Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Everybody!
These days I am educating myself on a variety of subjects, requiring me to read lengthy documents using VoiceOver, Text Edit and Pages on my 2022 Mac Studio . I hope you will share advice how I might more efficiently accomplish lots of screen reading reading. Smile.
First, is one document format better or worse than any other? Generally, I prefer dot txt files to allow me to search through the document for key phrases, but I'm certainly open to suggestions.
Second, I use VO-a for continuous read,, but in MacOS 15.6.1 Sequoia, resuming VO-a after a pause sends VO focus to the beginning of the document. Very annoying.
Third, the command-f search function is not reliable. Sometimes it finds the text to be searched for; sometimes it does not. Is there a better search feature, or perhaps a better document app than pages or text edit for continuous reading and searching for text strings?
I dearly do not want to read lengthy documents line by line, down arrow after down arrow forever. No thank you. The read next paragraph function isn't reliable either, especially for documents I converted from pdf. Do you have additional suggestions? Hope hope hope?
Smile. Thank you! And may you feel the joy, no matter what.
Bruce
Comments
Interact first.
You're probably opening the document in TextEdit and hitting Vo-a right away. If you interact first, it doesn't start from the beginning, or usually doesn't anyway, it's been a bit since I've read with it so I don't have the behavior top of mind. Also you probably want to go into the formatting menu and pick "disable editing", that way it won't announce misspellings as it reads.
Generally I just use whatever app for the file format, Preview for PDF, TextEdit for .txt and .docx, Books for .epub, and so on. If you've got Pages installed you'll probably have to use VO-shift-m and pick open with to get a .docx file to open in TextEdit.
Nothing BEats TextEdit
TextEdit is really your best bet. I’d recommend going with RTF; it’s the perfect middle ground between a plain TXT file and a heavy Word doc. It allows you to use bold, italics, and underlines to mark important spots for later. Honestly, we still lack a truly serious reading app on the Mac. Until someone builds something comparable to Windows tools like
QRead or BookWorm, the current macOS options just don't measure up.
Windows
Mac and Voiceover are poor when it comes to long-form text. To be honest, it’s poor when it comes to most things.
After playing with a Windows machine for the last few weeks, I've realised just what a joke Voiceover is on Mac. Safari is pretty much unusable, and Voiceover chokes on any long-form data. Sad to say, Apple Accessibility has pretty much ended development of Voiceover for Mac, aside from a few pointless public-facing flurries.
They are, in fact, remarkable... Which is ironic. Remarkably incompetent.