2018-03-19 15:27:12

I recently got a Macbook air to replace my broken pc computer, because my friend found the discontinued 11 inch version on sale cheaper than most pcs that were similar for size and specs. I can do just about everything I need to for work fine. I learned some basic commands several years ago, and thankfully things haven't changed much since, but I have a weird problem where voiceover randomly stops talking, and I have to restart it to get it to talk again. I notice this especially happens when I use the Chinese voice.
Also are there any audio games that work on Macs? I plan to get some kind of bootcamp setup going at some point, but until then, all the games I played before are gone. sad

2018-03-19 18:17:38 (edited by MasterChief 2018-03-19 18:20:07)

Hi,
Draconis Entertainment has 2 games for mac if I remember right.
Also you have the rs games client, I think it has a mac version.
Hmm, what else?
The recently created web games can work on mac too, like Cyclepath for example.
You can find a Chess game as well, it comes with the system and it is accessible last time I checked.
hth.

2018-03-20 04:56:02

Hi,

Glad to see another 11-Inch MacBook Air user here. What model is your Mac?

About gaming, you may want to try and setup the wine emulator. It works great. Using a Windows virtual machines is good if you have a bigger SSD, but remember, a Windows virtual machines or Bootcamp requires lots of hard drive space, and sometimes can conflict with Mac keyboards. Wine emulator, on the other hand, doesn't need too much space to install, and it also light weight. I don't know, because this is your choice, hence it depends what you want to do with it. But just give you some alternatives. smile

2018-03-20 14:53:39

this is the perfect topic for me to ask a question i've been meaning to ask for quite some time now.
this may sound  obvious. but, I need a detailed answer, because I am trying to form a picture in my head heere.
we all know how windows and office works. we all know there's jaws and NVDA,
now. my questions is this.
if you walked in to a apple store.
and felt the urge to buy a mack. weather it being laptop or desktop.
what sort of out of box office support can you expect? with apples own apps? i'm basically trying to ask. if they work better then the microsoft word/windows and jaws and NVDA equivilints.
or, is voice over made to work with apples built in apps such as pages and numbers.
or, has voice over been beefed up to work with MS word these days.

also, if you on a mack, does it also have an app store. similar to your Iphone? in other words. If I have my i phone here, and now i jump on a mack,
can i except the exact sort of feell of IOS ease of use? or is the entire thing different.

There's a place for me in this universe.

2018-03-20 19:37:48

flyby chow wrote:

this is the perfect topic for me to ask a question i've been meaning to ask for quite some time now.
this may sound  obvious. but, I need a detailed answer, because I am trying to form a picture in my head heere.
we all know how windows and office works. we all know there's jaws and NVDA,
now. my questions is this.
if you walked in to a apple store.
and felt the urge to buy a mack. weather it being laptop or desktop.
what sort of out of box office support can you expect? with apples own apps? i'm basically trying to ask. if they work better then the microsoft word/windows and jaws and NVDA equivilints.
or, is voice over made to work with apples built in apps such as pages and numbers.
or, has voice over been beefed up to work with MS word these days.

also, if you on a mack, does it also have an app store. similar to your Iphone? in other words. If I have my i phone here, and now i jump on a mack,
can i except the exact sort of feell of IOS ease of use? or is the entire thing different.

Hi,
I will try to answer your questions:
1. As for the store, yes, the mac has its own app store, with its own apps, how ever, you can use the same apple id that you use in your phone no problem, they all work with the same id.
But you should know, that the apps in the ios app store and the apps in the mac app store are completely independent from each other.
What I mean is:
If you have an app in your iphone, and this app is available for mac as well, don't expect to get it free, you have to pay for that one too.
From what I've noticed, mac apps are usually higher than the ios apps when it comes to the price.
2. As for the pages and numbers and word apps, honestly I've never used pages or numbers, but I can tell you that Microsoft word works like a charm with voice over in ios, I expect the same in mac as well, I have never tried it on mac though to be honest though.
hth.

2018-03-21 05:52:07

I wouldn't recommend Microsoft Word. If you're reading a document about 300 pages long, don't expect that it works with your document. VoiceOver just Keep saying "Busy" all the time. If I have a book around 300 pages, I would read it with Apple's Pages instead.

Hope this answers your question regarding Microsoft Office support on Mac.

2018-03-21 13:24:18

Hi.
Both Textedit (which is simular to Notepad in Windows) and Pages works with VOiceover on the Mac. I prefer Textedit though since it fits my needs. I have no experiences with Word on my Mac yet.
Regarding VOiceover crashes, I have no clue on why this is happening. Maybe there are some issues with the voice you are using. Are there more than one Chinese voice? Then you can try to switch to see if it still crashes. Voiceover does not crash often on my 11 inch Macbook Air, and I'm using english voices and danish voices.

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/sorenjensen1988
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soerenjensen

2018-03-22 04:30:31

TextEdit works for most things as long as you aren't planning on making extremely fancy documents. Pages is mostly accessible. If you want to read tables and navigate document headings, use Pages.

