iBooks with voiceover: how to.

Dear reader,

 

I know that we all have heard lots of horror stories about iBooks for Mavericks, I might even have spread a few.

 

I have done some investigation in the meantime, and have found an efficient way to make use of this app.

 

The first problem you will usually find, is difficulty with reading book titles, authors etc. 

 

This is easily fixed by selecting the list radio button.

 

Another common problem is not being able to open a book. This can be also fixed by selecting the list radio button, interacting with the table with the books, and using command oh to open the book.

 

Reading books is a bit more complex, but each chapter has its own HTML content area within the scroll area. I usually read my books in iOS, thus have not really read using iBooks for the Mac. Will post a second blog on iBooks at a later date.

 

More from me soon.

Some of the quirks of Mac OS X Mavericks

Hi there,

 

For those of you who have updated to Mac OS  Mavericks, you might have noticed A few quirks. One of the most interesting of these, is noncontiguous selection.

 

In Mountain lion, if used to be VO command space, but that keystroke has now changed to show an actions menu. The keystroke has now changed to VO command return. In the past, you had to hit the VO command space twice to start the selection process and once for every item you wanted to select. This is not true anymore. You can now use VO command return on the first item you want to select. This will immediately start the selection process.

 

Being that I only have the one working hand, IAM not sure if this will work with quicknav turned on.

 

There are still a few quirks that needs sorting out, but I will get to those in due time.

 

Please leave a comment if you have any more information on any quirks of Mac OS Mavericks.

 

I hope you found this useful,

 

More from me soon.

BBM and some of its inadequacies

Dear reader,

 

This post is regarding a relatively new release on the iOS app store, namely BBM, (BlackBerry messenger)."

 

I will say upfront, what I have to say is not necessarily very nice.

 

First, the setup. Obviously, installing the app is as simple as they usually are, in other words, extremely so. The issues begin with creating your own BlackBerry ID. the sheer amount of information required strongly and not pleasantly remind me of South African bureaucracy.

 

Okay, now we have the setup done. Annoying yes, but not completely undoable. 

 

The problem comes when excepting invitations from people, or rather, trying to do so. When catching an invitation from the lock screen on your phone, it is no problem whatsoever. If, however you missed the invitation, you will have to wait for the next invitation to come through and hope you catch that one on the lock screen. If not, the cycle starts all over again.

 

That is not the only issue however, if and/or when you are trying to communicate with someone, you cannot send any media using voiceover. Thus, no photos, videos or voice notes.

 

With all the other messaging apps out there, I can honestly and with a clear conscience say, this app is totally redundant, unnecessary, and unnecessarily inaccessible.

 

If you like redundant, incredibly difficult to use and just plain pointless apps, feel free to go ahead and get it, I will start praying for you.

Have updated my contact details

Hi there folks,

 

For those of you who would like to lay your grubby paws upon me, I have added a list of ways for you to contact me by editing  my first blog post, "introducing myself". 

 

I think I did quite the job on this.

 

You can get a hold of me via, Skype, email, twitter and Facebook.

 

Feel free to do so. No, really! I am not shy

New in mavericks, pages, etc.

As we all know by now, we had major updates since 22 October 2013.

 

Firstly, we had Mavericks coming out of developer preview to the public. What we did not expect however, is the fact that Mavericks can be downloaded for free.

 

We also have updates to the iWork's and the iLife suites.

 

I am still trying to get my head around pages, but what I have seen thus far has me almost convinced that Office for the Mac user Might just become obsolete. The interface has been simplified to such an extent that it is almost unreal. The fact that MS-word documents is now completely usable is an incredible bonus. Unfortunately, there are some issues regarding RTF files, not sure if it is a bug, or deliberate in design yet.

 

I have not played with Numbers at all, for I have no need for it. But what I have seen online looks promising. The same is unfortunately true for Keynote.

 

Mavericks, as expected, except of course for the price. My only bitch with it, is the horrible monstrosity they pretended to call iBooks. I really have no idea what they thought when they put that thing together. There is absolutely no structure. My personal feelings regarding it is too either scrap it completely, or to get their act together and fix it ASAP. I personally hope they get their act together. 

 

You can contact me by referring back to my first blog post, "introducing myself".

My rather interesting boot camp experience

This is what I would consider to be something not to be dumb on a regular basis, (consider this a friendly warning.)

 

Not so very long ago, I decided that there are some things that was available in windows that I just cannot live without. Now I can hear you Mac lovers scream indignantly, what the hell does windows have that you cannot get on a Mac! Quite a few things, is my answer. Yes, I am also a big fan of Apple computers, but I also think that I am mature enough to know where to draw the line.

 

For one thing, even though this is despicable, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided not to make MS office accessible for the Mac. I know, some people would say that you do not need office, but you are wrong. Unfortunately over the last decade or so Microsoft office became the industry-standard for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation. I know that Apple has iWorks, but unfortunately the currently available Version of iWork's software, does not play nice with the newer versions of office. We are currently waiting for updates from Apple for the iWorks suite, but I have not seen anything regarding this as of yet. This is not the only reason why I installed windows on my Mac, yeah I know, blasphemous is it not? I am also fond of playing computer games. In my case, obviously audio games or other accessible games. Unfortunately for us gamer freaks, the available accessible games for the Mac are very few and even more difficult to get a hold off if you are not in the US. For some reason, very few of the good applications is available in the South African App Store.

 

One of my favourite Windows applications, is a program called Winboard. For those of you who do not know, it is a chess program. Now I can hear some Mac fan scream, but the Mac has the chess app. True, but it is very limited. It does not allow for keyboard input of algebraic notation, nor does it allow you to play on some of the more popular servers. It also  features only one chess engine, and does not allow you to add your own. I will not go in to detail here, but suffice it to say, apple failed on this one.

