Hello Rick: I am going to post something I wrote up for a friend of mine just last week who was asking a similar question.Actually, I'm posting the conversation for the sake of completeness. If you get borred, of course, you know where the DEL button is.:)
This is strictly my opinion, but you may find something useful. Carolyn Haas ----- Original Message ----- From: Carolyn Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2010 11:40 AM Subject: Re: Mac Ok let's see. I'm going to put this out a little long-ways. Because, there's not an easy way to answer your questions. ITunes as you probably know, especially if you've worked with jTunes, is laid out in grid fashion, much like thw iPhone. When Jaws sees the screen, it sort of takes things and attempts to show them as listviews, or at best, collumns. It does this pretty darn well. Apple's system, on the other hand is based a lot on visual icons. So, on a mac, you have lots of pictures of things to go by, and again, there's the grid arrangement prominent. The mac OSX offers for one to view the screen with voiceover as it actually exists, much like the iPhone. So, you have the ability to begin to understand the layout of the actual screen as people see it. Voiceover development in my opinion is kind of in it's adolescence. It does an incredibly good job of offering you choices of how to explore the screen, and navigate. It works pretty much flawlessly with iTunes. You have the option to view your screen in Listview, icon mode or collumns. It's most common voice is that of "Alex." The synthesizer for Alex is interesting, and in some ways better than Eloquence in my humble opinion. Yet, at times, the speech is odd, as with any synthesized speech. For example, the word "thanks" to me, sounds like "thnx"f, and it will read for instance the name "Melissa" as "melissla ." Certainly not as bad as some of the ones in the 80's and 90's. It is an awesome step forward in terms of mainstreaming accessibility. I love my mac, and wouldn't give it up. Having said that, there are some inherent weaknesses. In Apple's infinite desire to tweek the geek, they update a lot. The constant updates tend to make for a little inconsistency in how things run. For example, the latest update to their internet browser, Safari has a lot of people experiencing issues with Voiceover anomalies Another weakness for me is the matter of scanning. The most widely recommended software for scanning with the Mac is Abbyy Fine Reader, which is an OCR program.(costing only around $100 vs what krzweil or openbook now cost).:)) So, you would need to capture the image then send it to Abbyy to process. It works well, but to me isn't efficient. The other top-runner for scanning is a program called Vuescan. This does both the scan and recognition, for only about $40. However, I haven't played with it enough to know whether it can understand page orientation and tell you if something's in upside down. Finally, the move from Windows to Mac is snot a small move. There are similarities, and a lot of people have made the jump fairly easily. Also, there is a lot more material out there now compared to just a year ago when I took the leap. More people to help too, including yours truly, who has taken forever to learn this stuff. The last thing I'll say is that a lot of people are embracing what Apple is doing because it's the beginning of an attempt to mainstream our access to the web and all that computers have to offer. Apple has built voiceover into the system, as opposed to companies like GW Micro and FS who have built programs to adapt the system. You won't be buying a mac laptop and then paying thousands of dollars every couple of years to update the screen reader, and more to update your scanner. Macs are also mostly well-built. So, they cost a little more at the outset. But, in the long run you're saving money. You also don't have the constant upkeep of expensive anti-virus windows software. You can also set up Windows to run on the mac machine to either help you with the switch-over or to get the benefits of both.e. Ok. I wanted to be thorough because it's a big decision, with a lot of variables. I'd hate for you to get a mac, thinking it's simple, and wind up struggling to do what needs done. I would suggest you take the time if you can and check out a Mac at an Apple store. You can, of ourse get them to turn on voiceover immediately, and run through a starter tutorial that will give you some sense of how it works. . ----- Original Message To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, November 29, 2010 10:30 AM Subject: Mac LaptopHi Carolyn, OK, I played a little bit with the voice over at the Apple store. Of course no one there knew anything about the voice over so I was on my own. I noticed that the voice over did not read the characters as I typed which I like to have read. Is this just a setting somewhere or does the voice over not read characters as they are typed? Also I could not figure out how to navigate the computer because I did not know the keystrokes. I basically ended up places and had no idea how I got there. Did it take long to learn the keystrokes for reading the screen? Is there anything that you wish it did that it doesn't do? Really I am talking major stuff. Does it work well for filling in forms on the Internet? Can you read a line, a paragraph, a document like in JAWS? Thanks for the help. Response: Hi: Ah, should have given you a better place to start. The mac keyboard is in some ways similar and in some ways different from a pc one. In case you get to do this again, let me kind of give you the key layout. From the spacebar left are a key called command, (not unlike alt, but more functional), option, control, and fn. Going right: command, option, and the rest depends if you're talking Macbook pro or regular keyboard. Ok, so, the keys next to the command key are option and control (left hand). Together they are referred to as the voiceover keys or VO keys. when pressed together, they are a modifier key that does a lot of the screen-to-speech stuff. There is a "voiceover cursor" which is a square that basically encompasses the chunk of text you're working with. The best way to get a sense of this would be to press Command/option/ctl/f8 to envoke the voiceover getting started tutorial. (MAy require the use of the fn key as well, which can be a tricky left-hand movement. That depends on how the f-keys are set to work.) I'm not doing this justice, but so much depends on what's set up when you start. Ok, you can set typing to do character, words, or both. You can read by line, paragraph, and probably sentence as well. One very very cool thing is, you can also use the multi-touch trackpad, and here is where the similarity to the iPhone comes in. A friend of mine has actually developed a whole mapping of the trackpad that allows you to do most commands from it alone. The internet crowser is currently acting up for me. But, I haven't worked very hard on ferretting out the problem, which I'm told is fixable. As far as the net goes, it works very well. In fact, I've had more trouble with Jaws n the net lately because it keeps getting stuck in its form fields. My MBP handles formfields very well. It is extremely customizeable so you can have it do all sorts of stuff. I find the applemail client a lot easier to navigate than any of the currently available windows mail clients. That is, since Microsoft has pretty much dropped a lot of the support for Outlook express, and that for me was the best, applemail beats the socks off of things like windows live mail, webmail, thunderbird, etc. (strictly my opinion.<smiley>) Which reminds me: Very stupid and yet funny: I've never seen Jaws read an enoticon, and never knew one could set it to do so. VO has some already programed and you can add as many as you want. Finally, if you do discover an issue that really needs tweeking, you are able to actually dialog with the Accessibility team at Apple about your issue and they do email you back. Never had FS ask me what I thought of anything. I find the mac easier to type on, because of the style of the keyboard. As far as things I wish it did, I think it could use some better scanning options, and sometimes I am quicker at web navigation with the Dell because of my unfamiliarity with the structure of some pages. I'm pretty darn spoiled to be able to have both systems here, though I don't know how long this old dell will serve. it's already around 5 years old. Anyway, what a blabbermouth, eh? Please let me know if I can be of further help. I don't really mean to sound like a sales pitch for the Mac, but I really do enjoy mine a lot. Another thing that might help you is to go on Apple's website. Look at some of the stuff they offer such as pages on accessibility, and "switching to mac" stuff. HTH ----- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. 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