See my answers below. I'll answer them as best I can and others will
no doubt have more to provide.
On Aug 9, 2008, at 1:22 AM, Hayden Smith wrote:
Hi there,
I am recently a windows migrant to the OSX environment and had just
a few queries in regards to voiceover and general macintosh
applications and features:
1. Under the windows environment, the system tray provides
application's main windows to be closed and the process still
perpetuates with certain statistical information shown. Does Mac
possess such a feature? As such applets as Skype, Adium, et cetera
would be a lot more manageable in such a fashion.
[SH] Yes,, but it is not a system tray in the since you are thinking
under WIndows. You can use the utility called Activity Monitor under
Utilities to gather stats etc. You can use the "Force Quit" command to
see a list of running apps and this is brought up by command+option
+escape. You can also use control+option+f1 which is the VoiceOver
command for the workspace overview. This will tell you how many
applications are running and two quick presses in succession will
bring up a list of those apps you can navigate. You can arrow through
and just press return on the app you wish to switch too.
2. When I was setting voice announcements to occur on certain skype
events, it did not allow for such a modification as voice and rate.
Which voice would I be looking at - under voiceover
[SH] You do not affect voice event changes in this manner. You would
go to Speech under System Preferences and choose the text to speech
tab. There you will find the appropriate options. Now what I am not
completely sure of is if those apps that speak announcements such as
those Skype provides honors and uses those preferences via some speech
mechanism, but someone else may know more about this.
3. Would it be possible for someone to detail the different uses of
the voiceover voices listed under the speech tab of the voiceover
utility?
[SH] Most of these are self explanatory. You have a a default voice
which is what it states, you have a content voice which without
consulting some documentation is going to likely be the voice that
would read web pages, documents etc. you have a default status voice
which speaks status messages and I can't think of one example at this
minute, I assume for events that need your attention etc., and finally
there's a VoiceOver menu voice which speaks all the options etc. in
VoiceOver's menu. That is the quick and dirty version and others might
expand more.
4. I was told by a VO user that it is possible to enable voiceover
to read the time every hour. Where would such a preference reside?
And is there a voiceover command to read the time without having to
go into the status menues?
[SH] Yes, it is possible and this option is located and configured in
System Preferences under Date and Time. under the clock tab. You can
set the clock to speak on the hour, half hour, and on the quarter hour..
5. Finally, I have discovered such utilities as open office,
transmition, vlc media player, fetch, adium, skype and fusion; are
there any other essential applications that experienced voiceover
users could suggest that I have - either for necessity or simply
usefulness - and also if there are any resources around for learning
apple script to develop new applications for voiceover use.
[SH] There are a number of apps for burning CD/DVDs and I personally
like Dragon Burn and there are just a large number of apps that do
work just fine. Read Iris for OCR works very well, but it's just a
matter of trying them out. I'm hoping others will provide some details
here, but seems you have covered a number of apps that are useful
already.
Cheers
Scott Howell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
