VoiceOver Utility

VoiceOver, a new feature of Mac OS X, is a built-in screen reader that helps visually impaired people use their computers. Once configured, VoiceOver enables you to hear descriptions of everything onscreen, move around the screen, select items, and read and manipulate text.

A complete discussion of VoiceOver is beyond the scope of this book. However, in this section, I introduce you to VoiceOver Utility, the application you use to configure VoiceOver.

Tips

VoiceOver can be enabled or disabled in the Universal Access preferences pane, which I discuss in Chapter 21.
To learn more about configuring and using VoiceOver, open VoiceOver Utility and choose Help > VoiceOver Help. Then follow the links to get the information you need.

To configure VoiceOver

Open the VoiceOver Utility icon in the Utilities folder (Figure 1).

The VoiceOver Utility window appears. Click buttons to set options in each of five categories:

Verbosity (Figure 90) controls how much speaking VoiceOver does.
Figure 90. The default settings in VoiceOver Utility's Verbosity pane.
Navigation (Figure 91) controls how VoiceOver moves and tracks the cursor and text selections.
Figure 91. The default settings in VoiceOver Utility's Navigation pane.
Voices (Figure 92) enables you to select the default voice and voices for various types of spoken text.
Figure 92. The default settings in VoiceOver Utility's Voices pane. In this illustration, I ve clicked the triangle beside the first row to display options for specific categories of spoken text.
Display (Figure 93) enables you to set the size of the VoiceOver cursor and menu magnification, as well as configure the Caption Panel.
Figure 93. The default settings in VoiceOver Utility's Display pane.
Pronunciation (Figure 94) lets you specify how VoiceOver should pronounce certain words, phrases, abbreviations, and acronyms.
Figure 94. The default settings in VoiceOver Utility's Pronunciation pane.

Choose VoiceOver Utility > Quit VoiceOver Utility, or press , to save your settings.

To configure VoiceOver

Figure 90. The default settings in VoiceOver Utility's Verbosity pane.

Figure 91. The default settings in VoiceOver Utility's Navigation pane.

Figure 92. The default settings in VoiceOver Utility's Voices pane. In this illustration, I ve clicked the triangle beside the first row to display options for specific categories of spoken text.

Figure 93. The default settings in VoiceOver Utility's Display pane.

Figure 94. The default settings in VoiceOver Utility's Pronunciation pane.