I'll admit that Apple isn't perfect when it comes to composing documents and viewing format information with VoiceOver. For instance, VoiceOver cannot report indent level or line spacing information. Navigating by links and headings is clunky. These are things that should be relatively easy to address with updates. The only thing I can say is to keep sending requests to Apple's accessibility team via [email protected] or through the apple.com/feedback website. I still love my Mac, although it seems as though most of the effort is going to the iOS version of VoiceOver these days. Maybe this will change now that Apple is supposedly going to start polishing their software rather than rushing out new features each and every year.

Grab my Adventure at C: stages Right here.

2018-03-23 08:05:36

For info on using VoiceOver with the Google Drive suite of work space applications, please view the following web page:

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/ … &hl=en

2018-03-25 07:49:49

If you need help with your Mac, please feel free to write to me. That's why I'm here after all.

You can't connect the dots looking forward.  You can only connect them looking backwards.

2018-03-26 07:41:32

Thanks for all the feedback. Can a wine emulator run something like a game using BGT? My computer only has 128 gb of ssd storage, so something like the wine emulator might be worth looking in to. I used to play rs games a long time ago on my pc, but I forgot my log in information, and the computer that had it had the motherboard go out in it last year. I would have to make a new profile I think. I'm not sure if it will work overhear though. If anything uses a google server to host, it requires a vpn.
I haven't tried using another Chinese voice, but their might be one that requires less somehow. I don't think that's the main problem though as I am using the default Chinese voice in compact mode. It seems to do this less now.
What do people use to read books? I tried using pages to read something for one of my classes, and it stops after every page. I hav tried interacting as much as possible, and using caps lock a, as well as the trackpad 2 finger swipe like on the phone, but still it stops at the end of each page.

2018-03-26 08:18:36

Regarding reading books: I would prefer using VOice Dream Reader for IOS. You could read books in Text edit or iBooks on the Mac, but your reding persission is not saved, just like when reading a huge document in Word in Windows.
Regarding gaming: VmWare Fusion will work just fine. If you only have 4 gb of ram it will lack a lot, but it'll work. If you have 8 gb of ram it'll work fine if you make the right configurations.
RS Games have a client for Mac as well which works fine.

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/sorenjensen1988
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soerenjensen

2018-03-26 08:19:39

stevejobs wrote:

If you need help with your Mac, please feel free to write to me. That's why I'm here after all.

Lol. If that's the case, then I wander why you haven't replied on the questions so far... smile

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/sorenjensen1988
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soerenjensen

2018-03-26 10:43:45

Regarding Wine emulator, I used to play BeatStar just fine. I have no problem with it. The game that uses Sapi Speech, or self voicing game, all works. One tip though, for game like Beatstar, you need to delete nvda controller client32.dll for Sapi to speech.

2018-04-19 07:18:04

So, I think to brought this topic back. Between using VMWare, and Bootcamp, which one you guys go with it? I used VM and my Mac heat up a lot.

2018-04-19 08:04:10

I'm happy with VmWare Fusion.

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/sorenjensen1988
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soerenjensen

2018-04-19 09:02:50

Same.

2018-04-20 12:03:18

A few more questions. I have the base model of this computer I think. So, I think it has a 128 gb drive with 4 gb of ram. or less.
I heard they don't make vm fusion anymore, and are wanting people to use parallels or something like that.
As for internet based games, many of them seem to use a google server or some other probably back end thing that China doesn't like at the moment. The vpn client I use is not accessible. I can figure out how to go in to the settings to turn it on, but I don't know how to get all the stuff to manually enter in different server locations.
My questions I have now are:
How do you get pages to go forward or backwards by page consistently. Mine skips random groups of pages in my document that was about 30 pages long.
Also, I have an external drive that sometimes won't open unless I have all other windows closed in finder first, and spotlight search only gives me the file names, but doesn't let me open them because it says the ailius is broken. I am guessing this has something to do with it being formatting by my pc and I need to get some sort of ntfs assistant or something similar to get it to work better.

Something I did not think about when I got this, was how many other people around me use these. I am finding that many apps that were accessible on the pc are less so on here. However, these are things like the vpn and qq that are very specific to where I am. If I had known this I might have stayed with a pc, and ask my students to help me get the Chinese keyboard set up. I think both systems work fine for blind people, but it depends what you want to do with it. My case is pretty strange, for why this is inconvenient for me, and probably doesn't apply to most people.
How much is the wine emulator, or a copy of windows for bootcamp?

2018-04-20 12:45:21

Let me answer some of your questions:

How much does the wine emulator cost? Wine emulator doesn't cost a dime. In fact, it is open source, so you can go grab it whenever you want, or whenever you feel like it smile .

About your hard drive issue, you shouldn't have any problems accessing the NTFS formatted drive, unless it has been dropped or something. If you want to write to an NTFS drive, you need to have the third party driver to enable read and write access on the drive.