Episode #165
I am a blind user of a PC that uses zoom text ver 9.1 to surf the web and my College studies. I want to use an IMAC PC for all my work and play but I have never used one before. I have been around PC’s since 1990 so I have a good grasp of what they can do. I herd you can zoom in on an I-Mac in Leopard. I want to get rid of 3rd party apse like Zoom Text because it hogs memory. The other part of leopard I want to know about is the speech\voice synthesizer because it’s native to the O.S as well. Can I get a box around text to follow the screen reader just like the bouncing ball etc? In word documents and can I hover my mouse over a sentence to get it spoken out aloud. Will it also say what icons are and text boxes as well. The next question’s is really important to me. I invert my colors so white is black and black is white… will this adjust 3rd party apse I buy so I can see them better or will they stay white with black text. The white screen dazzles my eyes. I have R.P. Oh yes will it boot up this way normally every time or will I have to make a script to do it every time? Your long time Screen Saver buddy
Denzil, Mildura, VIC
Sean’s note: On the Mac, there’s a section in the System Preferences panel called Universal Access, which has a few options that will be very helpful to you. The first is called VoiceOver, which will give you verbal cues as to which application you’re in — you will have to set some options to get it to react the way you’d like without it become a constant chatter in your ear. The Zoom function may be more useful to you — if you hold down control and move your scroll wheel up and down, your screen will zoom in closer to your cursor — if you click on the options button it will give you some options for minimum and maximum zoom, and the one you probably want to pay attention to is the option for the screen to constantly follow the cursor vs the screen only shifting when you reach the edges of the screen. Lastly, there’s an option to change your display from black on white to white on black.
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Air Date: March 25, 2008
TranscriptCaller Questions
- Denzil, Mildura, VIC
- Judit, Montreal, QC
- Rob, Carlsbad, CA
Yewell's Jewels
- XShelfmac
XShelf enhances drag and drop in MacOS X by letting you “pause” drag and drop operations, as well as have multiple drag and drop operations in flight at once. You can drag files or folders from Finder into the shelf and they will sit there until you drag them out. Once you drag them out, the drag operation will finish as if XShelf were never involved. You may drag individual or multiple files or folders, as well as text clippings and URLs to XShelf. With XShelf, you no longer have to shuffle windows so that both the source and target of a drag and drop are onscreen at the same time.
Sean's Shinies
- Logitech MX Air
$150
Shiny
- works on desk or in midair
- cordless design
- works up to 30 feet awayDull
- batteries not user-accessible
- might lose it in the cushions
- pretty expensive, for a mouse
- gesturing hard to masterMX Air
Logitech
Kate’s Tips
- First Showing
There has always been a line between people who make movies and people who watch them. As movie watchers, many of us have no idea what goes into making a film and what takes place behind the scenes. For those who are interested in peeking behind the curtain, movie blog FirstShowing will keep you up to date on all the hot gossip from back lots, movie sets, and Hollywood bigwig offices. (It’s also a great place to find new teasers, trailers, and production stills.)