[macvoiceover] Re: Newbie Questions Day 2: Safari and the Web

  • From: David Poehlman <david.poehlman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:06:23 -0500

how often do you lock the vo keys?

On Dec 11, 2008, at 11:54 AM, Chris Hofstader wrote:

Hey Dave,

Maybe a chat would be worthwhile. I do, however, have the luxury of having multiple operating systems and a boatload of screen readers at my fingertips so I can work around the VO/Safari issues by using Firefox in Windows or Ubuntu.

I am, however, trying to write a comprehensive tome on accessibility and, more specifically, migrating to Macintosh as a movement to the future. Hence, it behooves me to learn the best way to use VO as moving to it from JAWS specifically and other AT in general is of primary concern to my current research. Making VO act more like JAWS is the answer to some questions (a kb manager for instance and allowing one to use Caps Lock as the VO key is another) but, overall, the object navigation in applications and other areas where VO may take a little time to learn but, in the long run, presents a "better" UI paradigm is the innovation engine in this field and being more like JAWS will make transitions easier but will also lose the progress we can enjoy as VO
continues to grow and mature.

Thus, I wanna learn web browsing with VO - lumps and all.

Happy Hacking,
cdhOn Dec 11, 2008, at 11:36 AM, David Poehlman wrote:

Hi C,

We have to start with this sort of excuse. Most of the web was written for microsoft explorer and although that is changing, it's still a major stumbling block. It might surprise you to know that beyond a bug or two with some well formed code, there is nothing we can do in safari to deal with this issue entirely. Have you tried changing he user agent that safari calls its self? it is easy to do now with safari 3.0. In safari prefs, there is a check box for "show develop" menu. when that box is checked, you have a new menu in the menu bar and one of its submenus is user agent. pick ie and see how that works. This is a long way of saying that it is quite possible that you are not seeing something that is on the page because it simply is not there for us.

There is no reliable find string mechanism in vo. We'll have to ask development if we can have this. There is however a really nice type ahead feature in a lot of places that often gets around this. Also, have you actually used all the nav keys? the list is found by pressing vo-f7 and arrowing down yes, arrowing down to search and pressing just plain old right arrow.

I have learned to do a lot of things the windows way on the Mac. Maybe we need to have a chat to see if we can find a set of solutions that work better for you.

On Dec 11, 2008, at 9:42 AM, Chris Hofstader wrote:

Hi David,

I also use the item chooser, the list of links and the VO approach to quick keys but still find myself "lost" in portions of a page or unable to figure out how to get to places that I know are probably there but am uncertain of how it may be labeled. The total flattening of the virtual buffer in the other screen readers causes a lot of inefficiency resulting from turning everything into a laundry list of objects. VO, though, seems to build a box of boxes (which seems to work great for applications and, if they move in the direction of an r-tree sorting algorithm with some intelligence added, they may well be able to take screen reader UI well into this century) I find I have trouble finding the right "box" on many web pages.

This is probably due to ignorance but I cannot seem to find a way to do a SayAll in Html or PDF with VO. I get lots of long, scholarly stuff in these formats and I just want to hit a single keystroke and let it rip. I also want a single key stop speech but place me where I stopped as often my reason for stopping is so I can get the spelling of a word or person's name. I then want to restart the SayAll from the same point and continue until I feel like stopping again. If this is possible with VO, I haven't found out how in a pretty lot of reading. Again, this may be a vocabulary problem or that I'm brain damaged from a decade of JAWS on the brain.

Lastly, I can't quite figure out the Find (Command+F) in Safari with VO. Is there an analogue to the virtual searches in the Windows screen access tools?

Happy Hacking,
cdh

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