Tips for Working with VoiceOver

For the visually impaired, much of your experience while navigating the activation wizard depends on optimizing the configuration of your screen reader.

VoiceOver, the built-in Macintosh screen reader, is highly configurable using the VoiceOver Utility, which is found in the System Preferences under Universal Access, Seeing.

There is a wealth of controls in the utility. Under Verbosity, we recommend that the default speech verbosity be set to "High." Under Navigation, you may find it less confusing to set the initial position of the cursor to the first item in the window instead of the first item that acquires the keyboard focus, so that you do not miss the on-screen instructions.

As the wizard moves from page to page via the Next button, the operating system does not necessarily detect that the window has changed, because the page change occurs inside the wizard window. When in doubt, you should take full advantage of the hot-key or "commander" for speaking the entire window.

Known Issues

1. The wizard has important instructions on most pages. In most screen readers they are not spoken just by tabbing through the active fields of the page. You have to watch out not to miss helpful information by requesting a read of the whole page.
2. A "busy" box pops up during operations that take more than a second or two, but some screen readers do not speak the message in this box to let you know that something is happening.
3. A few users have had the experience that the wizard can disappear unexpectedly behind other windows. If you think this has happened, use Command + TAB to bring it to the front again.