A good deal of the difficulty for PC people is that they expect VO to
mimic jaws commands and operation. If they take the alternative view
and forget JAWS and say they are learning a new system they will quickly
find it is great and very easy to use and learn. Stop trying to make VO
act like JAWS. It took me only about 1/2 hour to get to where it could
be used and then I just learned as I went. When learning JAWS I had to
go to classes at considerable expense for at least 10 days to get minor
use of it. Vo is much easier to learn and use and can be self taught at
no cost. Vickie Weir
Darcy Burnard wrote:
Hi Harry. I'm sorry to hear that you are finding voice over
difficult to master. I've been using it for a couple of months now,
and I'm finding the opposite to be true. I've used a lot of
technologies over the years. Starting off with the Apple 2 and text
talker with the echo, moving on to dos with asap, then on to windows
and a variety of screen readers like window bridge, asaw, and
eventually jaws and window-eyes. In addition to all that, I've
played extensively with linux and speakup, before finally trying out
voice over and the Mac. In all that, the only thing I would say is
easier to learn then voice over is speakup, and that's only because
it's screen review functions are very similar to asap, and thus no
learning curve. But of all the screen readers designed for graphical
interfaces, I've found voice over to be the easiest to learn. The
main reason I think is that there aren't a lot of commands to
remember, so it was more about learning tiger then it was learning
voice over. The voice over tutorial you get when first turning on
the Mac gave me a good chunk of what I needed to know about voice
over. The rest of what I needed was found in the voice over manual,
and going through the archives of this list. Now to be fair, I had
been lurking on this list for a good year before getting my Mac, so I
had a pretty good idea of what to expect with voice over.
Obviously I'm not an expert in the Mac by any stretch of the
imagination, but in the last month or so, I have been using it
exclusively for my computing needs, with very little difficulty.
Actually that's not entirely true. I have been using windows to play
change reaction, but other then that, it's been the Mac.
Now I'm not trying to compare myself to anyone else. We all have
different ways of learning, and different things that work for us. I
for example, have never much cared for Jaws, but I know that's the
screen reader of choice for most. I mainly wrote this because I'm
seeing a lot of people saying that voice over is good, but they
wouldn't leave windows yet. I just thought I'd offer up the
perspective of someone who has recently switched over to the mac, is
loving it, and rarely if ever uses windows anymore.
Darcy
On 7-Sep-06, at 9:34 AM, Harry Bates wrote:
I agree. While I have not yet even mastered the simplest
rudimentary commands of VO, I am definitely in no hurry to discard
my JAWS screen reader and my windows system. Learning VO has turned
out to be more difficult than I imagined. I know it has to be
something real simple that keeps stumping me in the learning process
with VO and the keyboard commands, but I haven't figured it out
yet. It is probably something real simple like pressing the
spacebar at the right time or the return key or something, but what
is it? keeps stumping me. Or maybe it is making sure that all three
of the VO cursors are tethered together at the same point. Is there
a keyboard command to do that?
----- Original Message ----- From: "John Heim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS
Xby theblind" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 10:11 AM
Subject: Re: Accessibility look at Vista
David,
Sometimes it's difficult to frame a question so that it doesn't
sound snotty. But trust me, I'm really just asking...
You said:
When the make their os seriously and robustly accessible such as
what Apple has done, I'll take them seriously.
What do you mean by the above comment? Voiceover is way better than
Narrator -- you've got to give Apple credit for that. But in large
part, the blame for that probably goes to the NFB. I suppose
Microsoft could have ignored the NFB's request that they *not*
include a real screen reader in Windows but that would have been
extraordinary.
Other than that, I think Microsoft has really done an outstanding
job of making Windows accessible. Internet Explorer, Outlook
Express, and the Office suite of programs are some of the best
programs on the market in terms of working with screen readers. And
I haven't found anything in Windows itself that doesn't work with
JAWS. Everything in the control panel works great. At one time,
there seems to have been a problem with the Users widget but that
seems to be fixed. I can administer a Windows system about as well
as anybody.
Again, trust me, I'm just looking for info but it seems to me that
the best solution is still Windows and JAWS. It's *way* more
expensive but it is better. Don't get me wrong, I think Voiceover
is excellent and given that it's included, it's fantastic. I'm
trying to switch from Windows/Jaws to a Mac/Voiceover system. I'm
just not sure that's practicle at this point.
