Hi David, You're absolutely right. I have often thought of doing something and have started several times. However, working full-time makes this sort of thing very difficult. It needs a collaborative effort. Moreover, it does not seem that Apple are making progress in the iWork area as we have not seen a significant update for it in nearly 4 years. Also, there are just some things that VoiceOver cannot do in Pages at the moment, such as lists and footnotes and of course, tables.
I would be very happy to try to write something along the "Getting Started…" lines but as i say it would have to be a collaborative effort I think. What do people think? James On 6 Mar 2013, at 13:25, David Griffith <[email protected]> wrote: There is a desperate need for structured work to be done on building up knowledge of Mac productivity software so that a Visually Impaired person can fruitfully access it. There should be getting Started guides to pages, Numbers, Key Note etc. These could then be usefully supported with audio tutorials giving walk through of essential tasks. All the current guides I have seen assume you have sight. At the moment the visually impaired user base Resources on Mac seems more concentrated on advanced Music/ creative products rather than serious advanced Office Productivity. Basic word processing is fine but as you are finding moving beyond this to spreadsheets and more advance usage is a massive learning curve. I have had the identical problems that you are experiencing. Ideally it would be useful for Apple to produce more than chapter 7 of the Voiceover guide on applications. Alternatively organisation like the RNIB should be doing more to increase the expertise in utilising or work arounding the issue to enhance Mac productivity for visually impaired users. This has happened in the USA where Visual Impairment charities produced Getting Started with the iPhone but there is a yawning chasm of a gap in the market where there is zilch support for Visually impaired users using the Mac. I guess this is chicken and egg. The Mac users of office productivity is small compared to the iPhone. This is likely to continue whilst the organisations do not support Mac access solutions. Listening to the interview on Blind Bargains recently it appears that organisation like the RNIB are focussing on Windows and NVDA for investment in Access for their user base. This is understandable but I wish they widened their horizons beyond Windows. We need proper in depth guides to intermediate / advanced use of Mac Productivity . I think this is quite tough to expect visually Impaired people to pull themselves all up individually by their bootstraps. There needs to be a proper structured project which builds tutorials on a number of tasks using Iworks, probably initially investigated with sighted assistance until procedures to complete tasks without sighted help are formulated. David Griffith -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Cathy Sent: 06 March 2013 01:23 To: Mac OSX & iOS Accessibility Subject: Re: iWork programs and accessibility hi, I have both pages and numbers. I have been disappointed with numbers because several of the shortcut keys have not worked for me. for example, I had some XLS files that numbers opened up fine, and I could read the first sheet of data, but the command to move from sheet to sheet has not worked for me.there were other shortcut keys in the help file that also would not work for me. I found pages to be very complex too learn, but this could simply be due to the fact that I am a new Mac user. I also constantly received "busy" messages from both aps, but now that I just got more memory installed, perhaps this will no longer happen. must check into that. my two cents. Cathy <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. However, this should in no way replace your own security strategy. We assume neither liability nor responsibility should something unpredictable happen. Please remember to update your membership preferences periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/> <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. However, this should in no way replace your own security strategy. We assume neither liability nor responsibility should something unpredictable happen. Please remember to update your membership preferences periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/> <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. However, this should in no way replace your own security strategy. We assume neither liability nor responsibility should something unpredictable happen. Please remember to update your membership preferences periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
