Hi Nic and William,
For hot key assignments of service menu items, I use VO-Shift-C to
copy the last phrase to pasteboard, then I usually paste to TextEdit
to check over the command. You can paste directly to the keyboard
assignment, too, but I usually have to backspace/delete the space
after the pasted phrase, so I generally check this in TextEdit first
anyway. Also, I've since learned that some problematic combinations,
like the ellipsis at the end of some menu commands, can be typed with
Command+Semi-colon (on an English input keyboard, at least).
As for reserving key combinations such as the F-keys with Command,
Control, and Option combinations, I think that you can override this
and make assignments through third party tools like Spark, but it's
probably not a good idea. You potentially get conflicting key
definitions. I suspect these are being reserved for development of
future VoiceOver key definition features.
Interesting discussion, and I also hope that we'll see more
development of multi-lingual features for the Mac.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
P.S. I've snipped off the parts of the discussion before William's
initial post of VoiceOver features he'd like to see.
On 8 Apr 2010, at 05:17, Nicolai Svendsen wrote:
Hi
Yes, it exists on the phone, but VoiceOver on the Mac does not have
multilingual speech as of yet, at least.
No, Mac OS prior to X had Outspoken, a third-party screen reader.
VoiceOver was introduced in 2004 with the release of 10.4 Tiger.
As for hot keys, you can easily have VoiceOver spell it out for you.
If I had a braille display, I'd probably find a way of fixing that
problem you are having. And, if I can't find it anywhere, at least I
can suggest this too. But until then, I can't provide any educated
guesses. I think a safe assumption, though, is that menu items, if
they are two words or more, are always capitalized. E.G. Skype's
Hang Up. H and U are both capitalized. Hotkeys can also be assigned
to the control key, command and option. Not shift, of course, as
this is the key for capitalizing a character, unless it is used with
conjunction of other keys. The Mac provides function keys which can
perform hardware or software keys. You may want to go to System
Preferences>Keyboard>Keyboard tab, then select for Mac to use all
F1, F2, etc as
The verbosity features are a recent addition. Or, at least, the
detailed verbosity features, including hints, how to speak items
such as buttons, checkboxes, and so-on, not to mention counting
items in lists, on the dock and elsewhere. It is a good idea,
however, to suggest multiple configurations for both braille
verbosity and speech if it is currently nowhere to be found.
Regards,
Nic
On Apr 8, 2010, at 3:44 PM, William Windels wrote:
Hi Nicolai,
What you wrote about the languages, the automatic language
detection on websites, is already available on the iphone and this
works also
wit voice-over I think.
I tought that voiceover was already implemented since version 9 of
macos.
But yes, the current version of voiceover is 3.0 and the windows-
screenreaders have a version number 9 or higher.
About the hotkeys for menus, you need to type the exact, case
sensitive, menu-item.
This is not that easy since menu-items are mostly underlined with
dots 7 and8 while reading.
Because of that, you can't see which letter is capital or not.
Also, dots 7 and 8 can be used in editors to mark if a text is e.g.
bold, italic,undelined...
This is not possible when text is always underlined while reading
by the voice.
Some keys are also not allowed for assigning hotkeys to menu-items.
e.g. the f-keys im combination of ctrl, shift, commandm option.
Except the vo-keys, there are not that much f-keys used by the
system in combination with one of this 4 keys.
I am not shore about that but it's my experience.
about the verbosity :
In my opinion, it doesn't make sence to have all things that are
spoken are also on the braille display¸.
e.g.: it's sometimes interesting to hear the tooltip of a specific
element on a website but it's not necessary to see this info on the
braille display'.
also about the message bussy: why should i see this in the
display ¸and , at the same time missiong the information on the
screen.
this are some suggestions...
thanx allot for your answer
best regards,
william
Op 8-apr-2010, om 13:27 heeft Nicolai Svendsen het volgende
geschreven:
Hi,
VoiceOver cannot detect languages because these have not been
implemented. Furthermore, VoiceOver has only been localized since
the release of Snow Leopard. VoiceOver has only been around since
2004, and that is very important to keep in mind. Despite that,
though, In my opinion it surpasses Windows screen access in most
areas. Flash isn't very important to me, since you hardly got any
feedback even if you could see the controls. Saying that, the
verbosity does provide a huge amount of configuration, actually.
