Hi Ryan,
Kaare's suggestions about picking the tasks that were most wanted and
building lessons around them is a good one. Your own example of
tactile graphics sounds great! Please keep track of the ideas that
turn out to be really neat. Also, not to be too subversive, but here
are some things you can do along the lines of iTunes. There's a very
nice free podcast of "Wolf Brother" by Michelle Paver that was
released by Audible's UK division that you can use as a training
exercise for searching, navigating, listening, etc. Just for
background, this is an audiobook about a 12-year old boy named Torak
and his wolf-cub companion. It's a fantasy adventure story that is
complete and unabridged (about 6.5 hours in total for the 14 podcast
episodes) that is read by Ian McKellan, who does an excellent job.
(Audible UK released this as a free podcast in conjunction with the
Guardian in the UK to promote the series -- there are four books of
the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, including this first one, that are
available at the (U.S.) iTunes Store). It took a number of children's
book awards. You can read more about it (including reviews by some
kids) at:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/295305.Wolf_Brother
Anyway, I think this would be a fun project to try out. A lot of the
organizational concepts about searching, drilling down, and
interacting with tables, etc. get used in iTunes. You could
practically take him through the store and introduce the concepts of
looking at the menu bar commands and shortcut equivalents. (For
example, I now use Command-Shift-H to select the Store, but I'd
probably teach navigation on the sidebar by using arrow keys and also
by typing the first letters of the name). You can also find this by
using the text search field (e.g. "Wolf Brother podcast") and then VO-
right arrow to the HTML area of the iTunes Store to select the podcast
and download. This is actually also a good place to practice some of
the HTML navigation features in simple format (e.g. VO-Command-H,
etc.). Also, this is a very good listen for an 11-year old boy.
Cheers,
Esther
On Dec 12, 2008, at 8:07 AM, kaare dehard wrote:
Hi there. If your student is in to music, navigating with vo and the
itunes is a good place to stop. Also perhaps adium to cover the
social stuff and also learn intro to html navigation. Depending on
the musical interest, maybe a trip to the land of garage band?
Just a few thoughts.
When I tought screen readers we picked out tasks that were most
wanted then used the product in that context.
On 12-Dec-08, at 12:19 PM, Ryan Dour wrote:
Hello,
Got any suggestions on things that could keep teaching Voiceover
fun for teens and pre-teens? I am helping out a friend teach her
son Voiceover, and I want to keep things interesting. One thing
that helped big time was the use of tactile graphics of the OS,
Safari, iTunes, common controls, etc. I used the ViewPlus Emprint
in emboss only mode on Windows to emboss the screen captures. I had
a friend help me crop them to exactly what I wanted to show off.
Wonderful result.
He likes sports, games, and music. Please let me know what could be
helpful.
Thanks,
Ryan Dour
