OS X Yosemite: The Missing Manual

VoiceOver

The Mac has always been able to read stuff on the screen out loud. But Apple has taken this feature light-years further, turning it into a full-blown screen reader for the benefit of people who can’t see. VoiceOver doesn’t just read every scrap of text it finds on the screen—it also lets you control everything on the screen (menus, buttons, and so on) without ever needing the mouse.

On a Mac with a multitouch trackpad, you can interact with what’s visible on the screen by using the trackpad itself as a map of the current window or screen area; VoiceOver speaks whatever’s under your finger. You can flick in any direction to move to the next thing on the screen. You hear a sound whenever VoiceOver finds blank spaces on the screen, all in the name of helping you “feel” where everything is.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Talking to Chess

If your friends and coworkers are, for some reason, still unimpressed by OS X and your mastery of it, invite them over to watch you play a game of chess with your Mac—by talking to it.

(Actually, this feature isn’t purely for entertainment: Some chess players prefer to move without looking at the board. By speaking their moves to the computer—and having the computer respond by speaking its own moves—these people can play “blindfolded.”)

Open the Chess program. Unless you’ve turned it off (in Chess→Preferences), the game’s speech-recognition feature is already turned on. When it’s on, the round Feedback window should be visible onscreen.

To learn how to speak ...