Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Everybody!
These days I am educating myself on a variety of subjects, requiring me to read lengthy documents using VoiceOver, Text Edit and Pages on my 2022 Mac Studio . I hope you will share advice how I might more efficiently accomplish lots of screen reading reading. Smile.
First, is one document format better or worse than any other? Generally, I prefer dot txt files to allow me to search through the document for key phrases, but I'm certainly open to suggestions.
Second, I use VO-a for continuous read,, but in MacOS 15.6.1 Sequoia, resuming VO-a after a pause sends VO focus to the beginning of the document. Very annoying.
Third, the command-f search function is not reliable. Sometimes it finds the text to be searched for; sometimes it does not. Is there a better search feature, or perhaps a better document app than pages or text edit for continuous reading and searching for text strings?
I dearly do not want to read lengthy documents line by line, down arrow after down arrow forever. No thank you. The read next paragraph function isn't reliable either, especially for documents I converted from pdf. Do you have additional suggestions? Hope hope hope?
Smile. Thank you! And may you feel the joy, no matter what.
Bruce
Comments
Interact first.
You're probably opening the document in TextEdit and hitting Vo-a right away. If you interact first, it doesn't start from the beginning, or usually doesn't anyway, it's been a bit since I've read with it so I don't have the behavior top of mind. Also you probably want to go into the formatting menu and pick "disable editing", that way it won't announce misspellings as it reads.
Generally I just use whatever app for the file format, Preview for PDF, TextEdit for .txt and .docx, Books for .epub, and so on. If you've got Pages installed you'll probably have to use VO-shift-m and pick open with to get a .docx file to open in TextEdit.