Hi, I'm way behind on posts, but saw yours and wanted to reply.
Something you might try is in the voiceover utility, turn all the
cursor tracking options on under navigation. Most importantly is
voiceover tracks insertion point and mouse pointer tracks voiceover
cursor... In this way, your mouse pointer and keyboard insertion
pointer should stay in sync. Now, with zoom's tracking enabled,
magnification should scroll along nicely. The only problem may come
in if you move your mouse pointer and then start typing. Doing this
will pull your mouse back to the insertion point and that may not be
what you want to do.
There aren't a great deal of low vision Mac users, so a lot of this is
relatively new ground. I'd be very interested in what you find
though, so if you get a chance to try it, please let me know what
happens.
Thanks,
Steve
On Mar 8, 2008, at 6:42 PM, Mueller, Matt wrote:
Hello all. I'm a new member to the list and also new to the mac.
I've been using it in one of the labs on my college campus while
considering making the switch. It has mostly been a good experience.
The magnification features are not quite as developed as in ZoomText
which I am currently using on a Laptop with Windows XP, but the screen
reading features in VoiceOver are much more complete. This is
especially true with web pages. ZoomText provides no additional
navigation of web pages over simply tabbing to links or controls.
Reading any other part means pressing a keystroke, finding the
specific word you would like to start at using magnification, and then
clicking that word. Generally you have to repeat that for each
section you want to read and it is less than usable for reading small
pieces of text that are around other page elements. VoiceOver has
been a major improvement. the page can usually be entirely navigated
using the keyboard, reading as you go (obviously). The navigation by
groups and interaction has been very efficient in finding sections of
pages and skipping over irrelevant content. The other feature that
has impressed me is magnification of the VoiceOver cursor. I have
tried to gain similar functionality by using ZoomText with Jaws and
Window Eyes, but found they didn't always play nice or communicate
with each other.
It hasn't all been perfect though. The largest issue I have
encountered is with basic word processing. I attempted to get a
magnified view of what I was typing while it was read by word. This
is something ZoomText does effortlessly. At first I tried magnifying
just the voiceover cursor, but it kept the whole line in focus. So the
line would start out big, but as it expanded it would reach the edges
of the screen and necessarily have to become smaller to fit until, by
the end of the line, I couldn't read it. Trying another option, I
didn't magnify the VoiceOver focus but used the zoom feature to
magnify the whole screen and track the keyboard focus. This kept text
readable, but the zoom kept jumping between the insertion point and
the mouse pointer. It was a very annoying behavior and it kept moving
my text out of view.
So I've ended up facing a dilemma between 2 very common and basic
tasks: writing and web browsing. What I would like to know is if
there are any other low vision users out there who could share their
experiences. What have you found to work very well in OS X and where
have you had problems? How have you worked around them?
Finally I guess I should say I have been using Tiger. Maybe someone
knows if these issues have been improved in Leopard? In fact, I am
wondering, Just how well does Voiceover work in Leopard? I realize
that is broad so I will try and clarify it a little. Is the general
experience better? Are most applications that you download or want to
use accessible or are they hard to find? This got really long, so if
you made it this far, thank you for your patience and i hope you can
comment on your experiences.
