Not having a trackpad to hand to experiment, I am curious to hear if any VoiceOver users have taken the trackpad support in iPadOS 13.4 for a test drive yet? If so, does it offer anything over a hardware keyboard alone?
Even if you haven't tested this yourself yet, can you think of any possible use cases or added value for VoiceOver users?
None immediately come to mind for me. So, as much as I am curious about the upcoming Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro, I do suspect that much of its $300 price would be for a trackpad that not only offers nothing for my use case, but just gets in the way.
Am I missing something?
Comments
Answering my own question
Having found an old Apple trackpad lurking at the back of a cupboard, the answer to my question appears to be “no”.
I was able to use the trackpad to access the Control Center, Notifications Center. and App Switcher, but this offered nothing as I could just as quickly and easily do this with the keyboard that I have permanently attached to my iPad.
This just left navigating the screen using the trackpad. And, as far as I could determine, there was nothing here to accommodate VoiceOver. There might have been a cursor on the screen of my iPad, but only with the one app I know to be updated to add trackpad support was there a time when I received any audible feedback - and that was when purely by chance my sliding finger on the trackpad managed to have the cursor land on a button.
There's no real surprise here, but it does confirm that the upcoming Magic Keyboard will indeed be an extremely hard sell... no matter how curious I am about it!
not working in ios 14
I have a new logitech combo touch case with keyboard and trackpad, and, at this time you can move the cursor around the screen, but voiceover is not reliable at all and doesn't recognize any voiceover gestures, like using a mac without track commander turned on.
So basically, useless.
I use trackpad gestures on…
I use trackpad gestures on my Mac all the time because I find some of the text commands really clunky to hit on the keyboard. I broke down and bought the magic keyboard instead of the bridge keyboard because I am hoping that trackpad support will be voiceover accessible soon! I can also use it with the help of an Aira agent, which can be really useful sometimes - so it wasn't a complete waste of money. I am not used to reaching up at a strange angle to touch something on my iPad, nor am I accustomed to some of the keyboard commands that would replace my trackpad experience with the Mac.
I think it depends on who you are and what your work flow looks like. I don't like having my hands on the keyboard all the time, so it's nice to use trackpad gestures to read, write, do some precise editing, and scroll through pages one-handed while I eat or drink something with the other lol