FSCast #172 FSOpenLine

June, 2019

RACHEL BUCHANAN:  Welcome to FSOpenLine, Freedom Scientific’s global call-in show, in our episode for June 2019, where we get the chance to connect with all of you.  But before we get started and dive in with your questions, and I introduce my fine colleagues, let me cover a few little housekeeping items.  If you’re not connecting with us via social media, follow us on Twitter at @FreedomSci – that’s at Freedom S C I – so you never miss our tweets.  You can also subscribe to our blog at blog.freedomscientific.com and never miss a post.

Now, if you’re joining us via the Zoom on the PC, I’m going to give you some quick instructions on how you can interact with us in several different ways.  So if you are joining us via the PC, and you’d like to type your question, you can use the chat feature by pressing ALT+H.  Chat window will pop up.  Type your question and press ENTER.  We can read that when the time comes, call you by name, and answer your question to the best of our ability.  If you’d like to do the same on the mobile app, you can double tap on the Participants button.  That chat box should pop up.  You can type in your question, send it on over.  We’ll get to it.

Now, for those of you who would like to ask your questions by unmuting your mic and have a little chat discussion question time, you can do that by raising your hand.  And the way that works on the PC with Zoom is you’ll press the command ALT+Y.  That’ll raise your hand right up.  We will see that.  Again, you’ll be called by name.  We will unmute your mic.  You don’t need to do anything on that end.  We will call you by name and unmute your mic.  All mics are muted by default right now.  So that’s how you raise your hand on the PC.  To do it on the mobile app, you’ll just double tap that Raise Hand button.  And then lastly, for those of you who are joining us by phone, to raise your hand if you are on the phone, if you’ve dialed in, you’ll press star 9, pretty quickly, star 9.  And it’ll raise your hand, and we will see that on the Zoom platform.

So now it’s time to talk to my fine colleagues, Glen Gordon and Eric Damery.  How are you guys?

GLEN GORDON:  Doing well, Rachel.  It’s month number two for you hosting, and you’re already sounding like a pro.

RACHEL:  Well, it’s going well so far.  Eric, are you there?

ERIC DAMERY:  I am.  Good evening, Rachel.  Good evening, Glen.

GLEN:  Hi, Eric.  Nice to be here with you.

ERIC:  I see two hands up right away, by the way.

GLEN:  Well, that certainly is a good start.  I know we have some things to talk about throughout the hour.  But the primary purpose of FSOpenLine is for the conversation to go both ways.  So shall we get into it with a couple of callers first, before talking about anything else?

RACHEL:  Sure, let’s get into it.

ERIC:  Yeah.  Can I bring in Thomas Upton?  Thomas, I’ve unmuted you.  Are you there?

THOMAS:  Yes, I am. 

GLEN:  Hello, Thomas Update.

ERIC:  Upton.

THOMAS:  Update?

GLEN:  Upton, sorry.

THOMAS:  Anyway, I have a couple questions about JAWS Home, two of them.  First, as I’m sure everyone knows, the ILM system.  What does ILM mean?

ERIC:  Great question.  Internet License Management.

THOMAS:  Internet License Management.  And what’s the difference between the old ILM license and the Home Annual License?

ERIC:  Sure.  So maybe I’ll give the high-level view from an end-user’s perspective.  And Glen, you might want to throw in some technical details.  But basically ILM had a very long authorization number that we will send to a user, that they will have to enter through our FS Activate program that runs when you install JAWS and run it.  If no key is available, it automatically runs, and you have to enter that code.

The new solution is a portal-based option which is going to be, rather than tied to serial numbers and authorization codes that you have to know and interact with, it will all be tied to your serial number and a password that you create and maintain.  And the numbers are all in the background, so you’ll never have to know another number again.  And then a nice thing about the portal solution is that you can move keys on and off of your computers, even if you’re not at the computer.  You can go and delete a key off of one of your computers.  Maybe something has died and gone away, and you want to get that key back.  So you’ll never need a key reset again.

GLEN:  Sounds good.  Thank you, Thomas.

ERIC:  So Habib.  Let’s see if we can get you in here.

HABIB:  Thank you for giving me the opportunity.  First of all, thank you for introducing support for SecureCRT, Notepad Plus Plus, and [indiscernible].  I was awaiting for these features from a very long time, almost for two years.  So finally that’s come true.

GLEN:  Well, thank you for waiting, and I’m glad you like them.

HABIB:  Yeah.  So one suggestion is, if you are making notes, can you also introduce support for Wireshark, which is a network packet sniffer used to analyze the packets.  So there is a 70 to 75% support has been integrated into it.  But if you can enable several quick navigation keys that will provide us the complete support.

GLEN:  Well, I’m really glad you mentioned that.  That’s a system forensic or system manager’s tool for looking at what’s going on on the network.  And it’s been in the back of our minds to try to do more to make Wireshark more accessible, especially the packet view.  That doesn’t seem to be as easily accessible as it could be.  Would you agree with that analysis?

