Hi John, I'd use your VO keys, along with your arrow keys to read the
rest of these pages. Hope that helps you.
On 25-Apr-08, at 10:22 AM, John Heim wrote:
I finally took the plunge and bought the low-end Mac Mini. First, 2
quick questions... Is there a way to get vo to read the entire
contents of a dialog box like hitting Insert+b in jaws? Also, can I
get it to say the title of a data entry field?
I am still in the setup program and when I press the continue
button, it goes to the next dialog box but it doesn't read the box.
You know what I mean? You press the continue button after entering
whatever data it's asking for and it goes to the next data entry
screen but it doesn't say anything. So I've been pressing tab and
then shift+tab to get it to read the title of the data entry field.
But I would guess there's more text in the dialog box than just the
titles of the data entry fields.
On to my story. You may or may not find this interesting. I'm not
complaining. I'm just telling my story. Well, maybe I'm complaining
a little bit. But I haven't even gotten though the setup program yet
so I'm sure I'll have lots of positive things to say once I get going.
I bought the low-end Mac Mini last week Thursday. I'm not even
through the set up yet. But a big part of the reason for that is
that I opened the box at work last Thursday and took out the pieces.
And then I couldn't get them back in the box and accidently left the
power brick in my office. So Friday I stuffed the brick into my
backpack and when I got home, I discovered that I had also left the
power chord extension in my office. So then I couldn't do anything
all weekend either. It's an extremely minor complaint but Apple
should have made that chord a standard power chord.
Another minor complaint is that I had to take a printer/scanner/
copier along with my Mac. I'd have rather they'd taken $50 off the
price.
I took Monday off work so I couldn't pick up the power chord until
Tuesday. Tuesday night I got the thing powered up but then I
couldn't get it to talk. Maybe I didn't wait long enough for it to
boot but I wasn't getting any speech. I started pressing keys hoping
to remember the hotkey for starting voiceover. I finally got on my
Windows PC and googled for it. Command+F5. It started talking but in
French or German. I dunno. I putzed around with that for a while and
then turned it off.
Wednesday I turned it back on and it came up speaking in English.
But it didn't seem to want to do anything. I have a standard USB
keyboard and I thought maybe I needed an Apple keyboard. I was told
my standard keyboard should work I was listening to the Apple
tutorial on voiceover on my Windows PC but none of the keys did what
it said they would.
Thursday, I borrowed a bluetooth Mac keyboard from my boss. She told
me i'd probably need sighted assistance to set it up. That may be
correct but as it turns out, the problem I was having was that the
Mac wanted to run some kind of system check probably because I had
just cut the power to the thing the day before. That's my theory
anyway. I pressed enter, it played some funky music, obviously was
running some program, and then came up speaking English. In fact,
it asked me which language I wanted. So the first time, I must have
accidently selected another language. I can't explain it but I sure
didn't hear it ask me that the first time. This time I selected
English and was able to get through several pages of the setup
procedure. As I mentioned, my problem right now is that I am a bit
uncertain of what it's asking me because I don't know how to get it
to read all of the instructions in the dialog boxes.
For example, it asked me for my email address but it doesn't seem to
like what I've entered. It's asking for my mac.com email address and
I don't know what that is.
