Hi Bryan,
Yes, that's an old post that describes Automator under Leopard and the
excerpts are from directions I gave nearly 8 months ago. I wouldn't
have said that I've spent much time with Automator -- I mostly seem to
play with it when someone asks a question. I'm still running Leopard
on this MacBook for reasons of having to support an older software
configuration, so I can't test the latest Automator. Hopefully, I'll
get a chance to do the Snow Leopard upgrade in a couple of weeks.
Cheers,
Esther
Bryan Smart wrote:
Hi. Thanks for that.
I have noticed some differences in my experiences when compared to
what you wrote in that post. Probably, Automator has changed in
recent versions.
Regarding how to reorder actions in the workflow, you said that
you'd select the action and use command-up and command-down. For me,
simply placing the VoiceOver focus on an item doesn't seem to focus
it for the reorder commands. I have cursor tracking turned on. I've
tried VO-space, to activate the item, and VO-enter to select the
item, but this still doesn't seem to force the current action to be
the target of a reorder command. I tried moving the mouse cursor to
the VO cursor and clicking, but the VO cursor doesn't seem to be
moved in to the workflow. I always end up activating the wrong
object, such as opening the Apple menu.
The only way that I've found to reorder on my system is to change
the focus in the workflow with the arrows, and then use the re-order
commands. This is difficult, because there isn't any feedback when
you use the arrows regarding what action has focus. So I move the
focus, try to reorder, and, if I moved the wrong item, I press un-
do, move the focus, and try again. Hopefully there is a better way.
Your post talked about adding variables that are already defined,
such as the current date and time. I was concerned about how to add
my own custom variables. For example, if you put up an input box to
ask a question, the next action in the workflow must set a variable
with the result of the dialog before you should present another
input dialog. This isn't exactly what I'm attempting, but the
concept is the same.
However, I decided to try using predefined variables, since that was
apparently working for you. I added a predefined variable, but had
the same problem that I had with custom variables.
1. In the top level variables table, none of the variable names
read. Each row of the table says "object replacement character". I
can use your technique of moving mouse to VO cursor and double
clicking to open the variable's attributes window to view its name
or set its format. Similarly, I can move to my own custom variables
and open their attributes windows to view their name. This is slow
going, since I must open each variable's attributes window to even
know what variable is focused, but at least I can work around this
problem.
2. What has me stuck, though, is when I want to use a variable of
any type in an action. In actions that accept variables, there is a
pop-up menu where I either select to use an existing variable, or to
create a new variable. The only thing that VoiceOver will read in
this pop-up menu, though is the New Variable entry. I can arrow to
the other entries, but they are silent. Even after I pick one of the
silent entries, and return to the action, the pop-up button now has
a blank label.
I'm on OS 10.6.2. Automator is version 2.1 (246). I'm fully updated.
Are we using the same version? Are you experiencing these problems?
Thanks for your assistance.
Bryan
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]
] On Behalf Of Esther
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 2:13 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Using Automator with VoiceOver
Hi Bryan,
You might want to read through my archived list post about using
variable in VoiceOver here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg08577.html
(Re: Another List? was: Re: apple script and vo)
This contained excerpted posts from earlier correspondence off of
this list about Automator (under Leopard) using variables. Actually,
even at that time you didn't have to double-click to select actions
-- carriage return would add the action to the workflow. Quite a
lot of the way that navigation was outlined there reflects
historical behavior -- for instance, on applications where VoiceOver
accessibility is in a transitional state, I almost always have my
mouse cursor track my VoiceOver cursor so I can click on and
activate selections that I can't otherwise use. So there may also
now be simpler ways to navigate, although what is outlined will work.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
On Jan 9, 2010, at 08:46, Bryan Smart wrote:
Has anyone here spent much time with Automator?
Most of the program works well, but there is a very big hole. It
seems
almost impossible to use variables.
When you create a variable by adding a Set Variable action to the
workflow, and then try to use pop-up menus in other actions to select
the variable that you created, the names of the variables don't
appear
in the menu. In places where I should hear variable names, all I hear
are menus with blank items that don't announce anything. The menus in
general read, since there might be an item in the menu called "New
Variable...", but the other entries, where I should be able to select
from existing variables, are all blank entries.
There is a table in the window that shows all of the existing
variables. I can tell that the table contains rows through
VoiceOver's
announcement of current row, but VoiceOver doesn't read any content
for the row. So, I can't hear the name or any other status info about
the variable.
Since there doesn't seem to be any way to edit or assign variables
other than using the user interface of Automator, it looks like there
is no way to use variables.
I've gone through the menus, but can't find any sort of adjustment to
the appearance of Automator that would help me out. Has anyone else
had better success with variables?
Bryan
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