Hi Jonathan, Yes, the process is accessible. I assume you won't need the details below, but I'm writing them down for anyone interested. If you start up your mac and you hear the initial sound right after turning it on, then press and hold both command and the letter r while the sound is still playing. Hold for some 5 seconds and then let go. The mac will boot from its hidden recovery partition, instead of its normal boot partition. It depends on a few factors how long it takes to boot, but after 30 seconds or so, just start pressing VO plus f5 with an interval of a few seconds, until VoiceOver comes on. It should not take longer than 3 minutes on a slow machine. You won't hear Alex, it will be Fred. You can now take it from there.
Fred will speak very quietly, but you can crank it up a little bit using the normal mac volume control with f12 or fn f12, and also the usual voice controls will work as well if you hold down command, then going to volume using left or right arrows, and then increasing volume with the up arrow key. You'll see an interactable table with some choices, one of which is to reinstall OS10. If you prefer, you could first wipe the Macintosh HD partition using disk utility. Disk utility is in the interactable table as well. If you have an SSD drive and you did not encrypt your drive, then there is a good chance that some of your stuff is still somewhere on the drive. This is of course true for a normal hard disk if you just wipe out its partition table, but even more so for an SSD, because of a mechanism called wear leveling. What that means is that if you, for example, were using your SSD for just a few files, wipe it, rewrite a few files, wipe it etc, you would only use the first bit of memory on the SSD. Because those chips have a finite number of writes, it would wear out the first bit of the drive, and render it unusable rather quickly. To overcome this, new SSD's have wear leveling, where new stuff is written to new locations on the SSD all the time. This means that we as a user, cannot tell where specific stuff is being stored on the SSD, making it impossible to wipe out stuff on an SSD, as you would from a traditional hard drive. I got this bit of useful knowledge from Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte's podcast: security now. Their advice: when you start using a new SSD, make sure encryption is on before you add your personal stuff. Also, Don't forget to unauthorize your old machine from itunes before reinstalling it, and if I remember well, there are a few other useful steps to take when selling or giving away an older mac. Apple has an article on it. With a macbook air, I would like to warn you for a situation that I ran into, while helping someone else do it over facetime. I only experienced the following just once. First a note on wifi. After you boot from the recovery partition, you'll have to connect to wifi, but the status menus are not available with voiceover. The wifi stuff is indeed available to us, but it is in the normal pulldown menus, I think it was under utilities. Once connected, you should be able to proceed normally, and accessibly. Should, because here came the problem. You have to give your Apple ID to have the mac check for its eligibility to redownload the OS. Even though the ID was cprrect, we were hitting continue forever. The button did not go disabled as you would expect, so then you want to hit it again. However, things would not advance from then on, and she had to take her machine into an Apple store to have it fixed. Unfortunately, they did not explain how they fixed it, so I can't tell you either. However, on my machine, I never had a problem reinstalling OS10. Hope that helps. Paul. On Sep 22, 2013, at 9:19 AM, Jonathan Mosen <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, I normally don't mind experimenting with things but I am a bit > chicken to take this one on without asking for people's experiences. > I have just upgraded from a 2012 Macbook Air to a 2013, and want to restore > my old machine to the state it originally came in, IE erase all my data and > leave a fresh copy of the OS on the system. > I've read about starting the Mac while holding the option key and selecting > the recovery partition. My question is, is this an accessible process? If so, > at what point can I turn VoiceOver on? Is it just a case of pressing > down-arrow, then return, to get to the recovery partition? Any help, or a URL > that explains all this from a blindness perspective, would be very much > appreciated. Thanks a lot. > Jonathan Mosen > Mosen Consulting > Blindness technology eBooks, tutorials and training > http://Mosen.org > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
