. VoiceOver The Mac has always been able to read stuff on the screen out loud. But Apple has taken this feature light-years farther, turning it into a full-blown screen reader for the benefit of people who can't see. | . VoiceOver The Mac has always been able to read stuff on the screen out loud. But Apple has taken this feature light-years farther turning it into a full-blown screen reader for the benefit of people who can t see. Voice Over doesn t just read every scrap of text it finds UP TO SPEED For Laptop Lovers Only Tons of the special VoiceOver keystrokes require the use of an F-key like F2 or F5 . If you have a Mac laptop though the F-keys come wired to functions like adjusting the speaker volume or screen brightness. The VoiceOver keystrokes won t work in other words unless you also press the Fn key at the lower-left corner of the keyboard. If remembering to add Fn becomes a hassle or you don t have enough fingers open the Keyboard Mouse pane of System Preferences. Click the Keyboard tab and turn on Use all F1 F2 etc. keys as standard function keys. Now you ve reversed the logic. You need the Fn key only when adjusting the volume or brightness and don t need it for things like VoiceOver keystrokes. on the screen it also lets you control everything on the screen menus buttons and so on without ever needing the mouse. As you can guess learning VoiceOver means learning a lot of new keyboard shortcuts see the massive table at the end of this section . Fortunately most of them involve the same two modifier keys pressed together Control-Option. Note VoiceOver works beautifully in Cocoa programs like Safari TextEdit and Mail but doesn t work well in iTunes Microsoft Word and other Carbon programs. As software companies revise their wares compatibility is sure to improve. Furthermore VoiceOver is available in English only. . Turning on VoiceOver You can turn on VoiceOver on the Universal Access pane of System Preferences. But you may as well get used to using the keyboard shortcuts for VoiceOver in this case pressing -F5 serves as the on off switch. Tip Tap the Control key by itself to pause the speech feature tap again to resume. Oh and if Alex s voice doesn t quite .
