Accessibility

VoiceOver In Depth

VoiceOver in Mac OS X Leopard

Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard includes a thoroughly 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

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 at all human, but at least they’re intelligible at 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”).

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 customise 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 customised 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 favourite application, window or location on the desktop.

VoiceOver speaks your language

Localised in eight languages — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Japanese and Chinese — VoiceOver can begin speaking your language as soon as you add your favourite 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.

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, VoiceOver 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 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 favourite 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.