HABIB:  Yeah.  Yeah, I agree.  But I recently have seen Wireshark’s – I’m able to navigate with all the menus except certain controls the content feature is rendered, it seems that it is rendered in a browser window, where I’m not able to use all the quick navigation keys as we use it on the browser.

GLEN:  All I can say is great idea.  I think there are a lot of blind folks who could benefit from using this interface.  Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen tomorrow, but it is on our minds in terms of something that we’d like to support.

ERIC:  Habib, where do you call in from?

HABIB:  I’m from India.  I work with Cisco as a technical content engineer.  I’m currently leading actually about 15 people.

ERIC:  Fantastic.  Congratulations.

HABIB:  Thank you.

ERIC:  All right.  Thanks for calling in.  And how about if we try to bring in Mitchell Archard?  Is that correct?

MITCHELL:  Yeah.  Hey, guys.  What’s the price for renewing SMA?

ERIC:  Well, it depends what type of a license you have.  If it’s a Home License...

MITCHELL:  Yeah.  Yeah, that’s what I got.

ERIC:  Yeah, and you’re up to date and current, it’s $150 to renew an SMA on a Home License in the United States.  And that gets you the next two annual upgrades.

MITCHELL:  I’m one build below the current.  So what would that be?

ERIC:  If you’re one below current, so it’s $150 to upgrade to current and $150 to add the SMA.  So you’d be looking at $300 would get you current and the next two years.  So you would be in a situation – you’re a U.S. user?

MITCHELL:  Yup.

ERIC:  So you would be a prime candidate to look closely at the Home Annual License.  It would be $90 a year, so it’s a little less than the fee of upgrading and adding an SMA.  So you might want to consider that option; okay?

MITCHELL:  All right.

ERIC:  All right.

GLEN:  The only thing to add, Eric, as long as we’re talking about the Home Annual License, is there are some deals – most people may have already heard about the deals – if you’re going to the summer conventions.

ERIC:  Absolutely.  If anyone’s attending the two annual conventions, national conventions this summer, ACB is in Rochester; NFB is in Las Vegas.  They both kick off, not this weekend, but next weekend, the Saturday and Sunday following the Fourth of July.  And we will have discounted coupons for people in the range of 20 percent up to actually 100 percent.  They’re going to have some general session giveaways.  And we do a presentation at both of those conventions where people will be getting 50 percent coupons.  So if anyone’s attending the conventions, be sure to look us up, and be sure to look us up on the weekend when it begins because that’s when the best deals will happen.

All right.  Thank you, Mitchell.  And Adam on a cell phone.  Adam, are you with us?

ADAM:  I am.  And first wanted to say really thank you for allowing this opportunity for us to ask questions of the developers and the folks who are really, you know, where the rubber meets the road with these products.  So I have a JAWS question to Glen Gordon that’s more of a philosophical nature.

GLEN:  Uh-oh.

ADAM:  Yeah.  So, you know, JAWS is probably, what, 25 or so years old.  So just wanted to ask some philosophical questions about where it’s kind of going in the future as far as things, you know, we’ve got the JAWS cursor versus the Touch cursor.  We’ve got various ways of hooking video.  We’ve got the scripting language that’s kind of been around.  So I was just wondering if you could expound and maybe even go into some detail on where we’re kind of going in the future.  Is there any thoughts on simplifying the product or what, you know, as much detail as you can provide on that.  I’m just curious to pick your brain about that.

GLEN:  Well, the brain is getting old, but we’ll see what’s left.  Let’s start out talking a little bit about simplification because people often say JAWS is too complex a product.  And then, you know, as we drill down into how would you like it to be simpler, that’s often the holy grail.  So I’m curious, do you have some simplification ideas that you think would help streamline the product?

ADAM:  Well, you know, just one, speaking of JAWS cursors, maybe say forget JAWS cursor, use Touch cursor only and map all the scripting functions that deal with JAWS cursor somehow to be able to be specific to what the JAWS cursor used to do so that the there’s not as many cursors.  But, you know, I haven’t really thought about it more on paper, but just something like that maybe to simplify it in that way.

GLEN:  Have you been spying on our development meetings?

ADAM:  No, I’ve just been thinking.  I think about this stuff a lot.  But no.

GLEN:  I’m joking.  Because these are some of the topics that we’re actually discussing currently, that the JAWS cursor in its historic form, where it’s grabbing stuff written to the screen, there are more and more places where it doesn’t really work well.  And rather than just getting blank blank blank, somehow repurposing the Touch cursor or something similar to proceed over that similar content that’s off screen, but still available, might be a really good way to go.  The other thing we’re thinking about in the near term is doing a better job of supporting things like the Windows Store and other universal apps, giving them more of a virtual cursor feel than they’ve had before.  So can’t tell you exactly when those are going to hit the product, but they’re in active development as we speak.

