Hi everyone, On Saturday I had my genius appointment. Before I update you on my mac problems, I want to share my experience with all of you. As we originally walked in with my husband carrying a huge 27 inch iMac on his left arm and me on his right, a young pleasant, perky lady approached us and asked us if we had an appointment. We said yes, she took my name, and automatically took the iMac off my husbands tired hands and led us to the back of the store. I did tell her that I need someone who has knowledge of voiceover. A young man who introduced himself as James was assigned to help us. James told us he works part time for apple on weekends because he goes to school during weekdays. He told us during his free time he plays around with voiceover to familiarize himself with everything he needs to know. He was very polite and very very very patient. However after spending 3 hours in the store with him, the conclusion was he wasn't very familiar with voiceover. I had to tell him which voiceover commands to use, and when he didn't want to ask me, he would look up commands on his personal laptop. I was disappointed that I was supposedly dealing with an agent who knows voiceover but that wasn't the case. I did most of the work myself with him watching. At one point he couldn't solve a voiceover issue so he had me call apple accessibility to get the answer. The only thing that I did like about him, was that he went out of his way to solve my problems even though he wasn't familiar with voiceover the way he was supposed to be. You will all understand what I'm talking about when you read the description further down of what went wrong with my mac. When we first sat at the genius bar and the introductions were done and over with, I explained the whole story to James. We turned on the mac, and then pages. I showed him what pages is doing and then confirmed the problem in text edit. He turned on voiceover in one of the macs in the store and tried pages and the navigation commands, and it wasn't doing that on their macs, just on mine. We did a clean install. I set up my iMac by myself but pages wasn't on the fresh install. He downloaded it and bang the problem was solved. Tested in text edit and again bang no problem. Whatever was causing my pages and text edit navigation problems was fixed with the fresh install. I forgot to mention that before we did the fresh install we did test the problems with my keyboard and with a keyboard from the store to make sure the keyboard wasn't the issue. I asked him to invert colors for me and to give me a blue background, and he did. I noticed that he would use a mouse to click, and lots of times he would turn voiceover off. I understand it's easier for him cause he's sited but in my humble opinion he should have been working with voiceover on. One because I should be able to hear what's going on with my computer, and two if he's a voiceover expert and his customer is blind then why not keep it on. Anyhow, even though pages now was working, I mentioned to him that I was using shrook. I asked him if we could download it and let me test it out, just in case this app is the problem. He patiently downloaded it for me and went to help another customer while I try it out. The website I use shrook with is in Greek, so I had to download the Greek voice. I did that and tested the website with shrook, and then pasted into pages and text edit and everything worked fabulously. I also set some of my voiceover preferences while I waited for him. In doing all of this I tried clicking vo f8 to get the voiceover utility and nothing would happen when I clicked the combination. When James came back I told him the voiceover utility doesn't come up with vo f8 and we spent an hour trying to figure it out until finally he told me to call apple accessibility. When I told the agent on the phone what was going on, right away he told me to press the function key with vo f8 to get what I want. At the same time James I have to say was looking for it, and as the agent on the phone told me the key combination, so did James who had just found it. Anyhow the agent on the phone also told me quickly where to change that to just vo f8. The other thing that I was a little disappointed in, is he didn't think to set voiceover to on for login screen and when I got home I had some problems. No big deal I figured it out but when I bought the iMac the gentleman who helped me was much more aware of the blind person's needs and made sure that when I got home I was ready to go. Lastly I did mention to James the following: Why did the reinstallation of osx work at the store but it wouldn't work at home. His answer was we have an apple network we connect to and not to the app store. He really didn't address the issue of why I couldn't do a install. I hope down the road if I need to do a fresh install I'm able to do so without problems, because I shouldn't have to go to the store every time something happens. So in short I'm happy my iMac seems to be fixed. Generally my experience at the apple store was good. James even though not knowledgeable in voiceover was polite and patient. I have had better agents then him but oh well. Sincerely Zoe
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