessible either.
Beyond this, I called the University technical support line to
ask what programs they support for use with newsgroups on the
Mac and they were able to suggest Thunderbird and or Onterage
which are available. I tried Onterage as said with the Office
suite and it would not work and could not get Thunderbird to
allow for access either.
Finally, out of frustration, I called Apple and tried to ask
questions, thus the subject line of this message. I was told
that because I have the Apple Care plan that I could get tech
support but the questions I was asking about VO are usage and
therefore I would need to pay $199 to talk with someone.
Guys, this is beyond ridiculous. I've been patient and worked
very hard to make the Mac work for me. I really like it too
but the bottom line here is that the computer must meet my
needs and it shouldn't be a project to make it do so. I've
spent now nearly 2 weeks with it and clearly know what I need
it to do. Unfortunately, I'm not getting it to do that. Many
of you will argue that I should be patient and keep working
with it. However, the bigger issue here is that for Apple to
make it in the blindness community and to be a mainstream
product, they must realize that probably 99% of blind
people...or anyone else for that matter, won't have the
patience and tech skills to continue to work with it. It must
be user friendly and ready to go right out of the box and
folks, it isn't!!!
Perhaps in the future the Mac will make it but its not working
for me right now. Someone made the argument that it's only
been six months since VO has been available and eventually it
will get there. I'm sure this is the case but that won't help
me at this moment when I need it to work for me now. I'm
really unsure on what to do at this point but its clear that
while I can use the Mac to read and write Word documents, I can
not work with Excel or PowerPoint documents and I can not yet
at this point subscribe or work with newsgroups for my
classes. Someone suggested using Snownews but remember, not
all of us understand this advanced garbage that was on the page
there and I could not even tell which version to download.
I'm trying to balance maintaining a clear overall picture of my
experience here which has been relatively good with the major
short- falls that I find with some specific issues I've got.
Realize though that one buys a computer to perform specific
tasks for them. I clearly know what I need to do with it but
the Mac thus far is not allowing me to do so. I'm increasingly
unhappy with it and may in fact need to return this. I expect
some of you to have some sharp reactions to this.How could
anyone go back to a PC after experiencing the Mac? I can see
that point but if the computer won't do what I need it to do
and Apple wants $200 each and every time I want to ask a
question then what is the point. I might as well keep paying
Freedom Scientific or GW Micro the high price for a screen
reader and get support as part of that package. I fail to see
how Apple defines tech support verses user questions but maybe
someone has some insight on that as well?
Check out my blog at http://lsw999.blogspot.com/
Larry Wanger
Check out my blog at http://lsw999.blogspot.com/
Larry Wanger