More broadly, I think the world has very much gone to the Internet.  Not nearly as common as it used to be for people to download applications.  Most things get accessed through the browser.  And so us continuing to work on refining how things can be done in the browser and, when you have complicated sites represented on the web, what are some quicker ways of moving amongst the various parts and operating extremely efficiently.  Eric, you have anything to add to this?

ERIC:  Yeah.  Yeah.  I also think that in the future, and we’ve talked about this, we have to move in a direction of learning how somebody tends to navigate something, and maybe even share some hints with them along the way.  So that you’re on a web page.  You know tables exist.  If they move into the table, and they’re just arrowing through, at some point maybe alerting them to the fact that there are other ways of navigating tables, and start to enlighten them on some of those things.

ADAM:  Yeah.  I guess as far as the JAWS cursor and the Touch cursor go, I find the success rate of using the Touch cursor much greater with more modern apps.  So I kind of, as a trainer, I kind of show people that method instead of the blank blank blank with the JAWS cursor.  So I guess whatever way is the successful way is the one I’m going to probably tout the most as the one to go for.

GLEN:  I think the Touch cursor is one of those sleeper features that most people don’t think about if they don’t have a touchscreen.  But the Touch cursor, not named so well in hindsight, really does give you access to a lot of things and allows you to navigate things that you couldn’t necessarily otherwise get to with a keyboard.

ERIC:  And I think that’s one of the features, and we will be rolling out changes in that area with the 2020 versions, Adam.  And I think this is one of the ones that we’re going to want to get some users involved in that process to really start to get some feedback as we go because I don’t think we have a clear understanding of exactly what would be the best solution.  So I think we’ll come up with some options and start to float some things out there with some users and see what they think.  So I certainly will keep you in mind, and we’ll look to reach out to you.

ADAM:  Excellent.

ERIC:  Great.

GLEN:  Thanks, Adam.

ERIC:  All right.  And we have a phone number from the area code 203.  I’ll unmute them.  Are you with us?

HOWARD:  That’s me.  This is Howard in New Haven.

ERIC:  Hello, Howard.

HOWARD:  Hello.  I’d like to talk about some issues I’m having with JAWS and Google Chrome.  One that I’ve reported for quite a  while, and it still seems to be there, is that when you’re in a password edit field, and you type into a password edit field, you get multiple asterisks for every asterisk, for every character that you type.  I think it’s about 12 asterisks per character.  And if you get out of Forms mode and look at what’s in the field, you see the correct number of asterisks or bullets or whatever they are.  I just find that very confusing, and I would really love to see that fixed.

ERIC:  So, Glen, I’m not familiar with this.  Have you seen or heard about this?

GLEN:  No.  And I was attributing my not noticing because I have typing echo turned off.

ERIC:  Ah.

HOWARD:  Now, you won’t notice that.  But you will notice that, if you backspace, even if you have typing echo turned off, if you type one character and backspace, it will say star star star, not just star.

GLEN:  Yeah, you know, I have heard it say star star star at certain times.  But I’ve never associated it with actually typing characters.  What I end up doing normally is arrowing left and right throughout the password, even if I’m still in Forms mode.  And in that case it does report the proper number of asterisks, at least for me it does.  I should pay more attention on the others.

HOWARD:  That’s true.  But since I’m using braille and actually looking at it, I can, if I look really carefully, I can see that, yes, the cursor is in the right place.  But there’s all these asterisks after it.

GLEN:  So is braille showing multiple asterisks per character?

HOWARD:  Oh, definitely.

GLEN:  Oh, okay.  That may be the difference.  I’m primarily using speech.  And for some reason I instantly jump to the speech component.  So that’s worth us investigating.

RACHEL:  Definitely.  I’m using speech in Chrome, and I don’t see that visually on the screen.  But I’m going to hook up my braille display and try it ASAP.

HOWARD:  Okay.  Yeah, it’s not a visual thing because I’ve asked people what it looks like visually, and they say no, it’s just – and I have also tested it with – sacrilege here – NVDA, and that does show the correct number of asterisks.

GLEN:  And are you relatively current with your JAWS version?

HOWARD:  Yes, I’m completely up to date.  This started from the very first beta in 2019.

ERIC:  Would you mind pinging me with an email?  And I will – I’ve made a note on this one, and I’ll see if I can’t get to the bottom of it when I get to the office in the morning.

HOWARD:  And your email address, please?

ERIC:  Yeah, edamery, D A M E R Y [edamery@vispero.com].

HOWARD:  Okay, Eric.  Thank you.

ERIC:  At Vispero, yeah.  Yeah, drop me an email, and just in the subject line you can put “passwords chrome,” and I’m going to look at it first thing in the morning with someone there, and we’ll get back to you.  Thanks.

HOWARD:  Thank you.

ERIC:  All right.  And next up we’ve got Michael Mote.  Michael, are you with us?

