Hi,
After years of finding reasons not to look at Mac accessibility I took on
a new role at work and was asked "will a Mac do?" Figuring it was a good
excuse to try out VO I said yes.
I use Windows and Linux heavily but have never been able to get a platform
that gives me good enough access to the GUI and CLI that would allow me to
stop having a mutant multi-computer setup or a lack of functionality when
there's only one box at my desk. So I've been intrigued to read that
people are quite happily using their Macs for heavy ssh access to remote
hosts, if I can get access there working good enough and get my head
around the Mac interface then I could see me becoming a convert.
I have now spent 2 whole days with my Mac and have a few questions that
I'd like to ask here.
Firstly, I produce relatively complex spreadsheets as part of some system
modelling work that I do. From a browse of the archives it appears that
the obvious candidates (i.e. from Open Office, MS Office or iWork) are
currently not accessible and that I'll need retain some Windows access for
the time being for this? I do see that the Open Office 3 beta appears to
offer potential but unfortunately I'm using a PPC-based Mac and I don't
think that's supported. This of course does also kill my plans to run
Fusion but I may be able to get a new Mac Pro soon which may open those
doors.
In the terminal I'm finding it better than most Windows ssh clients but so
far not good enough to spend hours efficiently working on things. I've
noticed that any command that generates more than a single line of output
(weirdly excluding ls) gets truncated and my prompt is just read instead.
I seem to be able to mitigate this by setting an empty prompt but that's
an imperfect solution. It appears that the reading of the prompt or the
"new line" announcement is muting the command output. Anyone come across
this and have a solution? Is there any way to turn off the "new line"
announcement, I couldn't find anything in the verbosity menu.
By interacting with the terminal window (it gets identified as a scroll
area) I can review the screen but usually only a few lines back, to go
further I need route VO to the top of the window and then go down to where
I want. Again, anyone found this problem and have a solution?
More generally what have folks done with terminal to improve its
accessibility? I've played with cursor types, I think block blinking
currently works best and also looked at the various terminal emulation
modes. VT100/102 seemed to be best there.
Another problem is in editing text, either when I interact with it
directly or am navigating within TextEdit. The cursor seems to get stuck
at the end or beginning of a line and repeats the first or last
character. I couldn't find an obvious configuration setting here, is this
a problem or am I missing something?
Finally I'll potentially be controversial and say that I'm having real
problems with the VO interface metaphor when applied to complex webpages.
One thing I'm accessing is the Microsoft web front-end to an Exchange
account which I accept is a horrible webpage at the best of times. But
two things I can't seem to be able to do are to quickly jump over the
forest of links at the top or return to the same place in the page when I
return from reading an email. Note that these are related and solving
either would greatly improve my experience.
For the jumping over the link forest I thought that setting VO to group
navigation would work but each link is still identified as its own item.
Without looking at the page source I assume the links aren't logically
grouped within <div> tags or the related which may be the source of the
problem. But this is a point where the ability to do a quick page down
would be really really useful and VO doesn't seem to offer me that.
Once I select a message and go to its page I find that returning to the
parent page always takes me to the start of the HTML content area. I've
tried command-[ which seems to be the usual keyboard shortcut for going
back and this is the result. I saw reference to a related VO-[ command
that seemed to be what I want but it never seems to work. Can anyone
offer wisdom on either of these issues?
If it's significant I'm using Leopard but only the original 10.5.0
release, not updated. The machine is on a network without internet
connectivity which makes updating a pain.
I suspect that my overall Mac experience so far has been quite frustrating
but in a good way. If I can resolve the above issues I think I can get a
platform for both my GUI and CLI needs for the first time. If I can get
my hands on an Intel-based Mac then Windows within Fusion makes the rest
of my problems go away. I use VMware heavily on Windows and Linux
currently and plan to move that across to the Mac also.
Many thanks to anyone for any help they can offer.
Regards,
Garry
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Garry Turkington
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