All you'd need, and I'm sure more is going to be added. In Mac,
you don't need silly tooltips to be spoken when going through
elements. Or help balloons. VoiceOver, or just APple's
accessibility policy is different in that, if you want
information, you have to look for it without the screen reader
doing any handholding. This is why I think that the current level
of verbosity configuration is more than sufficient.
When it comes to the selection of text on websites, it works the
same way as it would if it was loaded into a virtual buffer, which
is a downside if you use a Windows screen reader, in that it has
to load it into the buffer after the initial page has been loaded.
This takes longer time than it should. On some pages, when using
the Mac, selecting text works amazingly well, and on some it does
not. I am sure that Apple will address this, as it is an important
feature to perfect.
Keyboard shortcuts can already be assigned to all menu items
within any selected application, as long as the menu title is
written properly and as long as the item to which you wish to
attach a hockey to is in a menu.
It is important to understand that any accessibility delivered to
VoiceOver users depends on Apple's framework, which is good in
that in a lot of cases, the developer is not always aware of the
accessibility of their application. The Cocoa framework ensures
that a lot of applications work out of the box, whereas WIndows
screen readers depend mainly on scripts. Also, that causes the
scripts to break if a change is made to the user interface. The
inability to access Flash is mainly because Adobe did not want to
provide accessibility until now, and even then, it's supposedly
going to take eighteen months, in which case HTML5 has probably
kicked out Flash. And, it'll already work with VoiceOver.
Regards,
Nic
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On Apr 8, 2010, at 1:05 AM, William Windels wrote:
Hello all,
I agree that Apple is doing great efforts to make their products
accessible and I love the mac for most of my tasks but the mac
and the corresponding os are not the only ones on the market...
They do good things like the integration of their screenreader in
all of their products and because of that , most of the tasks on
the mac are logic.
It gives also a good impulse to the computermarket for blind
people.
I mean e.g. the gestures on the trackpad of a macbook. This is
something new and very interesting feature that they have created.
Also a great advantage of apple and their accessibility-policy is
the feature that mac-users can give their feedback, questions and
comments to a special address.
I have the experience that they listen to us but of course , it
takes some time.
but, and this is perhaps the other side of implementing
accessibility without paying more,
the mac is missing some features that are available on a winds pc
in combination with most of the screenreaders.
Here , I have a list of things that I miss on a mac:
1- working with flash on websites;
2- automatic language detection on webpages (like on the iphone);
3- configurable representation of controls on the brailledisplay
(this is also good for people that have a little braille display);
4- creation of a verbosity level where you can define which
messages should be spoken and/or which messages should be shown
on the braille display;
5- setting webspots in voiceover for whole domains (e.g. www.google.be
) in stead of the current viewed webpage (Window-eyes can handle
this);
6- dragging and dropping with the keyboard so that we can also
cut elements in the finder (and actions in other programs)
This is a possibility in voiceover to do that but I am not shore
if it is working and it don't give the same result.
7- Selecting tekst in a browser without complex commando
instructions;
And then also 1 feature about the os:
the system of assigning hockeys for menu-items in the system-
prefferences : tab =keyboard , hotkeys. This system is not
working all the time, not all keys are aloud like function keys
and services can't have a hockey in snow leopard.
I would ask to everybody here to send accessibility one or more
of this things that you find interesting or necessary.
Or you can give also other suggestions of course ;)
If you do so, pls write it in your own words and not just copy
pasting.
Otherwise , they will think that's something like spamming and
perhaps they won't take it serious...
If you have a suggestion/comment to me, pls mail me private:
[email protected]
thanx in advance,
best regards,
William
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