Hello, I hope all will read what I write inline in Tony's message below because it will provide some information that substantiates long term use of the Mac by myself and many others and also provides some useful info for those wanting to work with The Mac. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Baechler" <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2008 6:24 AM Subject: My experiences with a Mac Hi all, Recently, my brother bought a Macbook with OS X on it. I was interested in looking at it because Apple claims that Voiceover is a complete screen reading solution and is good enough that you can do your daily tasks. You can read about it and download the getting started manual in pdf and mp3. http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/ dp: If you are using mac osx 1.5, the manual is out of date and you need to get the new voice over manual. I have it but do not have a link for it. There are a couple of places to get info and ask questions. http://www.macvisionaries.com http://www.screenlessswitchers.com and the voice over list at:macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx just to name a couple. You'll find a lot of useful as well as useless info there but your mission is to find links to info. There is also info on: http://www.icanworkthisthing.com you will find lists of keyboard controls and voiceover leopard manuals and tutorials among the pickings on these sites. There are a couple of things which might accellerate learning. one is that control option k turns on "keyboard help" which not only announces the keys on the keyboard but will also tell you what the use of those keys in addition to control with option will do. command (adjacent to the space bar on either side of the keyboard) sometimes known as the apple key, with control option f8 will provide you with an interactive tutorial which can be quite helpful. I am still very much learning as I go and I'm not an expert, but I've read a few chapters of the manual and can now do basic tasks. Here are some of my experiences. If you want me to look at something specific or if you have particular questions, ask quickly because I will only have access to it for about a week. It's a notebook so it has limitations, but it's a fairly nice unit. dp: what limitations do you speak of here? I like the keyboard better than other notebooks I've used. dp: I like the keyboards on the Powerbooks, the Macbooks and the Macbook pros. Quite snappy. I also like to ad a usb keyboard when working in windows on the Mac although it's not necessary, it makes things less awkward. The nice thing apple did for notebooks was to build its command structure around use of a laptop but then they also added the num pad interface so that it could be used in leu of or addition to the keyboard and it is customizable in leopard. The core is based on BSD but the OS is completely different than any other I've used and I've used most. dp: This is apple we are talking about and they have a habit of being different. Fortunately, the differences are well documented on their sites and in the community. I've used DOS 3.3 and ProDOS for the Apple II, MS-DOS 3.3, 5.0, 6.0 and 6.22 for the PC, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 95 OSR2, Caldera OpenDOS, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Linux, Windows XP home, FreeBSD, Windows XP pro, and finally Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard. That is almost exactly chronological order. When I say that I used them, I don't mean just to try them except the Mac. I mean that I've used them for at least several months and have at least a good basic knowledge of them. dp: knowledge is good I used windows and some linux and dos stuff before and also some outspoken on the Mac but found that much of my knowledge needed to be suspended at least for a while while I took a new approach to the Mac. This is how many of us have come to learn the Mac os since the arival of VoiceOver because our correct assumption was that the os was different enough that it warranted looking at in a different way. With FreeBSD, it has no equivalent to Speakup so everything I did was with ssh but I got Apache and an ftp server working. dp: Apache already works. I got Macports and the Mac ftp server and a bunch of other stuff going via the terminal and the gui on the Mac and learned a lot along the way. With Linux, I've used Slackware, Debian and Gentoo. While I'm very far from a Mac expert, I know enough to do basic tasks. I downloaded and installed Firefox yesterday. I got 1.22 MB per second download speed which is faster than I've ever had on any other computer before. dp: not sure why, the network interface isn't all that different unless you have a g router and all your other devices are bees. Mac OS X does have Braille support but I don't know anything about it. dp: braille is well documented in the new documentation and it works well but with usb displays only. You can set brltty up in terminal if you want to use a serial device but I'm not sure if anyone has gotten this to work under leopard yet. Apple pushes speech only but there was a category for Braille in preferences. dp: Speech can be muted and you can use braille only. The nice thing about this is that you won't see those voiceover messages when you are working like you do when speech is on. Braile lacks some niceties but is fully functional. Actually, other than a slight learning curve, I'm getting a feel for how things work. I would hardly call Voiceover a complete screen reader but it