Hi man, Go ahead. I hope it helps.
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 6-Jan-09, at 6:35 AM, E.J. Zufelt wrote:
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.
