Lack of iOS accuracy in OS X

By Felix, 29 December, 2012

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Happy New Year guys. At the end of this year I would like to focus your attention on, as it seems to me, fundamental problems with Voice Over in Mac OS. First is one of my top complaints. I think everyone notice that navigating via web rotor is the only way to scroll through a webpage. For instance, When I'm using three finger gesture to scroll from page 1 to page 10 in Safari I always find myself no better off than before. In iOS I clearly know that for example,there are 30 pages on a webpage and I can scroll to any of them using three finger gesture. Also in iOS it is possible to focus VO cursor inside a webpage simply by placing a finger on any part of the screen. This is not the case in OS X. I have already mentioned issues with contextual menu in Safari. The situation in Mail app isn't perfect either. It doesn't highlight urls in emails when opening a thread. Voice Over curser in Mac seems to be less accurate overall. This is not to mention that Voice Over often reads "text,text, text" upon loading a webpage instead of reading it's content. This problem also has to do with Preview making me lose a big chunk of my PDF documents. I thing we all should collect our complains and send them to Apple

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Comments

By KE7ZUM on Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - 23:32

Actually I'm having no issues in safari and here's why. You can assign custom jesters with the track pad to go from the top and bottom of the page. and the scroll jester does work with ht track pad anyways in osx. Second, it's the website that has the issue. To eliminate that I just tab in to the page and the text text thing stops and the page then reads normally. So as you can see there are work arounds and things to try before saying Oh it's totally broken. Remember you have to think like a sighted person in that not everything is gong to be visible on the screen so you have to make it visible before voice over sees it. as for the context menu problem in safari I to have that problem, but again that might be a website issue as google and archive.org has this issue as well. Hope this sort of helps.

By Florian on Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - 23:32

Hello, VoiceOver on OsX ...now there's a very nice topic of discussion. The problems you describe Felix are what I usually describe as 'VoiceOver clunkiness'. These little annoyances veer me away from using a mac as my main production machine. Ironeous messages nobody needs to know like the previously mentioned 'text' 'text' 'voiceOver busy' 'busy' , weird bleep sounds that could mean anything, 'selection this, selection that ...i am overgeneralizing now of course. Lets get back to what you said. Yes, VoiceOver on OSX has, since Lion, introduced a number of little inconsistencies and bugs into the way it does things. Let me give an example, the ever-present pitch-shifter bug in the vocalizer voices. This is dumb, unnecessary and pretty easy to fix if people actually took the time to test and fix it. Going by the fact the bug is still present in Mountain Lion, I guess it hasn't been tested all that much now has it? Next one, the web thing. A website problem? Then why does it only happen on mac OSX and why not on Windows, or iOS? Highlighting of links in email messages? Yes, the voiceOver cursor philosophy should suggest that is a thing it should do ...yet it doesn't. Has anyone ever tried to use Launchpad with voiceOver? Don't bother, it slows things down. Sighted people can drag items around so they can get to them for easy reach. VoiceOver? nope. Attention seems to have slightly shifted away from VO on the mac lately and it annoys me to no end. Bug reports that have been made about Lion have obviously not been addressed, which makes me wonder what is happening inside the Big Apple.

@Marrie contextual menu works just fine in Google Chrome. Bookmarks are also somewhat clunky and isn't as fun to use as in mobile Safari. And Florian yes, I've also noticed that those in Apple obviously does not address issues we report. In early September I sent a report regarding context problem in Safari. They replied in three days or so. I was amazed to see it wasn't an automated reply. They said: "We are currently investigating contextual menu problem, but unfortunately we can't say when this issue will be resolved." This bug still exists as of today as we can see.

Hello, In mountain lion, the pitch change seems to be deliberate. I only notice it when entering an edit field or, when I come across a data detector like a e-mail address or, phone number. I haven't seen the randomness that was the case in Lion 10.7.