Hello, to all. How are you? Once again I am Owen. A legally blind high schooler who would like your opinions. I recently bought a macbook pro-inch15 and am currently writing to you on it. My question regards my TVI. She says no one blind uses macs nor, will we get any support. Obviously the first part is wrong. I would love to hear all your inputs. In addition I am having a little trouble reading bookshare books with my braille display. I am reading them through the xml file. however whenever I click on a word, I can read it for five seconds and then it will say,"You are currently on a text format." Is there anyway to get rid of that, or is there a better way to access bookshare books? Could I in a way use my braille display without voiceover. Please also provide any helpful software suggestions, links, and advice. I really want to prove to my TVI, that macs are great for the blind and visually impaired too and not just not windows. I have nothing against windows, windows is amazing too, however, even if free I am not in favor of using at least $100 and generally more on technology which is 15 years old if not more. Thank you some much, I really need all your help.
Comments
Macs Bad for the Blind?
Well, I couldn't disagree more with your TVI's assumption that none of us use Mac computers. That's actually what I thought too though prior to even entertaining the thought of switching to one. But now I know just how wrong I was. People do have their own opinions about things, and that's all well and good. But for someone to basically claim that we don't or that we can't use Apple products is just plain wrong. I've had mine for almost 3 years and don't know what I'd do without it. Now that you bring this up though, I wonder how my teachers would've reacted to me switching over to the Mac platform for school. As to your BookShare question, I'll leave that one up to someone else because I don't use BookShare.
Text Format
Hi.
Earlier you mentioned VoiceOver saying, "You are currently on a text format." Those are VoiceOver hints that it gives you if the VoiceOver cursor is on a control or an item and wait for a few seconds, similar to VoiceOver on iOS. As far as I know, the only way to get rid of the issue you are having is to turn hints off completely through VoiceOver Utility. As for your other question on Braille, you cannot use a Braille display with VO turned off.
Reply to Miguel V
Ok, to begin thank you, that's actually ver6 helpful. But just to make sure i don't do the wrong thing, where in VO utilities would I find hints to further turn them off,
verbosity
In Voiceover utility, the option to turn off hints is under the verbosity category.
HTH