I'd be happy to see such a guide for pages from a VO perspective, no matter how rudimentary. Word processing and spreadsheeting has been the one stumbling block in my desire to switch over to MAC from the PC world. I plan to purchase Pages soon, and maybe a MAC Air so I can access the nearby Apple store's "one to One" training and perhaps get solid on Pages/Numbers through them.

----- Original Message ----- From: "JAMES AUSTIN" <[email protected]>
To: "Mac OSX & iOS Accessibility" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 12:21 PM
Subject: Creating Getting started Guides was Re: iWork programs andaccessibility


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

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