VO for MacOS -- Braille moves keyboard cursor -- is it possible

By charadani, 25 September, 2020

Forum
Braille on Apple Products

Hey all,

As I browse a document with the braille display using the panning buttons or any other key to navigate, it would be nice to have the possibility of instructing the braille cursor to move the keyboard cursor as you pan through the document, like other screen readers do.

Imagine you are reading through a specific document using only your braille display and you decide you want to add a new paragraph in the middle of two existing ones. If you had "braille moves keyboard cursor" enabled, you'd simply put the braille cursor where this paragraphs needs to be added and you could start typing. Otherwise, you have to press the braille cursor routing keys to put the keyboard cursor where it needs to be for you to start typing at the correct place in the document.

Is there any way that I can have braille cursor move keyboard cursor while panning with my braille display?

Thanks.

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Comments

By Life in Six Dots on Thursday, September 24, 2020 - 22:14

This is something that has frustrated me since updating to Catalina 10.15. Even when “Synchronise keyboard focus and VoiceOver cursor” is checked in the Navigation section of VoiceOver Utility. I posted about this earlier in the year, and even emailed Apple Accessibility Team about it. They said they were looking into it but as of yet no fix.

I even contemplated rolling back to Mojave 10.14 because of this issue, but in the end decided not to bother. At the beginning it only seemed to affect Safari but with subsequent updates I’ve found it to be an issue with other applications.

The only work around I have found is to press the up and down arrows with Quick Navs off, rather than the pan button on the braille display. This keeps both the keyboard focus and VoiceOver cursor together – although it doesn’t always work.

This is one of the reasons I maintain a ChromeOS Rig as ChromeVox does exactly what you want by keeping both the keyboard focus and screen reader cursor together. Searching the web and reading documents has become a joy on ChromeOS - like macOS used to be ...