Laura, good post, appreciated reading it...
can I ask, you and others have mentioned simply targeting an area of the screen, such as in your example where you say top right of a page etc. how is this achieved? using the touch pad presumably but how? are you meaning you drag the mouse up there, or that the touch pad in some way represents the screen? thanks. Twitter @neilbarnfather Neil Barnfather Talks List Administrator TalkNav is a Nuance, Code Factory and Sendero dealer, for all your accessible phone, PDA and GPS related enquiries visit www.talknav.com -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Laura M Sent: 11 October 2010 02:50 To: MacVisionaries Subject: Re: Can keyboard only navigation ever be... Neil, I get where you're coming from--the first couple weeks I spent with the Mac, I had exactly the feelings you describe. I had no problem learning the OS, but I couldn't possibly figure any way that it would be more efficient than JAWS. I have done a complete 180 in the year or so I've had since then. With quicknav, I can do more with one finger than I could with JAWS, and I can do so more conveniently. I'm not using the number row to jump through headings on a website, for example, then coming back to the arrow keys to continue reading. I've made a couple changes in keyboard commander, and they've also improved things, but those changes are no more extensive than anything I did with the JAWS keyboard manager. There are three things that really make it quicker for me: the trackpad, the item chooser, and--pretty surprisingly, given that I hated it at the start--the need for interaction. With the trackpad, if I'm on a page or a program I'm familiar with, I can instantly get to what I want by just touching it, as opposed to tabbing or arrowing however many times it takes to get there. It does mean taking your hand off the keyboard, yes, but the time saver is more than worth it, imo. There are many, many times in work now, when I'm using a Windows machine with no option but to tab and tab, that I'm beyond frustrated not to have it. That's also why the model of interaction helps. At the beginning, it seemed like a lot more work to have to interact just to get to a button, but if you've got a program with a lot of controls, skipping over them by groups, as opposed to painstakingly going past each control until you find the one you want, is far more efficient. The item chooser is extremely useful for similar reasons. It's not just present on webpages, where it gives you the JAWS functionality of narrowing down headers or form controls or whatever; it's in every program Voiceover works with. The more complicated the program, the more beneficial it is. I don't think Voiceover is perfect by any means. There's a level of customisation possible in JAWS that isn't there yet, but if we're just talking navigation, I think a lot of the solutions that seem backward at first really do pay off. And I'd also add that I feel much more like I'm using the Mac as sighted people do than I ever did with windows. With Voiceover, I'm not forced to do everything linearly; a friend can say, "You want the icon at the top right of the screen," and that's actually useful information now. There's a context to things that the Windows screenreaders simply didn't provide me. I also suspect there are duplicate VO keyboard commands for existing OS shortcuts because it was probably far more useful and common to lock the VO keys before quicknav came along. It's maybe not ideal now, but I can see why it made sense then. I listen out for whatever keyboard shortcuts the program menus list, and learn them, instead. There are also good resources on the web that list the most common keyboard shortcuts, which might help you out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
