I have come into this thread late so apologies if these points have already been made.
I am a comparative new Mac user and to be honest also initially found many of the VO shortcuts very key intensive. Quick nab helped a bit but I was constantly having to turn it on and off which added complication. Changing the function of the Tab key to automatically interact also helped a bit. This was not helped by my not getting on with the initial I MAC thin keyboard which gave me terrible RSI. For the first time I had to wear bandages over my wrists. 2 cope with the pain. 2 things have transformed matters for me. the firs is num pad commander which has for me personally revolutionised the ease of using Voiceover. . This has delivered much of the convenience of some old windows shortcuts and more. So if you want an application key to bring up the context menu then simply press the plus key on the num pad. . . I can even cope with interacting in and out of elements now with out wrecking my wrists because all I have to do is press 9 to interact and 7 to stop interacting. I execute by pressing the 5 key and so on. The other brilliant feature of the Mac is column view folder navigation which I constantly miss in Windows now. The other reasons for switching to the Mac is that hopefully Apple show no intention of losing a menu bar and moving to a hateful ribbon arrangement. By the way pressing 8 on num pad will bring up the menu bar, very easy. The other joy of the Mac is the way access tools work across the system. For example item chooser works as far as I can see everywhere and not just in Safari. I use it a lot in unfamiliar applications to get around. My only major disappointments so far is that after trying TextEdit bean, Nisus writer pro and Pages I have not found a satisfactory word processor to cope with word documents. Whether we like it or not this is a standard most of the world uses and none of these applications seem to cope with tables. If you are going to use a word processor for serious use then support for a table standard must be a basic necessity and I am baffled as to why this has not been sorted out ages ago. I also cannot do my online banking on the Mac as Safari will not even provide any feedback when entering passwords. Sometimes you sporadically get a click in some fields but often there is no typing feedback at all. I had to reset my passwords after several confused login attempts so sadly it is back to windows for anything involving passwords and finance. Secondly the other massive improvement was that I have got rid of the torture that was the new I MAC keyboard and replaced it with an older chunky model which with a wrist support no longer pains my hands and shoulders. If I could only now find a natural ergonomic keyboard that worked on a mac life would be definitely on the up. Unfortunately the windows ergonomic keyboards I have tried do not work. Anyway my recommendation is give num pad commander a try. If you have a mac book then I would definitely invest in an external keyboard to gain the convenience of the num pad. David Griffith n 26 Nov 2011, at 09:19, Anne Robertson wrote: > Hello Garth, > > There are vast numbers of keyboard shortcuts that have nothing to do with > VoiceOver. > > To get a contextual menu, hold down the Control key and click with the mouse > or trackpad; > To get to the Apple menu, press Ctrl-F2; > To go to the dock, press Ctrl-F3; > To go to the Status menus, press Ctrl-F8; > To go to the Toolbar, press Ctrl-F5; > To open the Applications folder, press Cmd-Shift-A; > To open the Utilities folder, press Cmd-Shift-U; > To open the Documents folder, press Cmd-Shift-O; > To open the Home folder, press Cmd-Shift-H; > And there are many more. > > To learn more about shortcuts and enable the ones you want, go into System > Preferences, Keyboard, and select the Shortcuts tab. There you will find a > table of categories, and to the right of that, a table of shortcuts for the > category you've chosen. > > Cheers, > > Anne > > > > > On 26 Nov 2011, at 09:24, Garth Humphreys wrote: > >> Hi Ricardo and Scott >> >> Sorry this is just an impression I have. I will explain a little further >> what I mean, and let me also say that I acknowledge that as a new mac user I >> probably don't really know what I am talking about. >> >> It is things like bringing up a context menu. There is obviously the 4 >> finger VO way to do this. Is there any keyboard only way of doing this other >> then the VO one? Under windows there is a specific key for this as well as >> at least one other 2 finger keyboard shortcut. >> >> I get the impression that a lot of the UI in OSX is designed to be >> interacted with by using a mouse or now the track pad primarily. This is >> obviously the same with windows but in windows I think that you would be >> more likely to be able to find a keystroke which would accomplish the task >> you wanted. VO seems to have to overcome the lack of a native keyboard >> shortcut and it often seems that there are a lot of steps that are needed to >> get the job done. Not to mention the number of keys that make up some of the >> shortcuts. >> >> There has been a strong history of supporting keyboard shortcuts under >> windows. I read recently somewhere, possibly in the Steve Jobs biography, >> that at one time he wanted to get rid of arrow keys on his keyboards >> altogether. >> >> I think Pages is probably a lot more efficient to use if you are able to see >> and can use the mouse. Under word you can achieve heaps with simple keyboard >> shortcuts. >> >> Anyway as I said these are just the impressions of a new mac user. >> >> Garth > > -- > 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.
