Reading and say all
Web pages and messages
Web pages and email messages are read as a document. Up and Down go line by line; Option with the arrows, word by word. Single letters jump: in the Mac style, VoiceOver's Quick Nav letters (H heading, L link, F text field, T table, 1 to 6 headings by level); in the Windows style, NVDA's. TurnOver Space switches between reading the page and typing into it. Enter activates a link or button.
Say all
Say all reads from where you are to the end: VO A in the Mac style, Caps Lock A in the Windows style (Caps Lock Down Arrow with the desktop keyboard layout). It moves the caret as it goes.
- Any key stops it, and the caret is left on the word you had reached, not the start of the paragraph.
- Up and Down during say all skim: they move a line and carry on reading from there.
The say all voice
Say all can read in a natural voice made on your Mac, while everything else (moving, typing, menus) stays in your usual voice, which answers at once. The TurnOver menu, Settings, Speech, Say all voice: "Same as speech", or a natural voice. Natural voice speed is there too.
The natural voice reads ahead: while one paragraph plays, the next ones are being made, so it never waits. Natural voices speak English for now; other languages keep your Mac's voices.
Documents
In Word, Pages and TextEdit, the arrows read as they move. VO Command H goes to the next heading (Shift for the previous). In Pages, a table's line says its size; VO Shift Down reads it cell by cell (the arrows move, each cell said with its row or column heading), and VO Shift Up or Escape comes back. Comments and highlights are said after the line that holds them. TurnOver says the page as you move onto it.
PDFs in Preview (experimental)
A PDF is read like a web page: line by line across pages, with "page 2 of 5" as you reach each page, and headings by H. Highlights, notes and text boxes, which Preview hides from VoiceOver, are read where they sit.