MICHAEL:  Yes, sir.  Good evening to everybody.  I have two questions.  One, I’ve been looking for a couple of years now on trying to do appendable PDF files using a screen reader.  And I wondered if the new Microsoft Forms would help with that.  Also I was wondering if you guys could address an issue that I’m seeing, and see if what it is – with JAWS, using it in a virtual desktop environment using Citrix, the CTRL+ALT+PAUSE key never works anymore in the particular environment that I’m in.  And I’m wondering if that has to do with the developers that we work with disabling shortcut key functionality on the Citrix platform, or is it something that we need to change in terms of the keystroke that we use.  So I’ll let you guys answer those two questions, and I thank you for allowing me to ask.

GLEN:  Don’t go away quite yet.

MICHAEL:  Okay.

GLEN:  So let me ask you about the Citrix thing first, and then we can move back to PDF.  CTRL+ALT+PAUSE is the key to switch back to your local system?  Is that correct?

MICHAEL:  It is the one that you use to bring up the menu where you can actually go and choose the option to minimize or expand the window to full preview, yeah.

GLEN:  Oh.  Yeah, I don’t think we have heard of this a lot.  And, you know, it’s always tempting to throw somebody else under the bus.  I’m just trying to figure out if it’s really true.  Does it work – presumably it works for your sighted colleagues.

MICHAEL:  Actually, what they do is they use the – they just expand the window.  They just move the mouse.

GLEN:  Yeah.

MICHAEL:  But what I will say is a caveat.  So I load, when I can’t do it with JAWS, I pull Narrator up just for grins and giggles to see what it would do, in Windows 10.  And it gives me the options of what’s there.  The menu’s there.  But you can press Enter on it, and nothing happens.  So it’s almost as if it’s there, but JAWS is not seeing it.  And that’s what I was wondering, why we are not able to see what’s going on there.

GLEN:  I would hate to say it’s a JAWS bug, but it might be a JAWS bug.

MICHAEL:  Yeah.  And it’s happened after Citrix released the new – they went from Citrix Receiver to Citrix Workstation a few months ago.  And that’s when I saw it.

GLEN:  Okay.  So it might not be us after all.

MICHAEL:  That’s why I’m saying I think there’s a couple of things that’s at play here.

ERIC:  Yeah.  We have some testing that’s been going on with Citrix in the test department at the office.  And I think I recall someone mentioning this to me, that they have changed, and some of the keystrokes that used to work don’t work.  And this is one I’d have to follow up on, as well.  If you drop me an email also...

MICHAEL:  Sure.

ERIC:  ...and remind me about the Citrix, and I’ll try and get some details from the person in the office that’s been working on it, and I’ll see if I can’t connect you back and get you some of those answers.

MICHAEL:  That’d be great.  Thank you.  Because we have several people that I support at work using the Citrix platform.  And they would really love to be able to do this on their own.

ERIC:  Sure.

GLEN:  So let’s talk a little bit about your question in terms of PDF forms.  I think there’s more to the question than meets the eye because at some level, if someone creates accessible forms, they can be filled out.  I find them to be somewhat hit-and-miss in terms of how good a job the people do of making the forms accessible.  But are you talking about actually constructing them as a blind person?

MICHAEL:  Yes.  And beyond that, wanting them to be in a PDF format for a particular reason in that you’re able to not change the information, and it’s easier to fill out as a portable document.  And I did go through the training on creating accessible forms in Word.  But I think with newer versions of Word the stuff that’s being taught is kind of a little changed.  It’s changed quite a bit, actually, I think, because of the way Word works now.  But I’m wondering if there’s another method where we could actually create the text fields, label the, you know, what’s supposed to be there, add our own controls and things of that sort so that we as the ones who use it as blind folks could actually develop them in the correct way, rather than relying on sighted counterparts.  No offense to anyone.  But it’s just we know what we need.  We know what we need to hear.  And it would be easier for us.

GLEN:  So I may have a boneheaded answer for you because I don’t have all the details.  I was actually pretty impressed with how easy Google Forms have been to use, the last time I tried them.  And I don’t know what the creation experience is.  But it might be worth looking at, if the end product would be something that would work for you.

MICHAEL:  Okay.

RACHEL:  I wouldn’t put a lot of time into Microsoft Forms.  I haven’t had any luck with those, trying them with any screen reader as of yet.  I don’t think that they’ve improved that to a point where we can use it.

MICHAEL:  Yeah.

RACHEL:  But I have been impressed with Google Forms, as well.  Just filling them out.  I haven’t created it.

GLEN:  So we’re in the same boat.

RACHEL:  Mm-hmm.

GLEN:  I was really hoping you wouldn’t say, oh, my god, I’ve tried Google Forms, and they’re the worst thing I’ve used since fill in the blank.  So I’m glad you’re in agreement, at least on the filling side.

ERIC:  Well, Michael, thank you for joining us, and I look forward to seeing your email, see if we can’t get you an answer.  Up next is Paul Hunt.  Hi, Paul.

PAUL:  Hey, Eric.  How are you doing?  Can you hear me okay?

ERIC:  Yes, we can.