isn't bad. dp: What does it lack? Terminal includes a shell with the standard *nix utilities, but some things are missing. The default shell is bash. The few man pages I looked at point to BSD. I am guessing but I think it's based on OpenBSD. It comes with Postfix installed. It's about as fast as Windows XP which is surprising because I expected it to be faster but I'm still learning. The Firefox installation was fairly painless. I think the biggest thing I don't like about Voiceover is that you must hold down Control and Option with all other commands. It has its own cursor but you must hold down those two keys and use the arrows. dp: you can lock the vo cursor with control option semicolon and release it with semicolon. If you're on a table and want to interact with it, you must press Control, Option, Shift and down arrow. Once you make your choice, such as checking a box or picking an item in a table, you have to press those keys again but instead of down arrow, it's the up arrow. This applies even with web pages, dialogues, tables and most other controls. It doesn't apply to buttons. To press a button, you have to press Control, Option, Space. I found that in most cases, I can just press the space bar instead but the manual says to use all three keys. dp: The manual was written from a VoiceOver perspective. There is a world of Mac beyond VO that VO can address. For instance, you can use tabs and arrows in dialogs and space to activate buttons, change the status of checkboxes and arrows to select radio buttons. On the web, once you have set safari up to highlight links on pages when youtab to them in its advanced preferences, you can tab through links, activate buttons with space and fill in formfields just by typing and even spellcheck what you've typed. Like Windows, there are close and minimize buttons. There is also a zoom in or zoom out button. To access them, you have to hold down the Control and Option and use the arrows until you find it. While still holding down those keys, press Space to close whatever you're in. Escape sometimes works instead but not always. dp: there are keyboard shortcuts for many commands. for instance, to quit an app, it's command with q. If you look through the menues, you will also see the commands for other things like zoom. One area where the manual is wrong is where it says that you can hold down Control and Option and press the letter H for help on the current control. The manual says that most controls have help tags. Well, every time I tried that, I was told that there was no help for this control. dp: on controls which name themselves, you will get nothing from vo keys with h. If something just says button though, there is a good chance that it will provide info. control shift u is a new command in voiceover for leopard which superceeds control option h but that one still works in some places. The newer command is mainly for getting info on the web from my experience. I've so far only used programs supplied with the OS. It has no equivalent of MSAA, browse, or forms mode for web pages. You have to go from upper left to lower right with the Voiceover cursor. dp: in addition to using the tab and arrows in dialogues and edit fields and boxes you can also use the extensive find utility in vo and the item chooser to get round the screen. I haven't tried any html content yet, so I'm only going by the manual. The manual itself is fairly small. If there is a more complete manual besides the getting started manual that I downloaded, it wasn't obvious. The first three chapters give a general introduction, an intro to OS X and an intro to Voiceover. Even if you don't like reading manuals, those chapters are required reading. You'll be completely lost otherwise, especially if you're not used to Windows. The equivalents of the Windows desktop and Windows Explorer are built into one window on the Mac. In the Mac world, the desktop is the same as the file browser or "My Computer" in Windows. There must be an easier way to get to installed applications, but so far the only way I found was to open the hard disk and arrow down to Applications. Opening the Applications row in the table showing all hard disk directories is as close to the Windows start menu as you're going to get. There is also the dock which is like the system tray in Windows. The dock was fairly easy to use. dp: you can get directly to the apps folder with command-shift-a and there are shortcuts for other folders as well like command-shift-h for your home folder. You can ad apps to the doc and use it exclusively if you only use a few of the apps available thus negating any requirements for scrolling through huge landscapes. you can also use letter nav in folders. Actually the desktop is when all finder windows are closed. Everything else that you open except apps or the doc are finder windows. the closest thing to my computer would be the browser in the network interface which you activate with command shift k. click browse and you will se something as close to my computer as you get. The doc is sort of a combination start menu and systray but it lacks some systray functions which are available through control-f8 such as energy, clock and others depending on what apps you have and how you have configured the os. There are so far several areas where Voiceover falls short for me. First, there was a dialogue that came up because the network wasn't set up correctly. It never spoke that at all. I had to have sighted help use the mouse to close the window. dp: if this is the dialog I