Good morning Erik,
Thats an interesting analogy. Do you mind me posting this with my review of
Voiceover on my site (with attribution of course)?
Thanks,
Everett
----- Original Message -----
From: "erik burggraaf" <[email protected]>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X by
theblind" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 10:33 AM
Subject: Re: the difference between learning the mac and windows with a
screenreader:
Hi Mike, This is what I call the dropped penny approach.
The penny drop was an orientation exercize my sister and I had to do when
we were kids, and it says a lot about the way blind people work vs
sighted people. The approach isn't rong, it's just different.
When a penny falls on the grownd, a sighted person steps back, takes in
the scene at a glance and focuses in on the penny so they can pick it up.
This is the approach voiceover takes.
When the same penny falls on the ground, a blind person listens to the
sound, chooses a point of reference such as a table leg or the toe of a
shoe, and sircles out concentricly in the direction of the sound until
the penny is found. This is the windows approach.
In windows for example, you are on a link, in a table, on a web page, in
a browser, on the desktop.
Conversely in mac, you are on the desktop, in a browser, on a web page,
in a table, on a link, that has text. Both approaches are good, but
blind people are not taught top down or outside in the way sighted people
are. They are taught bottom up or inside out. Or in other words, first
identify something by it's parts and then identify the whole thing based
on information about it's parts, instead of identifying the whole thing
at a glance and then zeroing in on each part to see how it fits with the
whole.
The new mac user coming over from windows may look at the way voiceover
works and think, "Oh my lord! That's not intuitive at all!", but of
course it is extremely intuitive once you rap your mind around it.
Best,
erik burggraaf
Certified Technician
Assistive Computing LTD Support and training
Sales department: 888-828-2445
Support and Training: 888-255-5194
Email: [email protected]
Website coming soon
On 5-Jan-09, at 4:39 PM, Mike Arrigo wrote:
I find what confuses some people with voice over is the whole
interacting thing, I think it's pretty simple, you could just call it
zooming in or focusing in on an item, but that confuses some people.
On Jan 5, 2009, at 2:51 AM, David Poehlman wrote:
Hello all,
One thing I have observed about the mac which has been different from
most if not all of my windows experiences is that when I read the
manual for my macs and the os and vo materials, I was able to do
anything I needed to do with the mac and the os because either there
were keyboard comands built-into the os or into vo. The most startling
thing though was how my knowledge of vo helped me with the system in
general when I was reading the user guides.
If you want to read the user guide for your mac, there is a folder on
the hd called user guides and information which has the welcome to
leopard guide and the user guide for your computer along with another
document or two. These work well in preview and give you some vo
practice.
