I recently received an MS Word manuscript with markup applied using strikethrough and text color changes. I loaded the document in Pages and could not find any mechanism that would allow me to move focus to next and previous color change, or next and previous strikethrough.
There is no mechanism for finding strikethrough text, as near as I can tell.
For color changes, the documentation mentions several commands I thought would help, but they all fail to find text color changes. Here’s what I tried.
VO+T, read text attributes, fails to mention the text color. Seems to work in Safari, to some extent. Not sure why it’s broke in Pages.
VO+Command+D, find next different item, seems to simply move from one sentence to the next. I would expect it to move to the next text element that is different from the current element in some way, such as formatting. But it simply moves from one identically formatted sentence to the next and skips right over color changes.
VO+Command+C, find next text with different attributes. I’m not sure what this command is actually doing. In some cases, it reads an entire paragraph, with subsequent invocations moving through each sentence of the paragraph it just announced. What I would expect it to do is jump to the next chunk of text with different color or text style, but it fails to differentiate by text color entirely.
VO+Command+O, Find next font change. Like VO+Command+C, this one defies description and seems to move from one sentence to the next. One thing is for certain, it does not help me find text in a different color.
VO+Command+K, find next color change. This command gives me a thunk sound, and VoiceOver announces Font color change not found.
VO+Command+S, find next text with same attributes. If my text cursor is on black text, I thought this would move focus to the start of the next chunk of text with black text, and I could arrow backwards to the colored word between the two chunks. But pressing VO+Command+S mysteriously moves VoiceOver focus out of the body and into the header.
If I load the Word doc into Google Docs, I can move to next text color change with Control+Command+N, Control+Command+W. Google Docs places the text cursor at the color change and announces both the previous and succeeding color. It's quite handy.
I’d love to be able to do this in Pages. If anyone has a solution that works, please share it.
Comments
Enhancement request
I never would have known that this manuscript contained color-coded text and strikethrough if the author hadn't told me that was how they had applied the markup. There are no software tools, that I'm aware of at least, that would look at a document (Word, Pages, RTF, whatever) and display or announce the number of fonts, sizes, text colors, and text styles, either for the entire document or just for the currently displayed page. This is information a sighted user can glean with a glance. They can just take one look at a document and realize that it uses color coding and strikethrough. I would love some tool that provides equivalent information accessibly. It doesn't have to be in VoiceOver, or even in Pages. It just has to take RTF as input, analyze the contents, and display the results.
Pages versus Word
Tinkering around with this a bit, I found that both VO+Command+C and VO+Command+O are able to locate strikethrough text and bring VoiceOver focus to that text. But this only seems to work with a native Pages document, not with imported Word documents. Once the document is imported, I'm not sure why it would be different.
Still no luck with text color changes.
Pages is broken
I am sad to admit it, but it's true. Pages just fails at life these days. If you, for example, load your .docx file in Text Edit, and those commands will all work in your favor. Of course if you save anything you will potentially screw up the formatting. Pages, however, just fails. I don't know how I got through college using Pages without issues, except to say college was many moons ago for me. . . 🤷🏼♂️
13.6.3
Forgot to mention above, but I am on macOS 13.6.3. 13.6.4 is out now, so who knows if anything is better for Pages there.
Using TextEdit
Thanks, TextEdit is a workaround. For example, VO+Command+K moves me from one chunk of colored text to the next differently colored chunk and reads it.
This workaround has shortcomings, however. It doesn't announce the color of the text it has moved to. And if I press VO+T, it announces the text color of the preceding text. So, I have to VO+Command+K, arrow right once, then press VO+T. I'll have to combine this into a macro and tie it to a keyboard shortcut, because that's a lot of keypresses for a long document with lots of markup.
This is the time when I should be thankful that MacOS is so customizable, right?
I mean. . .
It could have been worse. I could have told you that you, sir, were s.o.l. 😏