think it is, you need to command-tab to make sure you are on it and hit the spacebar. Another problem is that there is a permanent menu bar on the screen but tapping Command or Option will not open it, unlike Windows. You have to press Control, Option, M to cycle through the three types of menus. dp: I don't knw about three types of menus, only two. to get to the menu bar, press control-f2. you can use letter nav or arrows alone to traverse this menu. One nice thing is that the Apple menu is always visible so you can always get out of a program that locks up, at least in theory. There are status menus also, such as for battery power and bluetooth. It read all of those fine. There is no other keyboard way to access them. If a mouse user opens them for you, don't press the right arrow after the last menu or it closes. Unfortunately you have no way of knowing what menu is the last. dp: It's been my experience that I can arrow left and right through the menus with no closure. I can press escape to close the menubar at this point though whether I'm using the status menus or the main menu bar. You can turn on a navigation rap feature in vo but I think that's for vo only. Another problem is that sometimes you're on a control which you think you can interact with but pressing the keys to interact with it just gives you a ding for no obvious reason. I was almost stuck in Terminal until I thought to look at the menu bar. There was nothing on the screen telling me what happened except that cycling through the open applications showed that Terminal was still opened even though I was getting no feedback. I randomly tried the menu bar and found a way to quit. That was anything but obvious. dp: controls are not usually interactable, they are activated with the space bar. The sound you may have heard in terminal was an empty window sound so when you interacted with it, you got that sound. command-q to the rescue. I would like to briefly discuss the terminal since it will be of interest to most of you reading. As I said, it is based on BSD and has the basic utilities you would expect such as ls, bash, man, less, and nano. It is missing other things that you would normally find though, such as there is no cc or gcc and no text browsers. There is the standard ftp but no lftp or ncftp. I can't tell if Apache comes preinstalled or not but it didn't look like it even though Postfix is installed and running. There seems to be no "root" user from what I can tell but it comes with su and sudo. If you try "halt," you're told that you can't. If you use "su" to become root, you're asked for a password. Every password I tried didn't work. Many file and directory names have spaces. My guess is that either you have to add a root user (but adduser and useradd didn't exist) or change everything via System Preferences. The only thing I looked at under preferences was how to adjust Voiceover. The voice sounds pleasant. For amusement, you have to look at all the different voices included. Some of them sing. Anyway, the terminal left a lot to be desired. Often it would skip several lines of text or not read at all. If I did "ls" in my home directory, it would not read the directory listing. If you use the Voiceover cursor, it reads everything on the screen from top to bottom. There is no easy way to just read the last few lines. In ftp, all I got for a prompt was the word "space." It wouldn't read my current directory or give any other feedback. Obviously a lot of work still needs to be done in this area. I somewhat got around the problems with things not reading by pressing Control, Option, Shift down arrow to interact with the scroll area. That seemed to help a little but still gave me no way to read the last few lines if I missed anything. It also has an annoying habbit of not pronouncing whole numbers. I know Firefox is fairly big but I couldn't tell how big because it just read off a bunch of digits. One good thing it has is a keyboard practice mode which greatly helps in learning what keys do what. Since I was using a small keyboard, it helped me learn the layout. Another thing it has is a Control plus Option lock so you don't have to hit those keys every time to move the cursor. The problem is still that you have to unlock the keyboard before you can go back to your application. So far, based on my experiences, I would consider Voiceover more of an overlay than a screen reader. In other words, it runs on top of your apps and it helps but it's not good enough that I would use it day in and day out. It's quite a bit nicer than XP Narrator though and it does have a cursor which you can use to explore the screen layout. It has no concept of things like windows or graphic dictionaries and it only shows you the active window or dialogue, so it would be impossible for me to dismiss a background dialogue about the incorrect network settings because it would never read it. It has limited mouse support but not like what you would find in Windows. There is apparently support for the numeric keypad but I don't know to what extent. Since it's a portable, I kept that turned off. Again, I'll only have a week or so to play with it and experiment, so if you have any questions or things you want me to look at, please ask soon. If this is considered off topic, sorry. Please feel free to repost to other appropriate mailing lists. dp: I see that you found a lot of answers along the way and I and others are here to help. I'll be happy to dialog with hyou off list. _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list