 

As you probably assumed from my rant regarding office, productivity is important to me. To this end, I got an app called Q-Read for windows which will read PDF and other e-book formats. I know that Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks has iBooks built in, but to my horror, Apple completely failed when he came to Accessibility on that. In other words, I had to resort to Windows to solve this problem.

 

This is not something I am glad for, but unfortunately it was necessary. It is not as though I have completely gotten rid of my Mac, I doubt that will ever happen, but until certain things happen, the Windows partition will stay on my computer.

 

I just hope windows does not break on me! I had to pay someone to do the installation, and it is not as if Windows is cheep to begin with. I am not paying for Windows ever again, that is for damn sure.

 

I haven't found any way to do a boot Camp installation with out sited  help as of yet, but believe me, I am looking. If anybody knows, let me know.

 

You can contact me by referring back to my first blog post, "introducing myself".

 

This is it for today, I hope this post leaves you with something to think about.

 

Cheers!!

An update after a long absence

I know that I have not written in quite a while and I have no excuse.

 

I have however started something new in the meantime. The "new" something I am referring to, is of course horseback riding. I know that "horseback riding" is an American term, but I decided to use it anyway, even if only for clarification.

 

Over here we just call it riding, or horse riding. Not to be disparaging, but if you can tell me what other part of a horse you can ride, I will better be able to understand the American term.

 

Changing the subject, I found the one thing Farrell really has trouble with, and that is traveling by train. I know that he has trouble finding escalators, or to be more precise, he refuses to find them, but that I can work with. I have never seen a dog Tremble the way Farrell does when traveling by train. I have tried using rescue remedy, but that seems to have no effect whatsoever. I will now try to desensitize him to the train I use, (the GauTrain, an underground or Subway) by traveling using normal metro trains. The Metro trains are much louder, thus I hope that Farrell Will be less afraid when I switch back to the GauTrain. 

 

Okay, this is all for now. I shall hopefully write more often now that I am using Mars Edit, blogging software for the Mac. 

 

You can contact me by referring back to my first ever blog post, "introducing myself".

 

Go well, and be good. If you can't be good, at least be good at it.

Blogging and all its interesting difficulties

 

For those of you reading this, and who either have, or ever thought of having a blog, you would each have your own point of view on the difficulties accompanying creative writing. 

I find myself in the rather uncomfortable situation of being totally out of practise when it come to the art of the creative reconstructing of a boring day's events in such a way as to be interesting to the normal human being. Thus, I believe it would be better if I stick to factual information instead.

I will thus mostly dedicate this blog to useful stuff, such as written tutorials on using technology and interesting articles.

If you have any specific requests, please let me know. 

You can contact me by referring back to my first blog post, "introducing myself".

For your information, this blog post was written entirely on my iPhone using Fleksy.

 

Introducing myself

 

If you are reading this, I would not be surprised if you lost something somewhere along the way, such as your mind.

 

This blog will mostly be a combination of totally pointless ramblings, with maybe a nugget of useful information in between. 

 

Well, as the title of this post say, I am supposed to introduce myself. So let's get to it.

 

I am a South African guy, born on 16 May 1986. My schooling was rather standard for a blind South African, I graduated from the Pioneer school in Worcester, Western Cape, in 2004. for anybody that knows South African schools for the blind, the Pioneer school has been seen as the premier school in the country of it's kind for many years. Well, it was on it's way out at the time I graduated. But, alas I digress.

 

As you might guess from the school I have graduated from, I am blind although, I also have mild to severe hearing loss. after a stroke in 2009, I also lost some of the use in my right leg, as well as most all of the use of my right arm.

 

As most Pioneer school students did, I received a basic grounding in the use of a white cane. after the strobe, I had to retrain myself however, for I was right-handed. 

 

Somewhere round  March 2012, I decided that my days of using a cane is over. I applied for a guide dog, which I received on 3 September 2012.

 

Yeah, for those of you who know me, I am speaking of Farrell.

 

Hmm, what more do you want to know? Or more like, what am I willing to share?

 

I started using computers roundabout 1996, on an old 486 running MS-DOS 6. the screen reader I had available at the time was Soft Vert, with an old soundingboard speech synthesiser. I don't think I will ever forget the first time I wrote a letter using WordPerfect 5.1. I would say, I lost my written communication virginity using that old 486.

 

I started using windows right about 1999, with Windows 98. Don't ask me the machine, for I will not be able to tell you. I can however, say my first Windows screen reader was a demo of window bridge, with the old keynote gold multimedia software synthesiser. unfortunately humanware decided to discontinue it. God knows why though. Everybody that I know that used it, loved it.

 

After many years of Windows trouble, I bought my MacBook Pro  about two months ago as of this posting. At this point, I do not think I will be looking back at Windows. I have switched completely. Of course, I still find some things difficult, but those are mostly things that I found  difficult in windows as well.

 

Okay, I think I shall end things here, for now anyway.

 

I hope you have enjoyed today's entertainment, please stay tuned. As I have said in the title of this blog, this is basically my random musings about life, the universe and everything. Postings might be erratic. There will definitely not be any set posting schedule, I feel that will defeat the purpose of this blog.

 

You can contact me in the following ways:

 

Click here to send me an email.

 

Click here to chat with me on Skype.

 

Kick here to follow me on Twitter.

 

Click here to follow me on Facebook, why you want to do that I really don't know though.

 

Okay, cheers.