Temporarily hide in-text citations from VoiceOver

By Larry, 24 September, 2014

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hello :)

I am using VO on my Macbook Air, and I just begun my university studies in Australia, things are going well, but there is one thing that is really annoying, and that is all the citations... In Journal Articles, Books and Assignments there are a lot of in-text citations, since I use VO I have to read through all of them, which interrupts the flow, and is generally irritating. I use Pages when writing and Skim when reading PDFs.

I spent some time Googling but could not find any solution for this, but is it possible to get Pages to temporarily hide some text? Can I set VO to temporarily jump over text in brackets? Or would it be possible to create some kind of Apple script that temporarily hides text in brackets?

Any other ideas on how to get around this?

I appreciate the help! :)

//Cheers
Larry

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Comments

By RickC on Thursday, October 24, 2024 - 12:28

I know your post is 10 years old, but if you’re still monitoring this forum, I’m wondering if you ever found a solution. Seems to me that this would be a common problem with visually, impaired academics and lawyers, yet I can’t find much in the way of discussions about it, much less a solution.

By Khomus on Thursday, October 24, 2024 - 12:28

They're not as bad as footnotes anyway. I'm not sure you could script it. Well, you probably can, but consider there's not much difference between "he played a brass instrument, (a trumpet), in the school band" and "the Dani live in New Guinea, (Wilson, 32), and perform a style of harmonic singing".

In Pages, or some other word processor, you might be able to script something to remove parenthetical references and save the result as a new file, so you could go back to them. But
suppose you're reading a PDF in Preview, or some other format in a program where that's not going to work. Then what? It sounds like a simple idea at first, but it gets complicated pretty quickly, IMO of course.

By Brian on Thursday, October 24, 2024 - 12:28

Used to be that you could save the document as a .DOCX (Microsoft Word) file, then open it in text editor and read it that way. Text editor will not read comments. Again, this is how things used to be. I have not touched a Mac computer in quite a while, so things may be different in the later version of macOS.

HTH. 🙂

By WellF on Thursday, October 24, 2024 - 12:28

I mean, knowing the citations tends to prove useful later. Doesn't stop it being annoying, but I don't mind them by now.

By Khomus on Thursday, October 24, 2024 - 12:28

They're not comments, unless something like pages makes them into comments. They're inline citations,like so.

Many people think paperweights are both decorative and
functional, (Frederickson, 1993), while others claim they are useless, (Rothchild 2001, Peterson 1985).

The references are to books/articles/whatever by those authors in the bibliography. You give just enough to distinguish them, e.g. in case an author has multiple entries, and possibly page
numbers, though those are rarer, Esp. if you're citing websites.

They're called inline citations for the obvious reason that they're right in the text. This is opposed to footnotes, which appear at the bottom of the current page,or end notes,which appear in their own section, generally before the bibliography. Footnotes and end notes can also contain text, as opposed to simple
references. Inline citations are limited to references, at least as far as I've seen, if you want to expand on a point or such, that would be in a footnote or end note still.