Apple - Accessibility - VoiceOver - In-Depth 16/12/08 07:51 a.m.

Overview Mac OS X iPhone iPod + iTunes Resources

Vision
Mac OS X solutions

VoiceOver from third parties.

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To make it easier for the blind and those with low vision to use a accessibility solutions supported
computer, Apple has built a solution into every Mac. Called VoiceOver, by Mac OS X. Learn more
it’s cost-effective, reliable, simple to learn, and enjoyable to use.

In Depth Device Support Application Support Downloads

VoiceOver In Depth VoiceOver. A unique solution

VoiceOver in Mac OS X Leopard for the vision-impaired.
Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard includes a thoroughly More than 50 reasons to use
VoiceOver. Learn more
updated release of VoiceOver that builds on the
advanced features in Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger. It
provides a wide variety of requested feature
enhancements. These include a new high-speed,
high-quality voice, plug-and-play support for
refreshable Braille displays, international
language support, an interactive built-in tutorial,
and the NumPad Commander, which make
navigation easier for new Mac owners who
previously used Windows screen readers.

A new voice
Alex, the new voice of Mac OS X Leopard, speaks English and uses advanced
new Apple technologies to deliver natural intonation even at extraordinarily fast
speaking rates. Alex works with any application that supports Apple speech
synthesis, including VoiceOver.

Although most text-to-speech (TTS) systems analyze and synthesize text just
one sentence at a time, Mac OS X analyzes text a paragraph at a time and
deciphers the context more accurately. As a result, Alex will speak a sentence
differently depending on its location and based on concepts introduced in
previous sentences.

Alex sounds just like the rest of us

Thanks to Apple's new speech technology, Alex’s voice more closely matches the
nuances of human speech, so you can more easily understand the meaning of
longer text passages in books, articles, and news stories.

In fact, when Alex speaks a long passage, you’ll even hear him breathe. Apple
built human lung capacity and human sentence parsing into its speech
synthesizer, so Alex would sound more like us when he speaks. The synthesizer
inserts a breath based on a variety of factors: appropriateness, the structure of
the text being read, the time since the last breath, and the time until Alex
finishes speaking.

To our knowledge, it’s the first time this has been accomplished in desktop speech synthesis and makes
it much easier for the visually impaired to follow what’s being said — and to anticipate what’s coming
next. That’s because Alex’s breathing also changes depending on what he's about to say. This, too, more
closely mimics human speech. As two or more people speak, each breath provides an audio cue that
helps a listener identify upcoming words before they're spoken, a phenomenon you’ll experience if you
listen to Alex speak.

Sounds good at any speed

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Sounds good at any speed

All of this adds up to an amazingly realistic,
natural, and understandable synthesized voice you
have to hear to believe. And while Alex’s voice
quality is impressive at conversational speaking
rates, it’s even more impressive at the ultrafast
rates often required by screen readers.

While speech technologies that use snippets of a

real recorded voice can be made to sound great at
normal rates, these “concatenative” technologies
degrade noticeably as you speed them up. The
speech becomes choppy and uneven. To address
these shortcomings, screen reader users often
rely on fully synthesized voices. They don’t sound Hear Alex Speak
at all human, but at least they’re intelligible at Fast (0:38) Normal (1:19) Slow (1:49)
high speed.

With Alex, Apple has developed a brand-new approach to concatenative text-to-speech that sounds
human even at super fast rates. Alex can speak intelligibly at more than 750 words per minute without
sounding choppy. In fact, the faster Alex speaks, the better he sounds.

Braille readers that just work

USB Braille displays start working immediately. In fact, as you connect them to your Mac, VoiceOver
automatically recognizes the model in use and programs the keys — including "wiz wheels," scrollers,
router keys, and buttons — to best suit each model’s characteristics.

This built-in intelligence lets you immediately move the VoiceOver cursor using a unit’s panning, router,
or other navigation and selection keys. The keys behave as you would expect. If the unit is new to you,
you can easily learn how the keys are programmed using VoiceOver Keyboard Practice (Control-Option-
K). Just press a key on the braille display to hear its name. You can reassign input keys, too. Simply
choose a VoiceOver command and hold down the keys on the braille display. VoiceOver plays a pulsing
sound for a second or two as it programs the keys, then chimes when it's done.

