I got my iPad Back. Am I sorry about all those nasty
things I said about Apple?
Not in the least because this is big business at it's
worst.
Okay. Enough whining and griping from me. Here is the
fix. It was aimed at iPhone users, but it does work on the iPad
just fine.
As in most software bugs, things aren't what they appear
to be. The Caps-lock works correctly but the reporting of it's
status is what is broken. I will condense what little I have
learned so far.
From: Sarah k Alawami <marri...@gmail.com>
She reported that turning quicknav on helps. You do that
by pressing the Left-arrow and Right-arrow keys simultaneously.
The system reports that quicknav is on. This gives you your
arrows back but I would call this "teaser mode" because you
can't yet click on/select any of the fields that are
tantalizingly now reported as you arrow back and forth.
Also, another bug in IOS8 is that voiceover crashes when
one is using the arrow keys plus probably a few other things.
The system goes silent briefly and you here "Voiceover on" and
find that you are now back at the start of the list of available
links to arrow through. This is annoying but if you arrow
through things a little more slowly, it seems to crash less
often. Time to go down another rabbit hole.
One of the google searches I did turned up the following
set of instructions on applevis. Follow these carefully. The
following words are not mine but lifted from the email being
referenced.
Quoting:
AppleVis
If your Bluetooth keyboard doesn't work with VoiceOver except just a
few functions in iOS 8.0, try the following steps to resolve the
issue.
Once the problem disappears, it doesn't appear again unless you
change
the iPhone language in Settings, General, Language & Region. To make
the problem disappear from your iPhone, follow these steps:
1. If you use just one software keyboard, temporarily add an
arbitrary
one in Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards, Add New Keyboard.
2. Open the Notes app.
3. Create a new note.
4. Press the left arrow key and the right arrow key simultaneously
to
turn off the quick navigation option.
5. Hold down the command key and press the space key several times
to
cycle through the list of software keyboards.
6. Press the left arrow key and the right arrow key simultaneously
to
turn on the quick navigation option.
7. Now your Bluetooth keyboard should work fine except other iOS
bugs.
8. You may delete the software keyboard temporarily added at
Settings,
General, Keyboard, Keyboards.
This is a copy of the email sent to RiVO customers to resolve the
issue
(http://goo.gl/GiBvWy) since it should also resolve the problem for
other Bluetooth keyboards as well.
End of quote
This is Martin speaking now. After activating notes from
the touch screen, I selected compose and did as the instructions
said. I had selected a Spanish keyboard as the software keyboard so
I typed
Command+Space and heard Espaniole then English and then
Espaniole again as there were now two software keyboards.
I left it on English. You then just get out of notes and
the BT KB now works as well as it did in IOS6.
The IOS8 accessibility stack was simply not ready for
prime time. While I do not have any inside knowledge of how the
OS works, it appears that various parts of the system are not
speaking to each other during installation and setup. If your
are using an English or Russian or Chinese locale, all important
modules such as the keyboard translator should understand which
character sets to use without the end user having to essentially
initialize them. In unix, we call this the environment and make
use of environmental variables and it generally works
beautifully. IOS is not unix but the concept is an old and
tested one. We are using XYZ language so everything that deals
with text and fonts knows this and behaves accordingly unless
specifically told otherwise.
I hope this helps somebody. Knowledge is worth a lot
more when it is concentrated in one place. Treasure hunts are
fun and challenging but sometimes, we just want stuff to work.
Martin
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