Ok folks, its time I explain a little problem that I hope none of you
ever run into. I have no idea what would be the best way to deal with
this, but at least Apple was able to help.
Ok here is the deal. I was doing some testing for Apple Engineering
on a problem with ups when connected to your Mac. Being that I have
all my machines on an ups, I want them to startup when power is
restored. Now I digress from the issue I want to tell you about, but
I wanted you to understand how I discovered this and its happen twice
and I'll explain the other situation that occured.
Ok, so during the test I had the machine set to shutdown after the
ups kicked in. VoiceOver alerted me to the fact that the machine was
running on battery which is good and then it let me know it was
shutting down or at least something was being spoken I guess, but I
didn't hear much.
Now once the machine shutdown I hit the power button and once I got
the login prompt, I logged in.
So, can you guess what happen?
Well no VoiceOver. No matter what I did I couldn't get it speaking.
This problem only affects the account you were logged in as at that
time. So, the only way to get VO speaking again is to delete the
com.apple.universalacccess.plist and the com.apple.voiceover.plist
files. There are a couple of com.apple.voiceover.plists and my wife
was having a little trouble getting them all, but the point is it
seems that as long as you remove the universalaccess and voiceover
plists, it will work.
You then logout, log back in, and you'll have to setup VO as you
previously had it.
I'm not sure what is going on here, but I will report it to Apple and
hope they can figure out why this is happening. I'm thinking that I'd
like to setup a test account on another Mac and try to reproduce this
before I report it, but it seems that even putting the machine to
sleep while its babbling away is enough to cause the problem. Now I'm
not familiar with what exactly plists do, how they work, what is
being written to them etc. I'd like to know as much as I can about
them and perhaps that would shed some light on the issue. They
obviously are important and to understand them would really help.
So, I wanted to share this with you all because if you ever find
yourself with a non-speaking Mac despite all efforts, but yet it
works in other accounts, this might help you. The only problem is
logging in as another user according to Apple and assuming root
access isn't sufficient to delete these files. Now I find this hard
to believe so will try some experiments myself because root should be
able to do anything to the system. Perhaps he wasn't thinking of
gaining root access, but not sure, I was a little focused on trying
to fix things to relaly get into questioning him over root access
etc. I figured he might not have the answer in any case.
So, if anyone has any comments, I'd love to hear them.
Scott
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