PAUL:  Couple things.  First of all, there’s a lot of times in the business environment we have to collaborate on documents.  There are two ways to collaborate.  One is with Track Changes, and the other is real-time collaboration where you’ve got two people online at the same time, trying to collaborate.  As far as I can tell, that doesn’t work.  That’s not accessible at all.  JAWS hasn’t been updated to be able to make it accessible.  But the other is Track Changes is really very confusing for me.  It’s very difficult to work with.  And what I’ve done is I’ve asked the training department to actually do some sessions on Track Changes because that’s really more common in the business environment than many people think, especially when you’re working on teams.

ERIC:  Yeah.  We’ve been making a lot of changes in that area, actually, this past quarter.  And so a lot of the changes were in for April, excuse me, for the June update.  And interesting enough, we’ve been working with a law student who is becoming a clerk for the Supreme Court.  And Track Changes is pretty critical in that space, and it’s gotten our attention, and we’re doing everything we can to help out with that.

PAUL:  I was also going to say, as far as Microsoft Forms is concerned, Microsoft Word Forms, there are two sets of controls.  There are the legacy controls, and there are the newer controls.  If you use the legacy controls, you can make very accessible PDF forms, I mean Word forms that work really well.  In fact, our Workforce Solutions for VR, they’ve made all their forms accessible in that way and done a great job.

I also think that you might be able to import a form that was created in Microsoft Word and get Acrobat DC Pro to actually pick up those controls.  I’m just trying to learn, just trying to experiment with it.  I think it actually might work.  I’m not sure, but I’m trying.

GLEN:  Two very good ideas.  So thank you for those.  One thing I do want to add is that Microsoft, in their Office 365 product – the product that they’re trying to drive everyone to.  If you have an Office 365 account, and you want to collaborate in Word, they do provide pretty good feedback in terms of two or more people working on the same document at the same time.  So I don’t know whether you’re about to drink the Office 365 Kool-Aid in terms of work, but that might be a real-time collaboration option for you.

PAUL:  I’m 365 all the way.  I just haven’t seen it work properly yet, collaboration.  But that’s where the training department needs to get this going and put some webinars together on that.

RACHEL:  Absolutely, Paul.  We’ve been holding off just because of the changes that Eric mentioned.  So there are the big changes that were made to Track Changes.

PAUL:  Good, good.

ERIC:  All right.

GLEN:  And feel free to drop us a line if, as you’re trying the new Track Changes option, if confusion continues to reign, I’d love to hear from you.  I’m sure Eric and Rachel would love to hear from you, as well, some pointed info.

PAUL:  Is that the June update that’s been already released, or the one that’s coming?

ERIC:  Yes, no, those changes are in the June update that’s out there.

PAUL:  Oh, okay.  I will give it a try.  I didn’t try because I didn’t see that in the write-up.  I’m sorry.  Okay.  I’ll give it a try.

ERIC:  All right.  Thanks, Paul.

PAUL:  Okay.

ERIC:  All right.  And next we have Michael’s iPhone.  Michael, are you with us?

GLEN:  I wonder if Michael’s with the iPhone, or if it’s just the phone calling.

MICHAEL:  Yes, I am here.  Can you hear me?

ERIC:  Yes, we can.

MICHAEL:  Great.  So I’m actually calling about Track Changes, as well.  So it’s actually great timing that you got me right after Paul.  And I wanted to let you guys know that you made tremendous progress with improving JAWS support for Track Changes in the last two updates.  So it really started with the May updates.

ERIC:  Yeah.

MICHAEL:  One of the things I remember before the updates came out is that, when I was navigating a document with many revisions, and I would get to a line with a revision, JAWS would say “revision” kind of before starting to read anything on that line, which would make it necessary for us to navigate by character or by word to determine where exactly the revision starts and ends.  Whereas now, if I’m arrowing through, it will actually announce where the revisions start and end, basically correctly, instead of just doing it at the beginning of the line, which makes it so much more efficient to navigate Track Changes.  And I am an attorney, so I use Track Changes quite a bit to do a lot of transactional work.  So this is really a game changer.  And even with loading revisions in the Virtual Viewer, they load much, much faster now.  So keep up the good work, and excellent job on these updates.

ERIC:  Fantastic.  Now, Michael, do you use speech only, or speech and braille?

MICHAEL:  I do use braille also.  I have a Focus 40 Blue 5th Generation.  I haven’t used it with a computer, though, yet.  And I don’t use it as often as I might in the future.  Right now my work environment’s – I get along pretty well with speech, and I use a lot of formatting and proofreading features like Speech and Sounds Schemes and text, Text Analyzer, that really have allowed me to be very, very successful.  But I do have a braille display.

ERIC:  That’s fantastic.  With the braille display, if you try that with Track Changes, you’ll see we’ve made some modifications there, as well.  So dots 7 and 8 will be raised on places where either revisions have happened or attributes exist for underline or bold or font changes, things like that.  So I think we’ve made some great improvements on the braille side, as well.

GLEN:  As someone who uses Text Analyzer, are there some things you wish it did?