VoiceOver supports both contracted and non-contracted braille. Since it automatically expands
contracted braille under the cursor, you can easily read and edit it. When you move the cursor away,
VoiceOver changes it back to contracted braille for faster reading on the braille display. VoiceOver also
routes status information to dedicated hardware
status cells (when they exist), and you can assign
one, two, or three status cells on either side of
the Braille display.

The versatile Braille panel

If you don’t have a USB braille display, you can use the innovative onscreen visual braille panel that
VoiceOver provides. The Braille Panel behaves like a standard 40-cell display. However, the onscreen
panel offers an added advantage: You can resize it. Making it wider than a physical display allows
sighted users to view an entire line of braille at once.

Sighted users can take advantage of the Braille panel in another way. Since it displays both the braille
dots being sent to the dedicated braille display and an English translation, sighted instructors, parents,
or coworkers can read its contents with minimal disturbance to the nonsighted user.

Your input, your choice

Learn how to use VoiceOver on one Mac, and you can use it on any Mac you happen to be using —
desktop or notebook. That’s because the commands in VoiceOver are based on the “alpha” keys, so it
works the same way on over 15 million Mac computers, including those you might use in school
computer labs, libraries, or other public locations.

If you’ve used the numeric keypad as an input device in the past — on

a Windows PC, for example — you can continue to do so thanks to the
NumPad Commander. Using it, you can control VoiceOver with the
keys on a numeric keypad (sometimes called a “10-key”).

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To enable the NumPad Commander, press Control-Option-Clear, and

you’ll have immediate, one-handed access to all frequently used
VoiceOver commands. The same key combination toggles the NumPad
Commander off, allowing you to use the numeric keyboard to enter
numbers.

By default, the NumPad Commander comes programmed with only

basic navigation and interaction keys, but you can program up to six
levels of commands — and access virtually the entire VoiceOver
command set — by combining the basic keys with such modifier keys
as Shift, Control, Option, Command, and zero (0) on the numeric keypad.

VoiceOver Utility
Turn on VoiceOver for the first time, and it’s
ready to assist you. You can continue to use its
default configuration, or you can use VoiceOver
Utility to customize VoiceOver to suit your needs.
As simple to use as iTunes, VoiceOver Utility
presents a list of nine categories, from General to
Braille.

Click a category, and the options available to you

appear on the right side of the window. You can
navigate among the categories using a mouse,
the cursor keys, the View menu, or keyboard shortcuts. VoiceOver Utility also lets you export preferences
you create on one system and import them on another, allowing you to save them, share them, or
configure multiple systems identically. A simple menu command lets you restore preferences to factory
settings.

Your preferences — to go
Once you’ve customized your own Mac, you can take all your
VoiceOver settings with you on the road. To do so, connect a USB
flash drive to your Mac and choose Create Portable Preferences from
the File menu in VoiceOver Utility.

When you connect the flash drive to a Mac, VoiceOver automatically

detects its presence and instantly reconfigures itself to match the
Portable Preferences saved on the flash drive for such items as your
Pronunciation Dictionary, Braille input key assignments, and NumPad
Commander settings.

Log out, shut down, or turn off VoiceOver, and the settings return to their previous state. Great for
students who share computers in labs and libraries, this feature also comes in handy when you’re
visiting a friend or using a business associate's computer in the office or on the road.

Hot spots
While you’re working on a document, your Mac can keep track of the activity on up to ten hot spots that
you define. If a new item appears on the Hot News website, someone drops files into your drop folder,
or another of your hot spots becomes activated, VoiceOver automatically alerts you about the change.

With a single keystroke, you can jump directly to the hot spot, even if it means switching applications on
the fly. Great for keeping track of changing information, hot spots can be used as "bookmarks" to jump
quickly to a favorite application, window, or location on the desktop.

VoiceOver speaks your language

Localized in eight languages — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and Chinese
— VoiceOver can begin speaking your language as soon as you add your favorite voice. Mac OS X comes
with a wide variety of English-speaking voices, including the amazing new Alex, but you can install
additional voices after purchasing them from such companies as Cepstral.com and AssistiveWare.

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Spoken alerts, audio effects, and positional audio

VoiceOver now speaks descriptions of more events without prompting. When you download or install
software, for example, VoiceOver automatically describes the activity of the progress bar. It also speaks
the contents of dialogs when they appear and alerts you when you’ve misspelled words.

