Mac VoiceOver queries

hi there, first of all, let me congratulate you and welcome you in to the mac family. as far as your questions go, I would recommend pages for your work, or if you can't afford that right now, you can use the built in app text edit to do writing. I used a mac all the way through college, and people didn't think I could use it to do any productive work. the mac has replaced my windows machine, and I absolutely love using voiceover. Hope this helps.

Pages is the way to go, and I think it is even free. Other than that, pdf is not the best part of voice over, all though there are solutions.

The navigation with voice over is very easy once you get used to it, in my opinion it is much easier than on windows.

Yosemite has accessibility for iBooks included, and iBooks reads .pdf. You can also read adobe files with quicklook, though the control is much less.

I think you meant that the screen reader was expensive, so is ms office for that matter. pages you're looking at 20 dollars U.S. though I gather you are not from this country, soI don't know your currency. If you buy the mac pages will be free, though. If you have antoher device say an ipad or iphone, I think it's ten dollars for that.

Judging by my own experiences and research, if you buy a Mac, iWork automatically comes installed (Pages, Keynote, etc).

Hello there and welcome to AppleVis! I just got my first Mac as a Christmas present last year, and it has honestly been a much better experience than I originally expected. VoiceOver is certainly different from JAWS, Window-Eyes or any other screen reader but it is very good. Part of what makes Macs and other Apple devices so appealing is that they already have all the accessibility features built in. Regarding word processing, I had a brief look at the pre-installed Pages app and it didn't look bad. Perhaps a bit complex though. But I've mainly used TextEdit, because I haven't had any large projects to do. I really like TextEdit though, and hope to do more with Pages soon. I'm still using Os X Mavericks so haven't gotten to try out the new accessibility features of iBooks yet. As a matter of fact though, just iBooks alone makes me want to upgrade to Yosemite. Awhile ago I heard that Jarte was pretty accessible on the Mac side. It definitely is though with NVDA and System Access. I only used the free version of Jarte, but a paid version is also available. Go to http://www.jarte.com .

Guide Dragon,
ibooks actually does not read pdf files. If you try opening pdf files in ibooks, it loads preview and opens the file.

Unless something changed that I'm not aware of, Preview on the Mac does not support tagged PDFs, so if you open a PDF with accessibility tags, you won't be able to take advantage of them. The PDF itself is accessible, and you can navigate it the same way you would any other text document, but the lack of tagged PDF support can be problematic. From what I've heard, this is probably the biggest limitation of the Mac and VoiceOver, as things stand now.

As for navigating within a text document, you can definitely move around with the arrow keys, by character, word, line, paragraph, etc. The commands are not the same as Windows, but once they're learned they're easy to use. Just make sure Quick Nav is turned off, so that you won't trigger VoiceOver commands by mistake while editing text.

Left and right arrows move by character, while up and down arrows move by line. Holding Option when pressing left or right moves by word, while Option + up and down move by paragraph. Command + left and right move to the start or end of the current line, while Command + up and down move to the top and bottom of the document. Hold down Shift to select text while moving.

Adobe Reader on the Mac is not accessible. This is why you will be using Preview to read PDFs instead. In my experience, Preview is plenty fast enough, and I haven't had any crashing issues to speak of on the Mac at all, whether it be in Preview or otherwise. It is simply the lack of tagged PDF feature support that makes PDF reading a problem, depending on the PDF you're trying to read.

Preview reads tagged PDf files alright but if you can, I would recommend you convert the pdf to another file format. I even do this conversion on windows

I wonder if you've tried NVDA though. Most things are doable with it and no crashes either. Jaws was buggy and heavy last time I used it. that was 2 years ago. since then I have been using NVDA and I will never look back. I have a Mac and use it, but I don't find myself as productive on it. and if I gather correctly, you need to read files in Arabic. TTS on the windows side is better because of automatic language switch.

good luck.

no, on the mac side and up until Mavrix it doesn't do that. I assume it's easier even to implement on the mac than IOS but I am puzzled on why they didn't do it. May be you'd want to send an email to accessibility@apple.com asking about this.

If I have to use pdf files on a large scale, I will use windows. Ms word 2013 has full pdf support and unfortunately, pdf accessibility is far behind on the mac side. But my recommendation still stands of converting pdf files into a more accessible format.