VoiceOver Gestures in Microsoft Word on a MacMini

By Harin Vaghela, 26 April, 2023

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi,

I am a volunteer and my client who is blind is having trouble with voiceover on Word and in particular with some of the rotor navigation features. As this is his college work he tends to have Word documents that are over 10 pages long so this is causing him issues in writing longer documents.

His setup

  • MacMini (latest OS)
  • Apple Touch ID keyboard
  • Apple touch pad
  • Microsoft Word 16.72
  • Voice over with Trackpad Commander

What he wants to do

  • He is wanting to use the rotor to select navigation primarily by sentences and paragraphs.
  • He does this by selecting the sentence or paragraph option from the rotor
  • He then tries to flick up or down to navigate the sentences or paragraphs

What goes wrong

  • What happens regularly is that while flicking down on the trackpad to try to navigate through the content (I observed that it happens mostly with paragraphs) it jumps back to the top of the first page of the document.
  • I am not sure if the trackpad is to sensitive or there is an issue with support of this in Word but its quite frustrating for the client
  • We have tried Pages as a text editor but aside from causing compatibility issues with Word (what he uses at college) it does not seem to be well supported.

Has anyone experienced or seen this issue or something similar and if so is anyone aware of a fix?

Thanks,

Harin

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Comments

By Bryan Jones on Friday, May 12, 2023 - 20:28

Hi Harin,

I tried your scenario in Word 16.73 on a 2020 MacBook Air running macOS 13.4 beta and had the same results you mentioned. I rarely use the trackpad commander and have no thoughts on how to possibly troubleshoot it. However, here are a few keyboard alternatives, in case your client is able to use the keyboard. These keyboard navigation methods work fine in Word 16.73 in my testing.

How to use native VoiceOver keyboard text navigation commands to move by sentence and paragraph:

  • To move to and read the next sentence, press VO + Command + Page Down.
  • To move to and read the previous sentence, press VO + Command + Page Up.
  • To move to and read the next paragraph, press VO + Shift + Page Down.
  • To move to and read the previous paragraph, press VO + Shift + Page Up.
  • Note 1: "VO" is shorthand for the VoiceOver modifier key combination, either Control + Option or CapsLock, selectable in VoiceOver Utility > General.
  • Note 2: If the keyboard does not have a number pad, substitute the Fn + Down Arrow keys for Page Down, and the Fn + Up Arrow keys for Page Up.

How to use QuickNav to navigate by sentence or paragraph:

  1. Press the left and right arrow keys simultaneously to toggle QuickNav on/off.
  2. Press the Up Arrow + Right Arrow or Up Arrow + Left Arrow keys simultaneously to move forward or backward through the QuickNav rotor until you land on sentence or paragraph.
  3. Use the Down Arrow or Up Arrow key to move to and read the next or previous sentence or paragraph.

HTH, Bryan

By Harin Vaghela on Friday, May 12, 2023 - 20:28

Thanks for the detailed reply Bryan, I will pass this on and I think this will work better than the trackpad based navigation.