Hi Janet and Others,
The ability to navigate to an item in the Dock by typing the first
few letters of its name is a Leopard addition, so it's not something
that Felix would have been able to use under Tiger. Some application
menus can be quite long, and unless you use a particular menu
frequently, you'll want to arrow through to read all the options.
However, for short menus, or for menus with options that you
frequently use, typing the first letter or letters of the option you
want is a fast and handy way to navigate.
Typing the first letters of an item is also a quick way to navigate
under Finder, and it's often handy to use this in the iTunes Source
List or Songs Outline to go to a playlist or to a particular song in
a playlist. I also use this when I want to move quickly from a
podcast episode to the folder of a podcast that I've expanded; I'll
type the name of the podcast series, and provided all the episodes
don't carry the same name as the podcast series I move easily to the
folder. Oh, and in iTunes typing the first few letters of a song or
podcast means ignoring "The" at the beginning of a title.
I found out that typing the first letters of an item in the Dock
works for Leopard by listening to the webcast on Leopard's
accessibility that was released last fall. I missed this when it
came out, but there's an MP3 file version of this webcast on the web
page where you can get the VoiceOver Getting Started Guides in
multiple formats (including Daisy, MP3, PDF, and Grade 2 Braille) at:
http://www.cucat.org/books/vogs/
Look for the Leopard Accessibility audio file link for this talk by
Mike Shebanek of Apple from October 2007. It's a pretty good
presentation about VoiceOver and the last two-thirds of the program
are particularly interesting for visually disabled users. There's a
lot of content about what went into design decisions and what new
features in Leopard are particularly relevant.
If you want the original webcast download, which plays as a movie
file in iTunes, you can download it directly from iTunes. Select the
iTunes Store in your source list, tab to the search text field, then
type in: "Apple Global Training" (without the quotation marks) and
press carriage return. Tab over to the Songs Outline and interact.
The first item will be about Leopard Accessibility. VO-keys-right
arrow to the column that says "free", route your mouse cursor to your
VoiceOver cursor with VO-keys-Command-F5 (or on my laptop this is
Control-Option-Fn-Command-F5 with the extra Fn key) if you don't have
your Mouse cursor tracking your VoiceOver Cursor. Then click with VO-
keys-Shift-Space to start the download. This webcast showed up as an
item named "Mac Learning" under a Playlist Folder named "Duke" in my
iTunes Source list. Just as a warning, if I want to regain control
of my iTunes navigation after pausing a movie midway (by pressing the
space bar), I press the escape key to get out of the movie display so
that I can navigate by tabbing and using the VO-keys+right and left
arrow keys again. Otherwise the focus is in the movie display screen
until the movie finishes.
This webcast was a great intro to some of the VoiceOver Leopard
features, and (belated) thanks to Greg for converting this to an MP3
file and making it available on the VoiceOver manual site. (For
those who may not know, Greg Kearney was also responsible for
assembling the many manual formats on that site). This also reminds
me, did anyone on the list attend Greg's Camp VoiceOver earlier this
week?
Cheers,
Esther
