Hello Mike,
On May 4, 2008, at 5:01 PM, Mike Arrigo wrote:
Hi all. I had a few questions before I purchased my mac. If someone
could
help me out, it would be much appreciated. The main things I want to
do with
the mac are email, web surfing, playing mp3 files, playing and
burning CDs,
and watching dvds. I'm assuming those tasks are pretty accessible?
A.R. Yes, they are and you need no extra applications for these tasks.
M.A. I will
probably also use skype. I know with voice over, you can navigate a
web page
using the dom, or use group navigation. Is the dom navigation
similar to how
the windows screen readers handle things?
A.R. I can't answer that as I've never used Windows, but personally, I
dislike DOM navigation.
M.A. I've heard that group navigation
is actually faster in some cases, I haven't tried surfing the web
with voice
over yet, but I would think that the dom navigation might be better
for
unfamiliar pages, and the group navigation might be faster for pages
you're
familiar with.
A.R. For unfamiliar pages, I just Select All and use the Start
Speaking Text command to read the whole page. You then have the Link
Chooser menu and the Item Chooser menu into which you can type a few
letters of what you are looking for to reduce the number of links or
items you have to read through to reach the one you want. You can also
jump from one heading to the next.
M.A. When you purchase a mac, is it supposed to also include a
leopard dvd? I assume you could use that to restore your hard drive
to how
it was originally?
A.R. Yes, it includes two DVDs, as it comes with additional
applications. You can use them to reinstall the OS and customise it to
suit yourself. You do not need sighted help for this.
M.A. What about defragmenting the
hard drive? Are there programs you can get to handle that like in
windows?
A.R. There's no need to defragment the hard drive, the OS does a good
job of housekeeping. All you need to do is Repair Disk Permissions
when things start running a bit slow or after doing an update.
HTH
Cheers,
Anne
