Hi Cheryl
Simply put, there are significant improvements, enough to easily
warrant an upgrade. The web is more responsive, none of the lag that I
often got with tiger while using group navigation. There are commands
to jump to headings, tables, text, block quotes, and things like that.
Most of the cursor tracking issues seem to be resolved, as VO now
seems to have no trouble determining the keyboard focus when you first
open a window (i.e. when you open a mail message your VO cursor will
be in the message text, where it belongs rather than on the delete
button). Drag and drop ability is very nice and works for me more
often than not. The cursor tracking in terminal is much better, and
the line the cursor is at is now read allowed, probably a result of
the cursor tracking fixes. Also, the problem we had with the bottom
line in terminal not being seen by VO is gone. I've even had a chance
to test the braille support with my friend's Pac Mate display and,
while I wish a few more configuration options had been added, I'm very
impressed with the way it works overall. The default key layout for
the Pacmate leaves a lot to be desired, but that may not be the case
for the other displays and it's not really a drawback since you can
map the buttons to whatever you want. On a similar note of key
remapping, the numpad commander deserves a mention. It's made my life
so much easier, you can map almost any VO command onto any numpad key,
with or without a modifier.
That being said, I did find some things I didn't like quite so much.
In particular, you can now no longer read plain text messages in mail
with the arrow keys, you have to interact with the text and use the VO
keys to read it. It's both a curse and a blessing, since HTML messages
read so much better. And I guess I'm old fassioned, wanting a cursor
in my message reading window, not many mail programs have that
anymore. Basically you now read mail like a web page. Also, while most
of the cursor tracking bugs have been fixed, a new one has cropped up
that I'm consistently able to duplicate. VO will sometimes not
remember your place in a text area, and the VO cursor will be at the
top. This happens most often when you've switched back into a window
after being away from it for a while. So, say you're reading a nice
long novel in textedit. You're using the read all command and you
stop. You go away from the book for a while then go back into textedit
and hit read all again... and suddenly you're reading from the top.
This is because VO lost your place. It's easy enough to get around,
interact with the text area and route VO to keyboard. However, you
have to remember to do that. This also happens when doing a find in
most wordprocessors, the VO cursor will not jump to where your
keyboard cursor is in the text, even if you have them linked. Also
note that while the VO cursor has trouble finding the keyboard cursor,
the reverse is not true, so if you start reading from the top without
routing the VO to keyboard, you will be at the top of the file. This
is something I certainly consider a bug, and which I've already
written to Apple about. The only other thing I've noticed is that if
your machine has 512mb of memory in it (standard Mac Mini
configuration) you may experience slowdowns, as leopard is a bit more
resource intensive than tiger was.
Personally, despite a few annoyances, I'm very pleased with my leopard
upgrade, and in my opinion it's well worth it.
Sorry for the long message
hth
On Jan 13, 2008, at 1:20 PM, Cheryl Edwards wrote:
Hi all,
Same message just reposted with the correct subject for the sake of
archiving and accessing correct information.
*******
Hi all,
As stated in previous posts I've not yet upgraded to Leopard.
Rather, I've been watching the list to see what kind of report you
all would give it. Unless I've missed something there hasn't been
such a post, so I'm going to ask a straight-forward question or two.
1. Do you find a vast improvement in the new OS?
2. If so, is that improvement in stability, accessibility, or
interaction and functionality?
3. Are there disadvantages to Leopard?
4. Is there not enough significant change to warrant an upgrade
right now?
I understand Mac loyalty for those of us who are die-hard long-time
users,, as well as appreciation for the VoiceOver team and all
they've done and are doing; however, honesty is honesty and I would
really appreciate some "where the rubber meets the road" answers,
please.
There's been some reviews by folk who don't use VoiceOver, but do
use the Mac, that give it a thumbs-down, saying that Apple released
it too soon and that one should wait for the next upgrade. There's
a lot said about its beauty and such, but that isn't my focus. I'm
just not wanting to trade the accessibility and functionality I
already have for something less or more frustrating.
Thanks for any input you would like to give,
Cheryl E.
Cheryl Edwards
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
