Hi Carolyn, The behavior of Preview under VoiceOver is closely tied to the version of Mac OS X that you are running, so because I am not running Snow Leopard, and also because some of the details of behavior can depend on both your application settings and your VoiceOver preference settings (especially cursor tracking and, under Snow Leopard, whether you're using QuickNav), I haven't tried to post instructions about using this app.
However, here are a few suggestions you can try: 1. Check what PDF Display mode is being used under your View Menu. (VO-M to the menu bar, press "V" to go to the View menu, arrow down to "PDF Display", then right arrow to the PDF Display submenu option settings. Are you using "Single Page" or "Single Page Continuous"? There can be reasons for using one or the other, depending on the source of your document, but for Apple User guides I'll usually use "Single Page Continuous" if I want to read straight through without having to use a key stroke to move to the next page. This is true for both Preview and Skim, but only if you interact with the text page (VO-Shift-Down arrow), and use VO-A to start and resume your reading. I can't stress this enough. Interacting is not instinctive when you come over from Windows. The deceptive point here is that VoiceOver will start reading even if you don't take the time to interact once you're in the text area. Under Tiger (OS X 10.4), if I use Travis Siegel's Softcon PDF Viewer (since there's no "Single Page Continuous" option under Preview with Tiger), you can read books with VoiceOver and only discover, a hundred or more pages into the PDF file, that because you forgot to interact when you started reading your position in the document is lost when you stop/pause. 2. Crucial points: if you first interact with the text area of Preview or Skim when reading your PDF document, you can move around with your VO-arrow keys (e.g., VO-Up arrow to re-read a previous line, VO-Left or Right arrow to review words, VO-Down arrow to skip down several lines on the page), and then resume reading from the current location with VO-A. In Skim, I can execute a "Find" with Command-F (either first stopping VoiceOver reading by pressing the Control key, or not), and use VO-A to resume reading at the next found location, etc. I can even command-tab away from the application and return to the place I left off reading if I press VO-A again. (In Preview there's a bug under Leopard that requires you to set a hot spot to get back to the place you left off if you switch applications. I think you also had to do this for Skim in earlier versions of Leopard. You need to ignore what VoiceOver starts reading and use VO-A to resume your location in Skim. This works for Mac OS X 10.5.8 and above in Leopard, I think, but don't quote me on this. And I'm sure I don't have the latest version of Skim.) 3. You might find it easier to hide the Preview toolbar. This shouldn't affect performance either way -- but you might find it simpler to navigate between the sidebar, where you are presumably reading a Table of Contents and selecting a section in the Apple User's Manual, and the text area, if the toolbar is hidden. I'm not sure how useful these comments will be to you under Snow Leopard. Another difficulty is that I used to be able to use the "VoiceOver Getting Started Guide" as an example PDF document for illustration purposes. Since there is no corresponding Snow Leopard PDF guide that I can point people to, it gets more difficult to give examples based on an actual guide. HTH Cheers, Esther On February 11, 2010, Carolyn wrote: > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
