Hello all
I have installed leopard and have been overwhelmed with a variety of
mixed feelings about it. It is like, some things are easier and other
things that were easy and doable in tiger, are not in leopard.
I like how it reads deleted characters and words. I like the dom
navigation though it is a bit sluggish. I think it is good that the
widgets are a bit more accessible. More than anything, I am impressed
at how responsive the braille displays are and at such little effort
on the part of the user. But there are things that are annoying.
When used to read my discuss digests in my email application,
navigating with just my keyboard cursor, and the find forward and back
commands, now I have to copy and paste the digests into textedit
because vo does not handle plaintext n the same way that it used to.
Spaces, while accessible to set up, is completely useless for someone
using the keyboard. Here's why. You move from space to space with
ctrl arrows which is wonderful, but when you move to a new space,
open, say, safari, then go to another space and open textedit, you can
still command tab between each of them. It does not separate the apps
in th the space that is not being focused on.
Where's sherlock? I used to use that app a lot for finding movies,
translating, and reading rss feeds. It made things very easy and
practical but now it is not here.
I don't know about you guys, but I can't stand the entonation. Anyone
tried fred lately? He is speaking with accessive entonation to the
point of sluring his words. Alex is ok, because they obviously
focused on him more than fred. But he still does not read near as
fast as fred. It is great for people who don't listen to speech very
fast, who don't really have to skim a long text, but otherwise, not so
good.
In groups mode, the cursor still will go out of the html content on
some pages, most notably when you go and read articles on sfgate. We
used to be able to solve this by hiding the bookmarks and the tool
bar, and by pressing refresh a couple times. Now, the zoom, close,
and zoom buttons make this impossible. Apart from that, they are just
a redundant navigation hazard.
Stacks is just not accessible. Forget it. As though we don't want to
use that. Personally, I would have liked to be able to access my
files from the dock, make things more efficient not having to tab over
to the finder to access something. Just saying because you'd think
that new additions like this would be properly written.
What happened to the bilingual support? And the ability to customize
the way VO reads elements?
All in all, I have mixed feelings. Some of these things I simply
can't believe would be overlooked during the testing process. Unless
they simply were ignored for whatever reason by the developers.
I noticed on the webpage, that it compares VO to jaws and
"windowseyes". I definitely get the impression that they have been so
busy trying to lure the windows users into os x, that they have let
some of the old things like groups mode, things that made voiceover
1.0 unique, slip.
Regards
Justin Harford
PS
I like the spotlight dictionary and calculator capabilities. I don't
liek the fact that fred can't read capabilities.
