Mac questions

Hello,
First, do you mean the Vocalizer voices (Samantha, Karen, and others)? If so, find the popup button where you select a voice, then choose Customize at the bottom. You can download the synthesizers you want from there.

For download progress, go to Safari and press cmd-option-l. Interact with the table in the resulting window, find the file you're interested in, interact, and you can find the progress, speed, and so on. If a download fails, this is where you find the button to try it again.

For word processors, you've just eliminated the two best options. Text Edit in particular is very easy to use and is fully accessible. Perhaps it would help for you to tell us what it is you don't like about these two, since most any app will work in a similar manner?

I agree with Mehgcap on this one. Textedit and Pages are definitely the bestt/most usable word processors. In fact, I use text edit on a daily basis. Could you be more specific on why you don't like text edit/pages? All the built-in apps work the same/similar way. Is it the way VO reads things?
HTH and hopefully we can be of more help.

Alright, Vocalizer voices are free. As I said, just go to where you choose a voice in the VoiceOver Utility, but select Customize from the menu instead of a different voice.

The ruler isn't important--you can just ignore it. When you open Text Edit, you'll be on the text field where you can type or review text. If you aren't, vo-left or vo-right until you find it. If you only find a scroll area, interact with that, and the edit text area will be in there. You'll normally never have to do this, VoiceOver defaults to the text field in my experience. It might just be remembering your last position each time you open it, so once you find the field once, you should be all set.

Here are the steps to find the additional voices:

1. Open the VoiceOver Utility, and choose Speech from the categories table.
2. Vo-right until you find the tabs; be sure Voice is selected.
3. Vo-right until you are on the Default Voice popup button, then vo-space to open it.
4. Down arrow to Customize, and hit enter or vo-space.
5. Check all the voices you want in the resulting dialog box, then hit OK. They are each anywhere from 200 to 500 or so megabytes, so give them time to download and remember that they will take up space on your Mac. Once they download, they will appear in the save popup menu from where you selected Customize in the first place.

Vo right to find the text field. If it starts acting strange, interact with it.
I use text edit daily and Pages weekly.

Thanks for the info about the voices,

We have just released a translator app for the Mac that enables you to right click any text and translate it to almost any language. It will speak out the translation for you as well.
While this may not be exactly what you are looking for, it may still be helpful for your purpose.

The link to the app is: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/translator-with-speech/id1124337595?ls=1&mt=12

For everything I've needed to use it for, Scrivener is an absolute joy to use - especially once you rig it up with a couple of hotspots to jump between frequently accessed areas. And it has a very generous free trial period, so if you want to confirm that it is useful for your purposes before purchasing it, you should have plenty of time to do so. However it should be noted that Scrivener isn't technically a word processor - its primary goal is oriented more toward content generation and organization than user control over formatting and the like. Still, depending on your needs, it's a very versatile and powerful program.

Hello. While not exactly a word processor, I am currently using a 30-day trial version of MarsEdit and have been very impressed with it. The developer of this app used to work at Apple, so I think he knows his stuff. Regarding other voices, InfoVox iVox seems to work well on the Mac although I was only able to try out one of the voices. But if you do a search on AppleVis for InfoVox, there is at least one topic.

I have to disagree with Justin; I hate pages. It just seems clunky to me. I'm using microsoft word for mac and absolutely love it. super easy to use and familiar coming from a windows computer. Though, to be fair, I have no idea how much MSWord costs because I get it free through my college.

Hi, is it also possible to get eloquence on mac?

No, eloquence is not on the mac. As far as pages and text edit go, they are great. I use them each and every day.

Regarding infovox, I use it every day, and have been for the past 3 years or so. It's stable, reliable, and some of the voices are plain hilarious! lol. But yeah, it's worth investigating Vox for yourself. If you can afford it, purchase credits and download some voices onto your machine.

So, I've officially had to use MSWord for much more things in the past week than I have had to in the past 2 months or so. I've come to the realization that it is a nightmare to read multi-page documents with it. I still like it because it seems to be easier to edit certain things, but I'm now forced to change my opinion: pages is wonderful...especially with documents that have more than one page. lol.

Hey everyone, I’m not sure how to start a new thread, so I‘ll just post my question here, as it is related to some other things that were posted. I’ve just got a new Mac, the MacBook Air 13 inch, 2017 model. On my old Mac, I was able to sit on the downloads folder, and it would tell me the percentage of a download. How do I get it to do this on my new Mac? Also, when I’m downloading soundpacks from beatstar, it doesn’t give me the percentage. How do I get it to do that? I used to be able to press enter, and it will give me the progress. Any help would be much appreciated