Hi John, I imagine you have moved on, but something that will help you out a lot if you can get it going at this point is the vo quickstart tutorial It would have come up automatically after the music stopped had you not turned on vo but if you can get it to work at this point, the keystroke for it is: control-option-f8.
To navigate through a dialog and hear all its info, use control-option-arrows. Space toggles checkboxes, sets radio buttons and activates pop ups so that you can make selections. when you find what you want in a pop up, press enter to set it. I often tab through the items and then use vo keys with left arrow to hear the text of an Item if I am not certain what it is. When ever I do a new mac setup, I have to use an apple keyboard to get it going. There is a setting in that dialogbox to choose the type of account you have, pop, imap or .mac. Once you have seleced the account type, it should accept your email address. .mac is an email account that comes with a .mac subscription or trial. .mac is an apple hosted service that provides a bunch of features like storage, mail and web hosting. ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Heim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS Xby theblind" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, April 25, 2008 10:22 AM Subject: Finally took the plunge 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.