MICHAEL:  So with some things, I notice in some documents that it will report an inconsistency, but it doesn’t place the cursor right where the inconsistency is at.  And I haven’t figured out a pattern as to when it works properly and when it doesn’t.  Like sometimes it might place it like a few words to the left of it or to the right of it or a line above or a line below it.  But I haven’t figured out why it does that.

ERIC:  I’ve seen the same, and I haven’t figured it out myself.

GLEN:  Eric, can you reproduce it on demand?  Like this would be a fun one to look at.

ERIC:  Yeah, this is not hard to reproduce.

GLEN:  Okay.

ERIC:  It puts you in the vicinity.  It doesn’t quite put you on it.

MICHAEL:  And I could never figure out, because JAWS will say – I use the commands for a prior inconsistency and next inconsistency.  It will report, like, column and row information.  I’m not – I wasn’t exactly sure kind of how – what is the purpose of that.

ERIC:  So what’s the logic for that.  So I think I can take a stab at explaining it.  When the Text Analyzer solution came in, the person that put it in is a coder who was very interested to know position where the mistakes were happening that he was coding.  And so column and row position became pretty important in Text Analyzer from the get-go, and it never changed.

MICHAEL:  Okay.  So for the user there’s really no benefit to it?  It’s more for the developer?

ERIC:  Well...

GLEN:  Get out of that one, Eric.

ERIC:  I don’t – I would never try and tell a developer that there’s no benefit for the user in that.  So I’m not...

RACHEL:  You walked into that.

ERIC:  Yeah, I haven’t raised that one too often.

GLEN:  I think it would be safe to say that it may not be a benefit for lawyers.

ERIC:  Yeah, exactly.

MICHAEL:  Okay.  All right.

GLEN:  Thanks, Michael.

MICHAEL:  Thank you.

ERIC:  Yeah, bye-bye, Michael.  And Bobby Vinton is next.  Bobby, how are you?

BOBBY:  Okay.  I’ve got a question about browsers.  Now, JAWS, and I’m wondering if JAWS is going to support the brand new Edge Chromium browser, and another browser that came out a while back, I think maybe last – I don’t remember when it was released.  Brave, the Brave browser.

GLEN:  So I have good news for you on both counts.  So if you were to download the Chrome preview, the – excuse me.  I’m sorry, Microsoft.

BOBBY:  Edge Chromium.

GLEN:  If you were to download the Edge preview, the one that’s based on Chromium, you will find that it works just fine with JAWS.  The experience is quite similar to what you’d get from running Chrome itself.  Obviously there are the Microsoft-specific features.  It is possible that Microsoft will change their mind in terms of the interfaces that we’re using internally to get at the data.  And that will require some work, if they make the change that we must use UIA to gather the information.  But they’ve not made a move to restrict us from using the same techniques we use in Chrome.  And as a result you get the same really great behavior, whether or not you’re using the new Edge or whether you’re using Chrome.  Same is true for the Brave browser.  I do have it on my machine.  I was brave enough to install it and very pleased to realize that it works quite well.  So no matter which one you may want to try, they’re all working well at the moment.

BOBBY:  Sounds good.

GLEN:  All right.

ERIC:  Thanks for joining us, Bobby.  And next up we have – you know, Glen, have you noticed we’ve had some great calls tonight.

GLEN:  We have.  Is it something about 8:00 Eastern?

ERIC:  I think that’s it.  I think it might be the time.

GLEN:  Yeah.  And a lot of people who we’ve not heard from before on FSOpenLine, which is a nice thing.

ERIC:  Nice.  That’s right.  So next up is Steve Cutway.  Hello, Steve.

STEVE:  Hi, Eric.  How are you?

ERIC:  Good.

STEVE:  Thank you very much for your help after the March edition of this program.  You and I...

ERIC:  Ah, yes. 

STEVE:  You and I had a great deal of success.

ERIC:  Yes.  Are we talking about the shortcuts on the icons?

STEVE:  No, the Excel problem.

ERIC:  Ah, yes, the Excel problem.  So we did get to the bottom of that, yeah.

STEVE:  Yeah, yeah.  We did.  The result wasn’t – the workaround wasn’t what you or I expected, but it solved the problem.

ERIC:  Yeah, good.

STEVE:  First of all, I can say that I can reproduce Howard’s report on those password stars which JAWS often refers to as bullets in Chrome, I notice.  And it doesn’t bother me particularly, other than the fact that it’s intriguing that the filter doesn’t trap them, you know, your filter for count of three or whatever you set it for.

ERIC:  And do you use a braille display?

STEVE:  No.

ERIC:  Okay.

STEVE:  No.  I could.  I mean, I should probably.  But I...

ERIC:  No, that’s fine.  I was just curious if...

STEVE:  I don’t currently own one.  I haven’t owned a braille display since the VersaBraille.  So only Glen and I are probably old enough to remember that beast.

GLEN:  That was my first piece of computer equipment back in 1984.

