question about checking text formatting and position in Pages

By Chanelle, 10 October, 2015

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hello AppleVis,
I am attempting to write some papers for school in Pages. How can I make sure that the first line of each paragraph is indented by 0.5 inches? I went to layout in the format inspector and typed in 0.5 for first. When I press VO F4 F4, VoiceOver announces that the cursor is 0.39 inches from the right. With Jaws, it is possible to hear the cursor position from the left. Are there any VoiceOver commands to hear cursor position? Specifically, is there a way to have VoiceOver announce cursor position that takes into account page margins?
Is it possible to create a new style with specific formatting? Are there free resources on learning pages? Someone mentioned on AppleVis that using Pages !write assignments and APA papers in particular is possible. From this forum, I learned about a website called CeCiMac. Mastering the Macintosh does not discuss more complex formatting tasks. Eventually, I will probably need to pay for lessons, but I would like to find free resources in the meantime.
Thanks.
Chanelle

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Comments

By Apple-pie on Friday, October 30, 2015 - 02:40

Hello Chanelle,

thanks for bringing this problem to everyone's attention. I'have reported this to Apple Accessibility for several times. As far as I know there is no possibility to check the position of the writing cursor in relation to the chosen page format and edge of the page. So if you give Pages the order to indent first line for 0.5 inches then you need to trust that it works. This is the only thing I know about it.

By the way: This is a general problem occuring in every text processing program such as textedit, Word, Nisus Writer etc.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you anything about lessons for learning to deal with Pages. What I know about it I've been learning by reading help texts and by trial and error.

Hello,
Thanks for replying to my question. I will write to Apple accessibility about this issue. It seems that knowing the position of the writing cursor would be important to anyone using a screen reader and wanting to make sure that documents are formatted correctly. When I get around to writing to Apple accessibility, I will post or summarize the response that I get.
Thanks again.
Chanelle

By Smiling Sunshine on Saturday, January 30, 2016 - 02:40

Hi. We're in the same boat. I'm so frustrated and disappointed that I've spent $2000 on a new iMac thinking it would be easier to use than my windows computer, only to find out that there is very little invo or training out there for advanced word processing with VVO.

I don't want to give up on my Mac but I'm getting rather discouraged.