14 DAY TRIAL // In addition to beefing up VoiceOver with more languages and voices, Apple has been thoughtful enough to improve the VoiceOver Utility, which allows users to tweak parameters and set pre-determined behavior for the function.
Already an ingenious addition to Mac OS X, VoiceOver Utility is even more reliable on OS X 10.7 Lion, Softpedia has learned.
We’re here to talk about the few but noteworthy improvements that come with the updated utility, one of which is Braille-support for Verbosity.
The default Braille verbosity is set to High, but users can also tweak it to Medium and Low for all kinds of tasks.
Under the Web tab, a few changes can be observed as well. Apple has broken down its options into three tabs - Navigation, Page Loading, and Web Rotor. The latter also includes more options now.
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Finally, VoiceOver Utility adds a new tab - Activities.
As its name implies, this all-new Activities function allows users to set the behavior of VoiceOver in various circumstances, with various applications and files.
Options include the ability to set verbosity and choose voices, enabling hot spots for key areas on the user’s screen, tweaks for pronunciation, visuals, navigation, trackpad, keyboard and so on, as well as the ability to save one set of parameters for a specific app (like iChat, for this example).
For Americans, Lion includes three new English voices - Tom, Samantha and Jill - in addition to the current Alex voice added in 2007 with Mac OS X Leopard, and the Vicki voice added in 2003 with the introduction of Mac OS X Panther.
Regional English version include an Australian English Karen and Lee, British English Daniel, Emily and Serena, and Scottish English Fiona.
Other language voices are being introduced for the first time, including Chinese, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Slovak and many others.
Mac OS X is expected to launch publicly at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference this June.