Re: Before the Mini: Using an Aire To Prepare
It's funny you mention object navigation. When I tried to learn it, it seemed so convoluted and I had very slight success, so I was dreading the interaction aspect of vo because I figured it would be similar. I was really surprised when I ended up loving interaction. I couldn't imagine using my mac without it. It's especially useful when you can scroll past a frame of ads in one press of the right arrow key, swipe, or however you choose to navigate. Anyway, coming back to NVDA, I've discovered I can't use object navigation at all anymore. rofl
When I got my MBP, I was just as astonished when the machine made no sound whatsoever. I would joke about how my other computers, I at least knew they were on when they stopped working and I stopped receiving audio, but here I couldn't even tell that! Luckily, force touch trackpads are a very useful way of telling whether the machine is on or not.
Just a few tips that I can remember, in a completely random order:
1. The function keys are actually very useful even for a voice over user, but the best way to use them is with the fn key. I believe someone gave directions to changing what the keys do by default, but if you want them to perform their alternative function, you use the fn key. E.G. if they're set to the mode that caused you to accidentally mute everything, you'd press fn+command+f5 to enable vo. These keys are useful, though because f1 and f2 lower and raise screen brightness, for those times you want to conserve battery life and screen curtain is on, while f7, f8, and f9 act as previous track, play/pause, and next track respectively in ITunes and perhaps other media players that support them.
2. Do not use the dock. Well, you can, but using it as an app launcher is pointless when you have spotlight. Remember the lovely start menu search box? Spotlight is just that, but many times better. It can open specific applications, search for specific files by type , last modified and many other bits of metadata, perform web searches, etc. It even has very limited natural language processing. you can type something like "files I edited last week." and it will show you all of the files you edited last week. It's really neat, but apart from simple requests like that, it's not very intelligent. Oh and it can also query the OSX calculator. Spotlight will be able to serve you nicely forever, unless you decide to acquire an app launcher like launchbar, which gives you even more impressive functionality.
3. You don't need to use control+command, unless you're messing with password fields. By default, voice over is set to use capslock as a voice over modifier, starting in El Capitan. I say the bit about password fields because there's an annoying bug that causes the capslock key to be held down when pressed while editing a password edit field.
4. When starting out, trackpad commander is your friend. Won't say much more about that because I know people were talking about it on the other thread.
5. read this: http://www.applevis.com/guides/mac-os-x … s-x-finder
Unless you're like me and used the terminal to manipulate files at first, you will need that knowledge right away.
6. on OSX, command tab does not move between windows. though it's functionality is identical to alt tabbing on windows, it differs in the fact that it moves between applications rather than windows. If you want to move between windows, you would press command `. One example of this is if you had three documents open in text edit, you would not move between the three by command tabbing, but by being inside of text edit, and using command ` to move between the three files. There are also other windows, such as some popups that you cannot command ` to. you access these by using voice over's window chooser, accessible by pressing Vo+f2 twice, or double tapping the right side of the trackpad.
7. Although command tab makes a nice app switcher, you can also use spotlight for the same purpose. Generally, only one copy of an app will run at a time, so activating spotlight with command space, typing part of the app name and pressing enter will switch focus to that app, and you don't have to command tab through the 5 apps you have open.
Although some of us have been praising voice over's impressiveness, it still has quite a few extremely annoying bugs. If you press the capslock key while messing with trackpad commander, voice over kindly beeps in complaint, and you cannot use the trackpad unless you command tab out of the current app, or press fn. A few others include the capslock bug I mentioned earlier, to voice over acting very strangely on the OSX log on screen. The nice thing is that if you can't find a way around a bug, which is pretty rare for me, you can restart vo, it takes no more than a second and a half.
Anyway, hope all of this information was useful, and it wasn't too overwhelming.
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