I'm considering buying a MACBook Air and getting the "one on one" training
with it since there's a store near me. I thought using the training sessions
for Pages/Numbers would be worth the effort. I'd have to work with the
trainer around the VoiceOver issues, but at least they could help me
understand the basic principles. It'd be vastly helpful to have a
knowledgeable sighted assistant during the iWork learning curve I think.
What do you think?
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Griffith" <d.griff...@btinternet.com>
To: "'Mac OSX & iOS Accessibility'" <mac-access@mac-access.net>
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 8:25 AM
Subject: RE: iWork programs and accessibility
There is a desperate need for structured work to be done on building up
knowledge of Mac productivity software so that a Visually Impaired person
can fruitfully access it.
There should be getting Started guides to pages, Numbers, Key Note etc.
These could then be usefully supported with audio tutorials giving walk
through of essential tasks.
All the current guides I have seen assume you have sight.
At the moment the visually impaired user base Resources on Mac seems more
concentrated on advanced Music/ creative products rather than serious
advanced Office Productivity. Basic word processing is fine but as you
are
finding moving beyond this to spreadsheets and more advance usage is a
massive learning curve. I have had the identical problems that you are
experiencing.
Ideally it would be useful for Apple to produce more than chapter 7 of the
Voiceover guide on applications.
Alternatively organisation like the RNIB should be doing more to increase
the expertise in utilising or work arounding the issue to enhance Mac
productivity for visually impaired users.
This has happened in the USA where Visual Impairment charities produced
Getting Started with the iPhone but there is a yawning chasm of a gap in
the
market where there is zilch support for Visually impaired users using the
Mac.
I guess this is chicken and egg. The Mac users of office productivity is
small compared to the iPhone. This is likely to continue whilst the
organisations do not support Mac access solutions.
Listening to the interview on Blind Bargains recently it appears that
organisation like the RNIB are focussing on Windows and NVDA for
investment
in Access for their user base. This is understandable but I wish they
widened their horizons beyond Windows.
We need proper in depth guides to intermediate / advanced use of Mac
Productivity . I think this is quite tough to expect visually Impaired
people to pull themselves all up individually by their bootstraps.
There needs to be a proper structured project which builds tutorials on a
number of tasks using Iworks, probably initially investigated with
sighted
assistance until procedures to complete tasks without sighted help are
formulated.
David Griffith
-----Original Message-----
From: mac-access-boun...@mac-access.net
[mailto:mac-access-boun...@mac-access.net] On Behalf Of Cathy
Sent: 06 March 2013 01:23
To: Mac OSX & iOS Accessibility
Subject: Re: iWork programs and accessibility
hi,
I have both pages and numbers.
I have been disappointed with numbers because several of the shortcut keys
have not worked for me. for example, I had some XLS files that numbers
opened up fine, and I could read the first sheet of data, but the command
to
move from sheet to sheet has not worked for me.there were other shortcut
keys in the help file that also would not work for me.
I found pages to be very complex too learn, but this could simply be due
to
the fact that I am a new Mac user. I also constantly received "busy"
messages from both aps, but now that I just got more memory installed,
perhaps this will no longer happen. must check into that.
my two cents.
Cathy
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