How do you adjust steppers?

Ah, where I was confused is that I was expecting the changed value to be read. It wasn't actually navigating to something else when I did VO-up, it was saying "Hello, this is Reed" with the new value, so you could hear the effect.

Yep, a Mac Mini. I'm debating whether or not to get a trackpad, mostly because I'm debating whether I want to upgrade to another Mini, or pay more for a MacBook to get portability. I was using a Windows laptop, but it was plugged in most of the time. I don't travel a ton, but I do sometimes, so having something portable would be nice. Of course, a Mini would be pretty portable too, but it would always need an outlet.

Obviously if I got a MacBook, an external trackpad would be redundant. Hence the debating. Fun stuff! Now I just need to find where you adjust what VO does for capital letters. I think it's set to change pitch right now, and sometimes that works, and sometimes it seems like it doesn't.

I sort of talked about this in another thread, but for the most part, I'm at capslock and the arrows, unless I'm typing. The notable exception is Finder, because in columns view up and down move through files and left and right collapse and open directories, and when they open, they're in their own area, sort of like Windows Explorer.

IMO, this keeps things more productive. As an example, here I'm editing, so I need to be down around the arrows anyway, e.g. opt-left/right to move by words, up/down to read through lines, and so on. But the more important thing is that, for the most part, I'm not going out of my mind wondering if the arrows work here or the tab key works there or whatever.

I'm not pressing twenty-five googolplex keys at a time, at most it's three, and if I need to interact, well I'm right there. It takes me probably less than half a second to add shift-down instead of going VO-right. But you'll be happy to know that, yes, with quick nav off, you can just hit up or down to adjust the steppers, I just checked in VO utilities.

I get that this is all a personal preference thing. And if people treated it as such, I think I'd be way less baffled about it. But every time it comes up it's as though the very world is ending tomorrow. I mean, seriously, you just said that because you had to go capslock-shift-down, then capslock up or down, then capslock-shift-up, they were ruining the entire operating system. "Why not just give me a paper cut and pour lemon juice in it"! That quote's for the fans, you know who you are.

Meanwhile I solved my problem in less than thirty seconds after reading the comment and didn't even think about any of it until I checked new posts just now. This isn't a rant about how the Mac is a wonderland of amazement and I'll never touch another Windows machine or something. Until I switched about a month ago to see how it would work, I was happily using Windows, and I could happily use it again. I didn't have driver issues, and IMO since at least 10 Windows has been incredibly stable.

I'm just saying, having,or choosing, to interact with something isn't dragging my day to a halt or making the simplest tasks take half a billion aeons or something. It's just a different way of doing things. So far, I've just been going, OK, so this is what we do to accomplish this, and it's done and I'm getting on with my life. Maybe you can't do that, because you're so used to Windows or Linux or whatever that the other way just drives you nuts. I get it. I didn't really use Narrator in Windows unless I had to because I had NVDA which works with more stuff and I already knew, so I didn't have to get the hang of whatever Narrator was doing.

As an example, in NVDA I have that thing that automatically goes in and out of focus mode turned off. I want to explicitly put it there, so I know what's going on. Narrator has scan mode, which I honestly still don't get, and it forever popping in and out of it was really really annoying. So because I didn't have to, I never really got the hang of it or what it was trying to do.

This is why we have choices, which is awesome. But I don't go around yelling about how Narrator is a plague and a blight upon the universe of screenreaders or something. I don't tell people not to use it. I do recommend NVDA, but it's there, so they may as well get familiar with it, at least familiar enough to download NVDA and get it installed, am I right people?

Same thing with Edge or whatever MS is doing for email these days, I use Firefox and Thunderbird, and if you ask me for recommendations, that's what I'm going to tell you, well a little less enthusiastically with Thunderbird until they fully straighten out whatever they broke that made it super slow. I haven't tried MS' email thingy, I don't even know what it is, but again, Edge is really pretty solid these days, so I wouldn't tell somebody *not* to use it.

Obviously, if you try to get support from me about Microsoft's mail, you're shopping in the wrong store. Ditto Narrator. But they both seem perfectly serviceable, particularly if you stick with MS' stuff while using Narrator. Just because I didn't get the point of scan mode doesn't mean it's the software equivalent of Great Cthulhu.

I tried Mac ages ago. Like I think the latest OS version I could update to was one of the leopards, 10.6. I could do some stuff with it, but my wife ended up using it until it died. Its corpse is still out in the garage somewhere waiting to be recycled.

On the whole, I'd say I'm fairly happy, with some minor exceptions. I'm reading way less than I did because I still haven't found a decent reading program, or set of programs, although Preview isn't too bad for PDFs. Dealing with text as a whole is a little meh. For instance, if I'm on the web and I want to get the spelling of a link because it's a weird name, interacting with the text often gives me text next to it, or if there's an image it will interact with VO's text that says "image". So it can be a little fiddly to try and get it interacting with exactly the text you want, and often times I just resort to getting VO on to the text and hitting VO-w twice to spell it out.

But a good friend of mine says she can manage this stuff just fine. So I'm assuming at least some of it is me not quite knowing how to do things yet. The point being, yeah, the Mac has issues. Doesn't everything? There are still things I really like from NVDA, e.g. just having first letter navigation available without toggling quick nav on or off, the only times I use QN are for the web, or if I'm doing something where I know I'll just be using the arrows a lot, e.g. browsing patches in Garage Band, some games like Lost Island.

But so far, I've been able to make everything work, and except for a place or two, I don't really find anything annoying or incredibly unproductive or anything. One place is that sometimes QN will break if you turn it off and back on again, so hitting 'h' will move you to the next heading, and then fail to work again. I could solve this by just doing VO-cmd-h of course, but I'm Pennsylvania Dutch, so I'm stubborn. Usually I just end up toggling QN off and on really fast a couple of times, and that solves it.

But again, like I said in the other thread a while back, I think a big thing that's helped me is that I just started out accepting that things were going to be different. So I don't have a problem doing VO and the arrows. To me that's just easier than trying to remember where raw arrows might work. I limit the use of things like quick nav most of the time. In fact even where I use it on the web, if I need to move through stuff quickly, I'll hold VO-right, because I think it scrolls faster than just holding right.

Some people will be nodding sagely and going, "see? What did we tell you, all the weird little quirks you have to remember"! But this seems no different to me than knowing that if you want to see the progress of a Windows update, you have to use object nav in NVDA and get to the name of the update, then move down into the next object, which is also the name of the update, then down again, and *then* you can move right to see the download or install progress percentage.

YMMV, naturally. But at least for me, like 99% of the time, until I hit something new, I'm just doing the stuff I'd normally be doing on Windows, and it's fine. I don't notice that I'm being slowed down or anything like that, and where I do hit snags, well, doesn't seem much different than on Windows. I was playing around in Garage Band earlier and forgot to interact with the library to browse patches.

Seems no different than wondering why I can't change patches and realizing that I forgot to hit F6 in Reaper on Windows to go into the plugin's interface from the effects dialogue. Sometimes I'd get out of it entirely, but since that plugin needed that, I had to hit f to get back in and then f6. Same difference really, so far as I can see. That's just the kind of thing that can happen, when you forget where you are in a program.