Dear All, I have a question regarding use of the mouse pointer with VoiceOver on OS X - however, since I haven't posted here before I thought I'd better introduce myself.
I live in London (UK) and have become something of an Apple convert in recent years - starting off with my beloved iPhone in 2010, and much more recently buying myself a MacBook Air. One of the main drivers for the Mac purchase was the changing nature of my sight - whilst I still have useful vision, with which I can read a computer monitor, given sufficient contract, reduced resolution, increased font size, etc, this is becoming increasingly difficult. Having used VoiceOver on the iPhone virtually all the time, buying a Mac seemed like the obvious way of making a gentle transition from sight-reading to screenreading. I did a lot of research before biting the bullet, including playing with an Air for a few hours in an Apple Store. Since getting it, however, I have been slightly frustrated by the steepness of the learning curve, and my relatively slow progress up it. I think part of the issue has been that I am not only learning to use a new OS, having mainly used Windows (and Ubuntu for a bit) until now, but I am also relying more heavily on the screenreader than ever before. Whilst many of the gestures transfer across to from iOS to Mountain Lion, the significantly more complicated desktop and my lack of familiarity with the various keyboard shortcuts is proving to be somewhat frustrating. I'll no doubt bother you with some of my other issues another time, but I would appreciate a bit of advice on the thing which is probably causing me the most irritation. As I am still finding my way around the desktop and various applications, I often find myself getting rather "lost". One way of getting out of such situations, I find, is to disable the trackpad commander, zoom in a fair bit, and navigate with the mouse pointer, with VoiceOver announcing the items under it. This works pretty well within most applications, however in some - notably Mail - it automatically selects items as soon as the cursor hovers over them. For instance, if I move the cursor over the mailbox list and select "Inbox", but inadvertently hover over "drafts" when moving the cursor back to the message list, "Drafts" is activated instead of "Inbox". This becomes even more annoying if I accidentally stray beyond the boundary of a window, resulting in the next one back being activated instead. As an example, I might have Safari open with Mail still running in the background. Whilst navigating with the mouse cursor I accidentally stray beyond the Safari window, and suddenly find myself back in Mail! To make matters even worse, if I Cmd + Tab back to Safari, but don't move the mouse cursor beforehand, it flips back to Mail as soon as I touch the touchpad. You will understand how annoying and frustrating this is. I would be very grateful if anybody could help me with this. Is there a way of maintaining the VO focus whilst navigating the cursor, but without actually activating the items under it? Is there any way of automatically keeping the mouse cursor within the boundaries of a window? Any help or advice would be very gratefully received. Many thanks, and sorry for the very long post! Robert (Running Max OS X 10.8.1, with VO, magnification and screen inversion turned on.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/macvisionaries/-/PB8g6V7NCbEJ. 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.
