Hi Jacob, Thanks for reporting the added VoiceOver accessibility with the Mouse, and examples of where this extends to applications even beyond the suite that Apple provides.
I concur with the fact that in iTunes, in particular, using the mouse (well, the mouse cursor and my trackpad key, since I'm using a laptop and don't have a mouse connected) gives you additional capabilities with VoiceOver, and has since the beginning. In addition to using sorting at the top of the columns in the songs outline for tracks in the iTunes library, there are some instances where using the mouse actions give you additional capabilities. Here's one that I found: If your mouse cursor is on a selected smart playlist in your sources outline (for example, I generally have my VoiceOver navigation set to "Mouse Cursor tracks VoiceOver Cursor" when I'm using iTunes, since I don't have a physical mouse connected that I might move by mistake) and I "option-click" by holding down the option key and clicking my trackpad button, I'll be able to edit the smart playlist directly. Yes, this option is in the contextual menu, but I'd have to type VO-keys+shift+m and then "E" (for Edit Smart Playlist) and return to get the same behavior I get with just "option-click". The other thing that I can use Mouse Keys for is to play the sound samples on the U.S. Audible web pages. I know there are other Audible subscribers on this list who get audiobooks from Audbile.com. How do you access the sound samples (or do you?) from your Mac with Safari? I wish there were an improved interface for Mouse Keys so that we could command exactly where we'd like the mouse cursor to move to (either relative or absolute screen units). Cheers, Esther On Sat March 15, 2008, at 11:40AM, Jacob Schmude wrote: >Hey Everyone >Some of you probably have figured this out already, but I thought I'd >post my findings here. For a while now I've been playing around with >utilizing the mouse--yes, the actual, physical mouse. That thing next >to our keyboard, or underneath it in case of laptops. I've made an >interesting discovery in the process of doing this. It seems that, >even while some controls can't be navigated to with Voiceover, they >can be seen if you have Voiceover set to speak text under the mouse >and you move the mouse onto the controls. Some examples of this are >the checkboxes in iTunes next to each track, which Voiceover can't >navigate to but is able to see with the mouse, and the sorting buttons >at the top of the iTunes track lists. This is by no means confined to >iTunes, however. This also worked with my scanner software yesterday. >I have an Epson all-in-one and, if any of you have used Epson >scanners, you know what fun their software can be to use with >Voiceover. Basically, the way it's configured when you start out you >can navigate to a button, an unknown, and the close button. Well, >turns out there's a lot more on the screen than those things... and >the controls aren't inside the unknown. Using the mouse you can see >them, and manipulate the controls as you'd expect. >I'm posting this just to let everyone know that I've found that the >mouse can in fact be useful. If you aren't comfortable with the >physical mouse, mouse keys will also serve this purpose, though I've >come to prefer the actual mouse itself. Here's what I have my settings >set to when I need to use the mouse, for reference: >Announce when mouse cursor enters a window, checked >speak text under mouse after delay, checked >delay slider set all the way to 0, no delay >And before anyone asks, I'm a totally blind user. > >Just a little FYI. > > > >