STEVE:  Me, too.  Absolutely.  Me, too.  My other question, and I don’t really, like, want to harp on this at all, but is with respect to the Home Annual License that was talked about earlier.  Do you have any idea when that will be available outside the U.S.?  And I’m being selfish when I say Canada because, unless I’m mistaken, you guys own the Canadian distributor.

ERIC:  We do.  And we are working on getting this into the international markets.  I would have hoped we would have been closer to it by now.  But we’ve still got some work to go.  But it’s very high on our list of we’re talking about it almost daily.  So it’s a topic that comes up all the time.

STEVE:  Oh, that’s good because I think there are an awful lot of people out there who would benefit from that.

ERIC:  Yup.

STEVE:  The only other comment I would make is, Glen, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater with respect to the JAWS cursor.  There are still lots of us, maybe old people, out there who still use the JAWS cursor.  And I have come across unfortunate situations on the web where buttons don’t appear visibly, and so JAWS can’t see them, but I can find them with the JAWS cursor and press the left mouse button on the numeric keypad, and they still work.

GLEN:  That’s a really good point.  And we never intend to get rid of the JAWS cursor in those areas where it works well.  It’s more wanting to repurpose it in areas where at the moment it’s just a useless blank area, and we might as well make those keys, you know, with the muscle memory to turn on the JAWS cursor, at least give you something reasonable.

STEVE:  Yeah, no, I quite agree.

ERIC:  Yeah, just try to make it more transparent and let someone not have to worry about should I be using the touch cursor or the JAWS cursor.  We’ll try and be smart enough to know which one to use.

STEVE:  Yeah, absolutely.

ERIC:  Good.  All right, Steve.

GLEN:  Hey, thank you, Steve.

STEVE:  All right.  Take care.

ERIC:  Yeah, thank you.

GLEN:  Steve actually brought something up that I’m glad that it jogged your memory, Eric.  We got a call last FSOpenLine talking about how, if you set up a shortcut key with a JAWS shortcut, as soon as you update JAWS for the next time, your shortcut goes away.  And...

ERIC:  And we got that solved and fixed it across ZoomText and Fusion at the same time.  It was definitely something we were doing wrong, and it was the Microsoft installer that wanted to overwrite those things.  So we’ve gone in and we’ve made an exception for it and corrected that problem.

GLEN:  And I noticed the last time I updated JAWS my shortcut didn’t go away.

ERIC:  Excellent.

GLEN:  Which is a good thing.

RACHEL:  I noticed, I didn’t think of it, but mine didn’t go away, either.  Excellent.

ERIC:  Well, you can thank FSOpenLine for that.  And next up I’m going to bring in, it looks like an old friend, Don Barrett.  Don, is that you there?

DON:  It’s so good to talk to you guys.  And I did want to say a  very special thanks to Rachel, Liz, and Dan.  Your webinars are just awesome.  Keep up the great work.

RACHEL:  Thank you so much.

ERIC:  Yeah, we’re getting a lot of great feedback.

DON:  Yeah.  So a quick question.  I get a lot of newsletters, investment newsletters, the Flying Blind newsletter, et cetera.  And more often than not, when I hit H in those newsletters, I can’t jump from heading to heading.  Now, I can if I restart JAWS, which I’m not sure why that would – I guess it’s resetting some buffers or something.  But just curious, Glen, and who else might be using this, whether you’re finding the H – I tried to get a list of headings, but I’m told that’s not available in Outlook.  So I just wanted to mention that as something I’d love to see, if there’s something that can be done about that.  That would be real great.

GLEN:  So there’s a weird problem that I have seen in Outlook, and it’s on my personal list of things to look at – and it’s been there for several months, so clearly I’m not getting to my to-do list quickly enough – where when you open a message in Outlook, sometimes it doesn’t actually use the virtual cursor.  Do you think that might be it?  Because that would go along with the fact that the H key or any of those other keys, including the one to bring up the list of headings, wouldn’t work.

DON:  Well, when I hit the plus key, it does say “virtual cursor.”

GLEN:  Oh, okay.  Well, then, now, that’s a different thing.

DON:  You know, INSERT+ESCAPE won’t do it.  But most of the time, if I restart JAWS, then it’ll work.  And I’m not sure what’s going on.  But I’ll leave that to you folks who are much smarter about these things than me.

GLEN:  If you can come up with any sort of rhyme or reason as to how to get it to happen or cases when it happens more often, that would be great, and I’d love for you to reach out to me.

DON:  Terrific.

ERIC:  Don, you specifically – you started off by mentioning that this in the newsletters that you get through email.

DON:  Yup.

ERIC:  That’s primarily where you see this problem.

DON:  Yes.

ERIC:  And it would be helpful maybe if you forward one of those emails in to me or to Glen.

GLEN:  Especially if they’re picking good stocks.

DON:  Oh, I’ll write you about those, for sure.

GLEN:  Okay, cool.

DON:  Thanks, guys.

ERIC:  All right.  Thanks, Don.

GLEN:  Thanks, Don.

ERIC:  Good to see you here.  Bye.

