Hi Garry, welcome to the list and to the mac community as a whole.
I'll try and answer a couple of your questions. First off, for
spreadsheets, you might want to look at an app called tables. You can
find it at http://www.x-tables.eu.
I've not done much with it myself, but I've heard very good things
about it from other users. Plus, the developer seems interested in
its accessibility. You have to buy tables, but there is a trial period.
As for browsing the web, you might try out the link and item
choosers. The link chooser is VO u, and the item chooser is VO i.
These are great ways to jump directly to any spot on a web page.
HtH
Darcy
On 24-May-08, at 11:29 PM, Garry Turkington wrote:
Hi,
After years of finding reasons not to look at Mac accessibility I
took on a new role at work and was asked "will a Mac do?" Figuring
it was a good excuse to try out VO I said yes.
I use Windows and Linux heavily but have never been able to get a
platform that gives me good enough access to the GUI and CLI that
would allow me to stop having a mutant multi-computer setup or a
lack of functionality when there's only one box at my desk. So I've
been intrigued to read that people are quite happily using their
Macs for heavy ssh access to remote hosts, if I can get access there
working good enough and get my head around the Mac interface then I
could see me becoming a convert.
I have now spent 2 whole days with my Mac and have a few questions
that I'd like to ask here.
Firstly, I produce relatively complex spreadsheets as part of some
system modelling work that I do. From a browse of the archives it
appears that the obvious candidates (i.e. from Open Office, MS
Office or iWork) are currently not accessible and that I'll need
retain some Windows access for the time being for this? I do see
that the Open Office 3 beta appears to offer potential but
unfortunately I'm using a PPC-based Mac and I don't think that's
supported. This of course does also kill my plans to run Fusion but
I may be able to get a new Mac Pro soon which may open those doors.
In the terminal I'm finding it better than most Windows ssh clients
but so far not good enough to spend hours efficiently working on
things. I've noticed that any command that generates more than a
single line of output (weirdly excluding ls) gets truncated and my
prompt is just read instead. I seem to be able to mitigate this by
setting an empty prompt but that's an imperfect solution. It
appears that the reading of the prompt or the "new line"
announcement is muting the command output. Anyone come across this
and have a solution? Is there any way to turn off the "new line"
announcement, I couldn't find anything in the verbosity menu.
By interacting with the terminal window (it gets identified as a
scroll area) I can review the screen but usually only a few lines
back, to go further I need route VO to the top of the window and
then go down to where I want. Again, anyone found this problem and
have a solution?
More generally what have folks done with terminal to improve its
accessibility? I've played with cursor types, I think block
blinking currently works best and also looked at the various
terminal emulation modes. VT100/102 seemed to be best there.
Another problem is in editing text, either when I interact with it
directly or am navigating within TextEdit. The cursor seems to get
stuck
at the end or beginning of a line and repeats the first or last
character. I couldn't find an obvious configuration setting here,
is this a problem or am I missing something?
Finally I'll potentially be controversial and say that I'm having
real problems with the VO interface metaphor when applied to complex
webpages. One thing I'm accessing is the Microsoft web front-end to
an Exchange account which I accept is a horrible webpage at the best
of times. But two things I can't seem to be able to do are to
quickly jump over the forest of links at the top or return to the
same place in the page when I return from reading an email. Note
that these are related and solving either would greatly improve my
experience.
For the jumping over the link forest I thought that setting VO to
group navigation would work but each link is still identified as its
own item. Without looking at the page source I assume the links
aren't logically grouped within <div> tags or the related which may
be the source of the problem. But this is a point where the ability
to do a quick page down would be really really useful and VO doesn't
seem to offer me that.
Once I select a message and go to its page I find that returning to
the parent page always takes me to the start of the HTML content
area. I've tried command-[ which seems to be the usual keyboard
shortcut for going back and this is the result. I saw reference to
a related VO-[ command that seemed to be what I want but it never
seems to work. Can anyone offer wisdom on either of these issues?
If it's significant I'm using Leopard but only the original 10.5.0
release, not updated. The machine is on a network without internet
connectivity which makes updating a pain.
I suspect that my overall Mac experience so far has been quite
frustrating but in a good way. If I can resolve the above issues I
think I can get a platform for both my GUI and CLI needs for the
first time. If I can get my hands on an Intel-based Mac then
Windows within Fusion makes the rest of my problems go away. I use
VMware heavily on Windows and Linux currently and plan to move that
across to the Mac also.
Many thanks to anyone for any help they can offer.
Regards,
Garry
--
Garry Turkington
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