VoiceOver also includes other audio effects that provide contextual information about onscreen activity,
and it’s now easier to hear these effects when VoiceOver speaks at the same time. For example, you'll
hear special audio effects when a web page finishes loading, a new window opens, you reach the first or
last item in a list or window, you encounter a text style change in a document, or you plug in a Braille
display.

You can control if, and when, you hear these sounds, and in some cases, opt to hear a spoken
description instead. You’ll find samples of each sound in the VoiceOver menu. If you hear a sound you’re
not familiar with, check the VoiceOver menu.

Finally, VoiceOver provides positional audio, an amazing technology that adds cues to help you locate
items on the screen. Because the cues play in stereo, you need only a set of earbuds, a pair of stereo
headphones, or standard stereo speakers to take advantage of this feature.

Untangle web pages

Reading web pages is fun and simple using VoiceOver. With the built-in Safari browser, you can read
pages in the order the web page designer intended (called the Document Object Model, or “DOM” order).
Or VoiceOver can scan a page to identify related items and group them together for easier reading
(called the “Group” order).

In addition to the standard array of search commands, VoiceOver lets you jump directly to those items
that interest you. VoiceOver offers keyboard shortcuts for jumping by heading, heading of the same
level, link, visited link, graphic, and other web page controls.

If you know what you’re looking for, VoicOver provides an Item Chooser that scans a page instantly and
builds a menu of all the elements on a page. You can filter the list simply by typing a few letters of the
item you’re looking for, then go directly to that item on the page. Similarly, the Link Chooser displays
only the links on a page, so you can get to a link even faster.

VoiceOver lets you speed up and slow down the reading speed on the fly, and you can pause and
continue with a keystroke.

Navigate documents quickly

In Mac OS X Leopard, VoiceOver offers additional navigational key commands. They allow you to quickly
skip forward and backward through a window to key elements or objects, including headers, buttons,
links, fields, graphics, controls (such as a radio button or text field), and such text attributes as fonts
and styles.

Use these commands to quickly skip through long documents or web pages header by header, button by
button, link by link — even word by word — based on font characteristics like bold, underline, italic, and
text color.

You can also use the new Search Mode to locate and move to the next occurrence of a letter, word, or
phrase you enter. Use the controls VoiceOver provides to skip forward or backward to the next or
previous occurrence of the entered data as many times as you like. And since VoiceOver remembers the
last 64 searches you entered, you can review where you've been — and get there again — by selecting
the name in the search history list.

Great applications
Out of the box, VoiceOver works with email, web browsing, word processing, Internet messaging, music,
calendar applications, and other software. And since VoiceOver is part of Mac OS X, many third-party
applications will simply work with VoiceOver thanks to their compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard. Other

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applications will simply work with VoiceOver thanks to their compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard. Other
applications may require updates from the developer.

To determine if an application you want to use works with VoiceOver, check this list of accessible
applications. Since not all compatible applications appear in the list, be sure to check with the developer
to see if it works with VoiceOver. Or just try it. Many applications will work, and for others,
enhancements or updates may be available from the developer.

Tutorial available on demand

When you turn on a new Mac for the first time, Mac OS X Leopard greets you with an audio prompt
inviting you to activate VoiceOver, either to set up your computer or to begin the interactive VoiceOver
Quick Start tutorial. The tutorial offers the quickest way to get started with VoiceOver.

If someone else set up your Mac, you chose not to watch the tutorial when prompted, or you’d like to
watch it again, simply press Control-Option-Command-F8 while VoiceOver is running. The tutorial lets
you safely learn at your own pace without making changes to your Mac. You can even attach your
favorite USB Braille display and use it during the
tutorial. Click here to see a list of supported
refreshable Braille displays.

Learn more
You’ll find additional VoiceOver learning
materials — including a “VoiceOver Getting
Started” manual, podcasts, and other items — on
the downloads page. You can also visit the Apple
accessibility web page, where you'll find links to
other Mac accessibility features, accessibility
features of iPhone and other Apple products,
Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs)
for Apple products, and more.

Connect the input devices you need to
the most compact — and portable —
Mac desktop ever.
More than 200 assistive technology Apple welcomes your comments and Let the Concierge
products are available for Mac/iPod. suggestions on accessibility. Send email be your guide to
to accessibility@apple.com. the services
available at Apple
Retail Stores.

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