When you just can't figure out what's being said....

By mr grieves, 26 October, 2022

Forum

macOS and Mac Apps

OK, another stupid question....

Sometimes - OK, quite often - VoiceOver will be rabbiting away and I just can't make out what on Earth it is trying to say. My current solution is the trusty VO+Shift+C to copy the last phrase to clipboard, paste it into a text editor and then use cursor keys to figure out what it said.

This feels slightly less clumsy than using the rotor, which I pretty much never go near on the Mac.

There's VO+C which reads a random character, and never the one I want. VO+W seems almost as useless - in a text editor it'll read a word, then spell it out etc. but if I try it in Safari it reads out a whole phrase. I tried playing around with mapping previous/current/next word to the numpad commander but it didn't really work.

What would be nice is if VO+Z could have a different voice and speed.

Or are you guys so fluent in using VoiceOver now that you never have this problem?

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Comments

Voting for VoiceOver

If you can't understand what is being said, it sounds like VoiceOver is running for political office.

One thing that might be a little quicker is shift-vo-command right arrow to voice rate, change it, and listen again. Another is to use that command to move to voice selected and use a different voice. A third thing you can do is change intonation and/or pitch into a setting that's easier to hear.

Sometimes I have to press vo-w a few times to figure out a word. It's too bad they don't have something like that for vo-l

I'm just not very good at listening...

For me I think I need two speeds of VoiceOver - one where it's things I'm familiar with and can go quite quickly, and then there's reading names of films, albums or whatever where it's not always obvious. Or trying to decipher the gibberish I get in Skype.

I've got shortcuts, so I can easily press NumPad 0+*, right Opt + E then paste

I have set up an activity with a slower voice, which I think is a touch easier to use than pressing the 150 key modifiers I need to change settings on the fly. Maybe I just need to firstly remember I've done it, and secondly fiddle about with it a bit more.

It just feels to me like this is a thing screen reader users would need all the time. Sometimes VoiceOver makes such a mess of pronouncing something too that you're surely never going to get it!

If VoiceOver was running for office, I'd be quite happy not to be able to hear what it was saying. :)

Just remembered

I often interact with the line of text and then use option right arrow to read word by word, and then use vo-w a few times on the problem words. That's the fastest way that I've found so far.

This is why windows is easier for me.

I've tried a mac a couple of years ago and honestly, I find windows to be much easier. Left and right arrows goes letter by letter, control left/right word by word, and so on.

Have you tried a windows machine to see what you think with something like NVDA or Jaws? I believe that in jaws you can even change profiles per app so it remembers your settings. For example: you find it fine to read fast on a webpage but need documents a bit slower, you should be able to have jaws change the profile on the fly.

I'm an NVDA user now but I'm 99 percent sure that's a thing it can do.

I'm with Bruce

I pretty much use Bruce's techniques. I also do what Brad says he does on Windows, except I do it on a Mac.

I ran into an issue with activities on the Mac. I haven't checked to see if it's fixed in Ventura yet. But presumably this would provide task-specific speaking rates. I simply turn speed up or down as needed with VO+command+Shift+arrow, as Bruce described.

Headphones Perhaps?

I'm wondering if a headset would be better for some people in this situation? That way even if the room is totally quiet and you still can't understand VoiceOver and just wanna vote the dude/dudette out of office, you could wear a headset and maybe pump up the volume all the way. I personally have had few if any issues in this regard, probably because I've been using text-to-speech in some form or another since about 1983 if not prior. So I've gotten used to it. But I fully recognize from being on forums such as those found here on AppleVis, that people have different speech preferences. Some people around these parts don't seem to want me to wear the bleu-tooth headset which I got for Christmas, but that's another story.

I'm such an idiot...

For some really stupid reason I've always attributed interacting with text as me pressing the wrong button.

For a bit of context, I'm approaching 50 and have only needed a screen reader for the last few months. But I guess I've already got a bit set in my ways.

I'll see how I get on. I don't really know why I didn't do that before.

Re Windows - I've never used a screen reader other than VoiceOver. I definitely need to, but it's a matter of finding the time and energy. Using my Mac is so frustrating and exhausting that I need something to compare it to. But so far my adventures with Windows haven't been very fruitful.

Learning VoiceOver

Hi. I sympathize about learning VoiceOver, but I promise that the more you learn, the easier it gets, and there are resources out there, both paid and free. You might want to try googling "learning VoiceOver for the blind on MacOS" and see what you get.

Best of good luck,

Bruce

Thanks, Bruce

I do feel like I am getting there, despite this stupid post. But the thing I love about this place, is no one rubs it in. I've been trying some of the things mentioned above, and it's definitely helping a lot. Although as per everything on the Mac, sometimes it just randomly doesn't work. Like interacting with text in Edge and it just read gobbledegook.

I did read a number of things when I was starting, but a lot of guides just chuck millions of keyboard shortcuts at you which I found pretty overwhelming. It would be good to have step by step guides for using all the big name apps, but then everything changes so often that it would need a crazy amount of effort to keep it up to date.

When I was developing my app…

When I was developing my app I was completely confused as to what VoiceOver was speaking for a particular image. I just couldn't understand what it was saying. I got this tip to turn on VoiceOver captions. I just looked on my Mac (running Monterey) and in the VoiceOver Utility I do see a "Show Caption Panel" setting under "Visuals". Would that help?

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