Thanks very much Esther for the suggestions. I'll see if I can make
those adjustments soon.
Later...
On 5-Jan-09, at 11:45 AM, Esther wrote:
Hi Tim,
On Jan 4, 2009, at 7:54 PM, Tim Kilburn wrote:
Hi Will,
You asked: if i am in text edit is there a way i can highlight
from where my cursor is now,
TK: Check out http://homepage.mac.com/kilburns/voiceover/textedit.html
for instructions on this. Use VO-cmd-h to navigate to the heading
on Selecting Text and it should all be there for you. There are
also many more hints on the use of TextEdit.
As always, great job summarizing the VoiceOver selection options in
your TextEdit pages. In the section on Selecting Text I'd also add a
note that you can fine tune your selection with the shift selection
commands by issuing additional selection commands that modify and
"unhighlight" your original selection. For example, if you want to
select everything from your present position through to the end of
the document, except for the last two words, you can use Command-
Shift-Down Arrow, and then press Option-Shift-Left Arrow twice to
"back off" and remove the last two words from your selection. You'll
hear these two selections as "unhighlighted". Use VO-F6 to check
your highlighted text.
Another Cocoa shortcut I sometimes use in addition to the ones
you've listed for TextEdit is Control-V to move down by pages and
Control-Shift-V to select next page. This can be a convenient unit
of selection/navigation in longer text documents when you want to
use something longer than paragraphs or lines, but you don't want to
move to the end of the document. Here I believe that the "page" is
the text visible within the window, so the amount of selected text
depends on the size of the TextEdit window and the size of the text
font being used. (This is roughly like using VO-Shift-W to read the
contents of the window while using Control-V to page through the
document -- the selections are made in window-sized blocks.) Anyway,
with this combination I can, for example, select four "pages" of
text from my current position in the file by holding down the
Control and Shift keys and pressing the "V" key four times. Then I
can use additional selection commands to "unhighlight" by dropping
lines, words, etc. from the end of my selection. Using VO-F6 to
check what is highlighted, and also remembering that command-z will
"undo" actions if you inadvertently pressed keys that started to
replace that large section of selected text before you could copy it
(Command-C), helps a lot in experimenting with TextEdit selections.
A few other miscellaneous comments for your TextEdit page:
(1) The command to set a VoiceOver Bookmark at the VoiceOver cursor
location (with VO-Keys+Shift+1) and then jump back to it (VO-Keys+1)
is actually Leopard specific, since it uses hot spots. You can set
multiple bookmarks within the same document (VO-Keys+Shift+2, etc.),
subject to the limits of hot spots (maximum of 10; should remain
active as long as you don't restart VoiceOver). You need to switch
the definitions for setting and jumping back (there's a typo in that
VO-keys+Shift+1 is currently associated with jumping to the bookmark
instead of setting the bookmark on your page). You might also want
to note that you need to press the number keys at the top of the
keyboard when assigning the hot spots, since at least one list
reader ran into problems because of trying to use the number keys on
the number pad for hot spot assignments.
(2) VO-T to check text attributes is also Leopard specific. I
believe that everything else on the current TextEdit page (apart
from the 3 lines describing setting and navigating to hot spot
bookmarks, and using VO-T to check text attributes such as font
type, size, and color) works for both Tiger and Leopard, so you can
use the same page in your links to Tiger and Leopard apps with that
notation.
(3) Cara gave a great description of how to select color for fonts
in TextEdit. It will pop up if you do a search with the terms:
from:"Cara" TextEdit color
but here's the direct link to Cara's post on accessible font color
selection with TextEdit from the archives:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg45614.html
(4) Tabs can be set in TextEdit as you describe, by interacting with
the Ruler. But that is only the case for working in RTF (Rich Text
Format). Now admittedly, anybody who is using Word documents or who
is still closely tied to Windows will likely be using Rich Text
rather than Plain Text, but linux users will likely want Plain Text.
In plain text mode my tabs seem set to indent 8 characters. Keeping
track of tab indentation for programming purposes has been discussed
a number of times, but most recently, both Rafael and Jacob
summarized that you can have VoiceOver keep track of tabs if you set
punctuation level to all in the verbosity settings under VoiceOver
Utility, and you can also set repeated punctuation to count
occurrences.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
Tim Kilburn
& Carter the Canine
Fort McMurray, AB Canada
