Thanks, Jacob. This is most interesting and veryuseful and perhaps
this might be a way to access certain areas of the screen in the
iTunes Store, when making a purchase. And if not, perhaps in future
updates, Apple can place these controls in easy-to-locate areas with a
text label so that a physical mouse can be used with the settings
Jacob outlined here. Richie Gardenhire, Anchorage, Alaska.
On Mar 15, 2008, at 1:15 PM, Jacob Schmude wrote:
Hey Everyone
Some of you probably have figured this out already, but I thought I'd
post my findings here. For a while now I've been playing around with
utilizing the mouse--yes, the actual, physical mouse. That thing next
to our keyboard, or underneath it in case of laptops. I've made an
interesting discovery in the process of doing this. It seems that,
even while some controls can't be navigated to with Voiceover, they
can be seen if you have Voiceover set to speak text under the mouse
and you move the mouse onto the controls. Some examples of this are
the checkboxes in iTunes next to each track, which Voiceover can't
navigate to but is able to see with the mouse, and the sorting buttons
at the top of the iTunes track lists. This is by no means confined to
iTunes, however. This also worked with my scanner software yesterday.
I have an Epson all-in-one and, if any of you have used Epson
scanners, you know what fun their software can be to use with
Voiceover. Basically, the way it's configured when you start out you
can navigate to a button, an unknown, and the close button. Well,
turns out there's a lot more on the screen than those things... and
the controls aren't inside the unknown. Using the mouse you can see
them, and manipulate the controls as you'd expect.
I'm posting this just to let everyone know that I've found that the
mouse can in fact be useful. If you aren't comfortable with the
physical mouse, mouse keys will also serve this purpose, though I've
come to prefer the actual mouse itself. Here's what I have my settings
set to when I need to use the mouse, for reference:
Announce when mouse cursor enters a window, checked
speak text under mouse after delay, checked
delay slider set all the way to 0, no delay
And before anyone asks, I'm a totally blind user.
Just a little FYI.
