Hello Charlie, Mark & All, I just want to second Mark's post and tell you that forcing myself to begin using VoiceOver was a big help. I was a Macbook User in 2005 when my vision started to fade, so at that time I used OSX's built-in Zoom and White-on-Black functions and then added an external 20 inch monitor. As my vision faded more I switched to a 24 inch monitor with a higher brightness rating and better ergonomic options. Like Mark, I also used a handheld magnifier when necessary. Eventually when my eye started growing tired quickly, I decided to try VoiceOver. At first I learned to use it to navigate Mail as it was very simple to move through the list of mailboxes and then tab to the list of messages and then tab to a message body if I wanted to read it, and then VO would do the reading for me. Quite a revelation! I then added navigation of the Finder into the VO mix and found that to be pretty simple too. The big find came with Safari and the ability to navigate directly to different parts of a webpage without needing to mouse around or tab through a bunch of links.
While I am getting to be pretty comfortable with VO keystrokes, I use a lot of the standard OSX shortcuts instead of their VO counterparts. I've also added trackpad gestures into the mix which you can probably also do if your macbook is a fairly recent model. I still sometimes use "traditional" mouse navigation via my magic trackpad because that's what I am comfortable with and in my mind's eye I know what many of the screen layouts look like, so sometimes I just go that route. It's nice to have choices. :) For learning VO, you might want to start with the VO Help menu, which can be accessed by pressing VO + H. You can also get to the VO keyboard commands help by pressing VO + K. That'll allow you to press different keys and key combinations to hear what they can do. There's a series of VO podcasts by Mike Arrigo on www.blindcooltech.com and www.visionaustralia.org has a series of VO podcasts as well. Best of luck, Bryan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@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.
