Hi list,
While reading through todays digest, a lister asked for us to outline
accessibility problems with pages. From my admittedly brief time using
the program, here are the problems I have found thus far.
1. miss spellings are not detected dynamically:
As you write in pages, voiceover does not detect words spelled
incorrectly as it does in text edit. You can still use the spell
checker, but I found it easier to rectify the problems as soon as they
are created. Hearing miss spelled words dynamically is a plus.
2. Voiceover cannot detect changing text attributes:
This is a big deal to me. I used to use commands in text edit such as
control option command C, which would read until the text attribute
changed. This enabled me to quickly check a document for formatting
inconsistencies. Now, hitting control option command C in pages gives
me a bonk sound. Apart from that, nothing else happens. I can still
use control option T to read the current text attribute, but I am not
about to go through the document line by line while hitting this
command. Additionally, setting the option to automatically read text
attributes in the voiceover verbosity does not catch changes that may
occur in the middle of lines or sentences.
3. No ability to read comments:
With pages, you can see the comments written to a document, but you
cannot tell where they should appear in the document itself. In other
words, while in the text of a document, stop interacting with it, and
VO left arrow once. Interact with this item, and you will see multiple
comments listed. However, what is lacking, is a way to tell where the
comments should appear in the document. Sighted users tell me that
there is an arrow pointing from all the text that is commented to the
comments themselves. Voiceover, however, provides no indication of this.
In short, these are three accessibility problems, which I feel are
quite substantial with the new pages.
As I said before, I have only started using this program. Please let
me know if there is any way to correct any of them.
Sincerely,
John J Herzog
