Welcome to the list. Dictation on the Mac is not meant to be a keyboard replacement across the board - there is no way to teach it new words or enter alternative modes to get it to input numbers instead of words. If dictation is your primary means of interacting with the computer, you might want to look into paid solutions like Dragon Naturally Speaking. Unfortunately, I have no experience with Dragon so cannot say how well it will work with Voiceover or Zoom.
As for Voiceover training, it is quite a learning curve, to be sure. I'd first go to www.applevis.com where you will find podcasts and guides on all things Voiceover for the Mac and iOS. They also offer app entries which discuss apps from an accessibility perspective. Most visually impaired Apple users consider this to be an indispensable resource. On Jan 7, 2014, at 11:05 AM, April Brown <[email protected]> wrote: > I am legally blind, and wear a hearing aid, among other health problems. In > this cold my fingers are not able to use the keyboard at all. > > I am trying to learn the dictation program and having difficultly. I bought > my new Mac mini about three weeks ago. In general, dictation works well in > e-mail and social media. There are some words it cannot seem to understand no > matter what and other words it gets part of time. > > I did contact Apple customer support chat system, as well as have had one on > one training on Saturday. It seems, that my issues with dictation are > unknown, and I was told I wrote too much. It also seems that the store > representatives do not have much training in VoiceOver or dictation. Also > the person I spoke with him a chat did not have much training in them either. > I attempted to call the one 800 number. However it was playing hard rock > music that hurt my ear. After six minutes I gave up and contacted the > chatline. I don't comprehend spoken very well. Even though I'm going blind I > still comprehend written better. Yes I'm learning braille, that's a slow > process to > > I am also a writer. As a writer I typically write novels, and a typical > 80,000 word novel might be 300 doublespaced pages. I am finding that in the > Pages program, if the document is over 20 pages long, Dictation crashes and I > cannot reopen even in social media. Currently, I am dictating in a smaller > document, and then copying and pasting it over into the main document. > > I am also noticing some other odd glitches. Frequently after a comma, > Dictation capitalizes the next word as if it were in a new sentence. I am > also not sure how to get it to recognize some names. It never gets them > right. > > I also have to learn VoiceOver eventually. Just looking at the training on > that has overwhelmed me. > > How best to work with dictation in Pages, and editing it, so that I don't > look like I don't know how to spell or what words mean? > > Most people who know me consider me rather computer savvy. However, since > trying to learn how to use some of these programs, I don't feel like I have > any computer knowledge. For me, reformatting a hard drive is easy. Though, > before long, I will no longer be able to see to do so. All these tech terms I > just can't seem to understand are confusing me. It may be possible that some > of them are just different terms than what I call something. > > On anyone who follows writers, agents, and editors on Twitter has seen the > ridicule that they happily dish out regularly on someone who makes a grammar > or spelling mistake. The thing is, many days I can't see the errors that > dictation makes. I can't correct them, if I can't see them. And once you've > been ridiculed a few times by the industry standard people, no one will take > me, or my work seriously. They commonly say, if there is a single error in > your writing, any novel you write will be lazy and poorly constructed. It's > a bit paralyzing. I have to learn how to use these programs so that I can > continue writing and eventually be published. > > Thank you. > > -- > 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. Have a great day, Alex (msg sent from Mac Mini) [email protected] -- 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.