DON:  Yeah.  Bye.

ERIC:  All right.  And we’ve got – I’m going to bring Brad in.  We haven’t heard from Brad yet.  Brad, are you with us?

BRAD:  Yes, I am.

ERIC:  How are you?

BRAD:  I’m very good.  I’ll take credit for bringing up the shortcut issue during the last call.

GLEN:  Oh, excellent.

BRAD:  I was super pleased to see in the release notes for the April update that it listed that in there.  And so thank you guys very much, and let everyone out there know you guys are listening and taking notes, and you’re doing something about this stuff when you get a chance.  And that’s really all I had to say is thank you very much.  I did my April update.  I have Fusion, and I let it, when it prompted the update, I let it do the update.  And it was after I did that that I read the release notes and, you know.  But in the June update I downloaded the installer.  And that’s been the one really giving me the problem.  And I did it that way, and I was very pleased to see nothing changed.  It was all the way it was before.  So thank you guys very much, and thank you for listening to all the listeners and their comments and acting on them.

GLEN:  Well, thank you, Brad.  And I will add a personal to-do before the next FSCast, which should be sometime in September, perhaps even on my birthday, or very close to it, to go through the previous episodes and sort of take a tally of the requests we’ve gotten and the things that we’ve fixed because I know we fixed some other issues.  I just can’t remember them off the top of my head.

ERIC:  All right.  Well, thank you, Brad.  It was – glad to...

BRAD:  Okay.  Look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas, Eric.

ERIC:  Okay.  I’ll see you there.  See you on Sunday morning.  All right.  And Habib’s got his hand up.  Maybe I just never lowered it.  Habib, are you still there?

HABIB:  Thank you for giving me another opportunity.  See, if I give you a web page which contains 1,000 headings and 2,500 links, how well JAWS will be able to handle it without any sort of sluggishness?

GLEN:  The way JAWS works in most browsers is you pay the price when the page is loaded.  So if it’s a really giant page, it’s going to take a long time to load.  Depending upon which browser you’re using, that amount of time will be somewhat variable.  If you’re using Internet Explorer and a large page, it’s going to take much longer than for Chrome.  And Firefox is probably somewhere in the middle.  Once the page is loaded, you should be able to navigate through that page and through the headings pretty quickly.  Which browser are you using?

HABIB:  Chrome.  It’s Chrome.

GLEN:  Okay.  Yeah, I don’t have a good feel for that.  If JAWS is completely going dormant, it probably is worth trying to create a manual JAWS memory dump.  And you can do that by pressing Windows, no, INSERT+WINDOWS KEY+F4.  Theoretically that will create a dump in the JAWS reports directory and restart JAWS at the same time.  I would be personally interested in seeing one of those dumps.  I can’t guarantee any results.  But if you’re able to generate that and send one along, I’m ggordon@vispero.com.  I’ll happily have a look because I have a feeling there may be another factor that might be good to look at.

HABIB:  Okay.  Okay.  Sure, I will do it.

GLEN:  Sounds good.  Hopefully we can make some headway; though if it really is giant pages, there may not be a whole lot we can do about it.

ERIC:  Well, thank you, Habib.

RACHEL:  All right.  So that looks like it.

ERIC:  Can I remind everyone that we will be looking forward to seeing folks at the trade shows?  Douglas Gerry will be doing a session on Saturday morning in Rochester, New York.  Make sure you are one of the first 50 to get to that one and get the best discount coupons he’ll have at the show.  And on Sunday morning I kick off at 8:30 in South Pacific Sea at Mandalay Bay, and we’ll have a team of people down there helping folks get around and find it.  But look forward to seeing everyone early Sunday morning.  And I think we’re going to try and get Larry Gassman to jump in and say hello on Skype before he goes to church, so...

GLEN:  It sounds good.  Is it true, by the way, that they’re going to have accessible slot machines in your presentation room?

ERIC:  That’s right.  And roulette tables and blackjack.

RACHEL:  I’m going to be there now.

GLEN:  People will have multiple allegiances.

ERIC:  I am not a big fan of Vegas, but I am really kind of looking forward to this event because I understand that they have a big wave pool at Mandalay Bay.  And I can just imagine how much fun it’s going to be out there in that wave pool for everybody.

GLEN:  Don’t you wish you still had your shark costume?

ERIC:  Yes, I do.

RACHEL:  That would certainly make things more entertaining.

ERIC:  Yeah.

GLEN:  Well, this was great fun, as it’s turning out to often be.

RACHEL:  Yeah.  Thanks, everyone who took the time out of their day to join us.  And we’ll be posting about our next quarter’s FSOpenLine on the blog and on Twitter.  It’ll be in September.  We don’t have that date nailed down yet, but you will hear about it soon.

ERIC:  Excellent.

GLEN:  Thank you all very much.

ERIC:  Yeah.  Thank you.  And goodnight, Rachel and Glen.

RACHEL:  Goodnight.

GLEN:  Goodnight.

elaine@edigitaltranscription.com