By Graham K. Rogers

Most of us go through our daily lives without thinking how difficult it may be for someone limited by physical disabilities. While we take computing devices for granted with easy input and output, some may find the simple task of reading a webpage, or writing a shopping list to be nigh-impossible tasks.

I wrote yesterday (3 Jan) about ways that some features available on the Mac could help non-native speakers to access text with sound as an input option: input to the person; output from the Mac. I also wrote that I sometimes find this useful as a proofreading tool, although I still miss some errors.

Overnight an email from a native speaker (terms like this are used in teaching second-language learners) - who lives in California - indicated other ways in which these tricks, and more, provide valuable assistance. The reader, whose name I will not give for reasons of privacy, had suffered a stroke some while back. This can be a debilitating condition for some and the road back to wellness can be slow.

He described his state in the following way: he had lost much of the ability to speak, but also to identify words, so that when he was eventually able to type, he missed words. Such a mis-identification might also occur with those who are dyslexic. His hearing, however, had not been critically affected.

He created some AppleScripts that helped him input words - the effort here must have been monumental - and used the speech facilities to listen to the text, allowing some errors to be fixed. He had also added key commands to Start Speaking and Stop Speaking in the Edit menu, Speech item.

This is fairly easy to do by using the Application Shortcuts section in the Keyboard Shortcuts pane of Keyboard Preferences. I outlined this in my article on System Preferences, Keyboards in August 2012.

This Speech command is less easy to use in some applications. When there is a simple page of text, it works fine. It does with a section of highlighted text, too. In a complex page display, such as a Google search page in Safari, it will read out all the text, including some that is not wanted, like on-page links. As an example, I accessed the Wikipedia entry on Stroke. Once the title was read out, Speech then focussed on the image panel to the right before returning to the main text entry.

It is far easier to highlight the text, but those with limited functions may not have that luxury. To assist more, there are features in Accessibility preferences and of particular note here is VoiceOver. This provides assistance by announcing to the user what is displayed on a page. Related to this is the VoiceOver Utility that can be opened from this section.

There are a number of ways in the VoiceOver Utility to tune this feature to suit a user's needs. As well as a General section there are controls for Verbosity, Speech, Navigation, Web, Sound, Visuals, Commanders, Braille and Activities (for specific customizations). I briefly examined Verbosity, which controls how active the feature is (Low, Medium or High); Speech, which gave me access to system voices and to a number of selectors to adjust output (I slowed the voice down); and Braille, which allows the output language to be chosen from a list of 29 that includes Thai.

All of these tools are built-in to the operating system and need no other applications to be bought. The Apple Accessibility pages also provide information for users (and those who help them) as well as links to a number of resources.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.