Hello Mac Gurus,Thanks for all of the suggestions on Mail yesterday. It seems to have helped me sort out a lot of things and I'm working more smoothly since. One errata from my messages yesterday, though, is that I talked about the Thunderbird daily builds and my Mac. The absolute truth is that I do run it on my Macintosh, the more useful truth, however, though, is that I run it in a VM under Ubuntu with Orca. My brain sometimes gets vapor lock when thinking about VO versus Orca as I use them both on the Macintosh and, for all intents and purposes, use both every day.
Today, my question is about web browsing using VO. I have it set up to use "Group" and find that I often need to exert an awful lot of energy in terms of keystrokes and concentration when using a page with which I'm not terribly familiar. Simply trying to find the Apple TV product on the Apple web site and on Newegg.com took far longer than it would have using JAWS, System Access or Orca. I find the lingual and spatial semantic information provided by the VO method of navigating applications to be about the best in the biz and, as Dave P. can testify, I have been pounding tables about increasing non- linear semantic information for many years now.
On the web, though, I just can't seem to get it. As most web sites are somewhat different from each other and many change daily, I find that I spend a lot of time poking around trying to find objects that may have fallen into some sort of corner in the model VO built of the page. I also find sometimes that trying to move out of a spot will only provide one direction (I may be on an item and can only use VO+Up to get out as left right and down just play the sound telling me I can't go there). Finally, I find that if I move into a spot using VO +Right (for instance), VO+Left will bring me to a place other than where I started which can be fairly confounding.
Since I've started writing good things about Apple and VO in the blog and elsewhere, I've received a lot of private email both celebrating and condemning VO web support. Some tell me they use Firefox with Chen's plug-in thing which I think makes for a nice demo but cannot do the heavy lifting that a full time screen reader must. The remainder of the pack either switches to Windows or a GNU/Linux distribution to do their browsing or have found some sort of mojo that seems to elude me regarding the VO/Safari combination.
So, this isn't really a question as much as a "I just don't get it," sort of request for help. Is there a "VO Web Browsing for Dummies" or some other similar document kicking around that I can use to learn how to make the transition from the virtual buffer world to the VO UI?
One caveat: The object model, DOM based, turn the screen reader into a browser and parse the HTML on its own was first introduced in JAWS 3.31 and was invented by Glen Gordon, Eric Damery, Ted Henter and me. Features like Quick Key navigation that came along later were invented by some combination of Eric, Joe Stephen and me with all of us contributing to each of these concepts. Thus, as I invented a lot of this stuff, I have a fairly strong non-rational attachment to it added to an ability to use it with very little thought which, of course, makes it much faster for me to use.
So, please send tips, tricks, documents, pointers and phone numbers of cognitive therapists who specializing in the symptoms of having JAWS on the brain.
Happy Hacking, cdh
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