Note that banners will quickly disappear from your screen, so will only briefly show up in the vo-n command's resulting menu. This means calendar/reminder alerts, message notifications, VIP email alerts, and anything else that appears in your Notification Center. The other new command is vo-n, which lets you access any active notification alerts or banners. I'm not yet sure what this does that f11 and f12 don't, but for those with non-Apple keyboards on which there are no volume controls, it's a help. If you press vo-hyphen, your volume will go down, and vo-equals will raise it.

Apple even added a couple new keystrokes to make life easier. Three of my biggest annoyances were taken care of in this release, along with several more minor things that always bugged me. That's not to say that a few welcomed changes didn't come to VoiceOver, though. That is, they addressed as many bugs as they could, and did their best to make sure that every aspect of the operating system is as accessible as possible. What the fine folks in Cupertino did focus on is overall usability. There's nothing major in this release like Window Spots or a bunch of new voices, so don't expect anything earth-shaking this year. We'll start in VoiceOver, as that's the part of Sierra's accessibility most of you want to know about. And, again as always, we urge you to back up important files before upgrading, just in case.Ī few of us on the AppleVis team have been testing Sierra all summer, and I'm here to tell you about the new features-and bugs-specific to accessibility that we've found.

As always, this is a free upgrade, available to anyone with a supported Mac. No longer is it OS X it's macOS, to line up with tvOS, watchOS, and iOS. Apart from the new name for this version (Sierra), you'll notice that Apple has re-branded the entire line of the Mac's operating system. Today, Apple released a free update to its Mac computers: macOS Sierra.

Mac os 10.12 character viewer