By Sarah, 14 December, 2013
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
I got a MacBook pro today. How do you set things like speech verbosity and other synthesizer settings? How do I set the sounds such as those for sent and received email? How long should the battery charge? I found a few guides on the website but do not have an embosser or braille display. Is there a user guide in Braille? Thank you.
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Macbook Pro
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The option for changing the
welcome to the mac.
VoiceOver Getting Started User Guide resources
Hello Sarah and Others, Congratulations on your new MacBook Pro and welcome to the Mac with VoiceOver. First of all, I'd like to point you to Apple's web page of Accessibility Resources:
http://www.apple.com/accessibility/resources/
If you navigate to the "User Guides" (heading level 1) there are links to the web version of the most recent VoiceOver Getting Started guide for OS X, and for users who can read English Braille, there are also links to an electronic Braille version of the guide in brf format that can be downloaded, as well as a link to the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind web page where you can order an embossed copy of the VoiceOver Getting Started Guide for OS X 10.9 Mavericks. On the same web page under the heading for "VoiceOver Command Charts" there are links to quick reference charts that map keyboard and numeric keypad keys to VoiceOver commands for the default setup. (You'll be able to customize some of these options under VoiceOver Utility).
However, to expand on Piotr's suggestions, in addition to being able to being able to checking the list of VoiceOver commands by pressing VO-h twice (holding down the Control and Option keys, while double tapping the "h" key), you can also access the version of the VoiceOver Getting Started Guide for your operating system by pressing VO-h to bring up the VoiceOver Help menu, and then navigating to the Getting Started Guide. The link to the VoiceOver Getting Started Guide in HTML format from Apple's Accessibility resources pages is mostly useful for people who don't have this on their computer. Appendix A of this guide contains a table listing the VoiceoVer keyboard shortcuts in one place, which can be helpful to review, but in practice it is easier to use the VoiceOver commands help menu to look up and access commands and their shortcuts as you need them.
If you want to find manuals in other formats, including RTF, try checking John Panarese's MacfortheBlind.con web site, and under the "Resources" link select "Documentation". This page contains material for both iOS and Macs, but under the "Manuals and User Guides" heading you will find links to the VoiceOver Getting Started Guides in RTF format. I think these are only available up through Mountain Lion at present, and do not include Mavericks, but you will also find a MacBook Pro User Guide that has been contributed in a format and organization that may be easier to use by Braille users who wish to print in Braille. John's web site URL is:
http://macfortheblind.com/
Finally, for Piotr and others who may wish to access the latest version of the VoiceOver Getting Started Guide on the web, and in other languages, the basic Apple Web Site for this is:
http://help.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/10.9/
This accesses the VoiceOver Getting Started Guide for Mac OS X 10.9 in English. If you do not append the operating system number at the end of the URL, the version of the Getting Started Guide for OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will be displayed in English, instead. The full URL for the User Guide in English for Mavericks resolves to:
http://help.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/10.9/English.lproj/
Note that "English" is spelled with a capital "E". For older versions of the User Guide, change the operating system version in the URL address, so for Mountain Lion this would be OS X 10.8, so use "10.8" instead of "10.9":
http://help.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/10.8/
or
http://help.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/10.8/English.lproj/
For any other language, substitute "English" with the two-letter code for your language ("fr" for French, "es" for Spanish, "de" for German, "it" for Italian, etc.) So, for example, if Piotr wanted to read the latest version of the VoiceOver Getting Started Guide (for OS X 10.9, Mavericks) in Polish, he would use "10.9" for the version in the address, and use "pl" for Polish in the string "pl.lproj" at the end, like this:
http://help.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/10.9/pl.lproj
This URL address scheme lets you access the VoiceOver Getting Started Guide for your language and operating system, provided your language is supported. There are a few exceptions. Under Mountain Lion the transition to the two-letter code was not complete, so for some languages you still had to type out the languge name, like "German.lproj", "Spanish.lproj", or "Dutch.lproj" instead of "de.lproj", "es.lproj", and "nl.lproj". For languages with different scripts, like simplified and traditional Chinese, the two-letter code for language is modified, so you would use "zh_CN.lproj" for simplified characters and "zh_TW.lproj" for traditional characters. This code scheme is also used for the iOS User Guides, and is detailed in my comments under the Easy access to the iOS manual thread under the Guides section.
The information in this post was excerpted and updated from one of my archived posts on the macvisionaries list.
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