hi, i wish the braillenote via bluetooth was usable as a display allt
he toher humanware products are there, ut apart from that, i am happyw
ith the upgrade, and foreign language braille needs to be included
On 14 Jan 2008, at 03:08, Jacob Schmude wrote:
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]
