Hi all,
That idea occurred to me and my fiance about a year ago, but I kept forgetting to write a quick e-mail to Apple accessibility. As we know, very often, when we move from app to app, VO often loses focus, jumps back to the top of the page, and we have to find where we were previously before leaving the app and scroll forever to get there, (i.e. Pages, Safari, mail etc). If we have a long page or a document, fumbling around this way can be very frustrating to say the least and takes up plenty of time and efforts. The idea itself is not new, it has been implemented in a few screenreaders and I use it on a regular basis, but it could be really crucial in IOS. As many of you know, in Jaws you can drop a virtual marker anywhere on the web or in a document or e-mail and then quickly jump to the previously marked cursor position. This way navigating lengthy documents and web-pages would be a breeze and would spare us so many frustrations. It could be added as, say, a rotor action, in the future we could loop a chunk of text between a place marker and a cursor position and select it, too. If anybody finds this idea worth considering, please, write about it to the accessibility team. I recently followed up my letter with a question inquiring if anything is being done in that department, but there is what I received as a reply:
Hello,
Thank you for following up. We have passed your request along to the appropriate group for consideration. We are unable to commend on the status of feature requests.
Sincerely,
Apple Accessibility
Well, it doesn't say much, Apple enjoys keeping secrets, the more people would write about it, the more likely this feature will have a chance to be included in the upcoming VO enhancements. If there is something that I'm missing or if there is any way around it in Vo, please, let me know.
Hope everyone is having a great day.
Thank you.
Comments
Great idea!
This is a great idea and I will write to them about it!
A similar idea
I like your idea. Another, similar thing I'd like is for voiceover to stay in the place on a webpage the link you've just followed points to, if it does, instead of taking you back to the top of the page when it loads. For example, I'm on another forum where I'll sometimes follow a link to a specific post within a thread. When I do that, voiceover first jumps to the start of the post I want, but as soon as the page has fully loaded, it'll take be right back to the top and I have to navigate back to the post. If the page loads slowly enough, voiceover will have had time to tell me I was on, E.G. Post 27, but if not I'm left guessing.
Thank you for your feedback
Hi all, thank you for supporting this. It basically comes down to something that has already been implemented in Mac OS, but I want this to work universally, i.e. not only on the web but anywhere where there is any text present. There are anchors for Mac OS, but as far as I know they work only in browsers.
thank you for this.
yes, it would be a great feature.
I already wrote several times to accessibility@apple.com asking for this feature but apple never listen me.
This feature would be very important in various situations, but particularly in the web Safari.
I send a message to the iphone group asking everybody to do this request to apple, but no one was interested, mostly because of laziness.
I also used the feedback app on ios 10 to request this feature.
but with each new update, the cycle of betas ios 10, never saw my request be attended.
only together making pressure on Apple to add this feature to VO, it is possible that take place.
I've done my part several times but as already said before, the apple never listen to me.
this would be a great feature, and this is missing in VO.
It would be a great satisfaction for all.
for me, it is the feature that most lacking in VO.
things in life change only when we fight for them.
but not always all follow this example of unity by always staying waiting for others to do for them.
cheers.
Wouldn't apple have to obtain
Wouldn't apple have to obtain permition from freedom scientific first? We don't want fs crying and filing a lawsuit against apple like they did gwmicro.
What does this have to do with freedom scientific?
There's nothing that I know of as a Jaws user that is anything like this at all. So why would freedom scientific need to be involved?
Obtaining permission from FS
I agree, it has nothing to do with Freedom Scientific whatsoever, besides, Apple already has similar functionality in Mac OS, where one can drop an anchor on a web-page, what's the big deal about it? I think it's very doable and would spare us a lot of trouble. One of the previous posters was complaining about not being heard, well, as long as we can unite our efforts and keep writing about it, they will listen to our feedback. There is a toll free number as well, somebody could probably give them a call, too. AppleVis is a very vibrant community and some people from AppleVis really have a voice in such matters, and Apple Accessibility is responding though sadly not being very verbose sometimes, it's part of Apple's policy so we shouldn't expect them to report the status of every single request, not expecting a miracle, but doesn't hurt to try anyway.
Be Careful
Be careful wishing for too many features, in any product. Instead of a placemarkers feature (which they do have on the Mac so adding it to iOS is probably something we'll see in the end) to work around a problem, why not ask Apple to address the actual problem instead? We really don't want VO to end up like JAWS or Window-Eyes, with so many features that just don't work the way they're supposed to and never get fixed. Seems to me that, if VO is losing focus a lot, you want that fixed not to have a complex feature to work around it.
I haven't seen this happen too much myself, however I'm a toucher and not a flicker, i.e. I tend to touch the screen where I figure (or know) something is. That's as good as a place marker for me, and focus gets lost a lot less.