RACHEL BUCHANAN: Welcome to FSOpenLine, Freedom Scientific’s global call-in show. This is our episode for November of 2019. And my name’s Rachel, one of your hosts this evening. But before I get into introducing our other hosts, I would like to share with you the different ways that you can connect with us during tonight’s show.
You can either type in your question via the chat box, and you can do this on Windows in Zoom by the command ALT+H, Hotel. JAWS will put focus on the edit box, where you can type your question and press ENTER. If you’d like to type your question via the mobile app, go ahead and double tap on the Participants button, and then double tap on the Chat button. Focus will be in the edit box, where you can type your question and then double tap on the Send button.
For those of you who prefer to ask your question verbally, you’ll need to raise your hand. To do this on Windows, go ahead and press the command ALT+Y, Yankee. If you’re on the mobile app, all you’ll need to do is double tap on the Raise Hand button. And then, finally, if you’ve dialed in and joined us via telephone, to raise your hand you’ll need to press the key sequence *9, back to back, *9. So one more reminder. Go ahead and let us unmute you. If you have your hand raised, we will call you by name and then unmute your mic. Otherwise it gets pretty circular. And then also don’t forget to leave your mic muted while others are asking questions because it can make it very hard for us to hear.
And when I say “us,” of course, I mean Glen Gordon and Eric Damery, my co-hosts, who are here with me right now. How are you guys doing?
GLEN GORDON: Feeling very relieved, actually.
RACHEL: Are you? This side of 2020?
GLEN: Yes, perhaps, that’s part of it. But the other part was I was wondering would we have a good turnout this week before Thanksgiving. And we have a nice roster of people, some of whom I don’t think have joined us live for FSOpenLine before. So, great to be here.
RACHEL: Yeah, I was pleased to see that participant list populate, as well. That was really good.
ERIC DAMERY: Yeah. Good evening, Rachel. Hi, Glen.
GLEN: Hi, Eric.
ERIC: Great to be back.
GLEN: And it’s great to have product released, all three of them, once again.
ERIC: Yes. We had a successful release, right on schedule. And already did one update for ZoomText. And we’ve got updates for all three just around the corner.
RACHEL: That’s right, coming up in December.
ERIC: Yeah. About two weeks out, maybe a little quicker. But we’ve been making some real good progress, and we’re thrilled with the feedback from the customers so far. It’s been very, very positive. And I think, you know, I got a lot of personal messages from people who were very pleased with how things went for them this year. So very, very motivated and excited about all the work the developers did.
GLEN: I think we’ve gotten some good feedback, too, on the new enhanced JAWS cursor, and lots of areas where you’d otherwise here “blank, blank, blank.” The new what we call the “Scan cursor,” the JAWS Scan cursor, for actually being able to review what may be visible on the screen, but you can’t necessarily tab to it. Makes it much easier than needing to use the touch cursor before.
ERIC: Yeah.
RACHEL: And if you’d like to know more about the Scan cursor, we are planning on blogging about it really soon. So if you don’t follow our blog, do that so you don’t miss that post. We’re going to go into more detail about that cursor.
ERIC: I would like to point out that one of the things that we talked about that was updated this year in the 2020 was the new training material. And for those who have taken a look and not found it all, it’s because all of it hasn’t gotten live yet. But I’m pretty much assured that we’ll have it all, all the books will be updated by Monday next week.
RACHEL: That is my understanding.
ERIC: Yeah. So if you have looked for the new training material, and I understand there’s been some very good feedback on the folks that have gone through it, watch for that. And all you’ll have to do is go to the Help menu, go to Training, go to the Table of Contents, and you’ll be able to – the book names are the same. But if you choose the book, had you installed it previously, it will now download the new one and update it, and you can check that out. So if you’re associated with training centers, or if you know trainers, make them aware that all the training material has now been updated.
GLEN: Am I correct that one of the things we’ve done is streamline it and make things a little more task oriented?
RACHEL: Oh, yes. It’s much simpler and shorter than the previous training, and more task-oriented, definitely. Tried to break it down into tasks. And we’re going to be adding more to that Table of Contents, breaking it down by different lengths of time that the tasks take and giving more information about each task, even in the Table of Contents. So just keep checking back on those books for updates.
ERIC: So can I suggest we get right to it with Richie, who’s had his hand up first? Richie, are you there? Oh, I got Mickey Quenzer. Richie, we’ll come back to you.
GLEN: Oh, Mickey Quenzer, a voice from the past.
ERIC: Mickey.
MICKEY: Hey, how’s it going?
ERIC: So for those of you who don’t know – can I introduce you, Mickey? For those of you who don’t know Mickey Quenzer. So one of the first people I met in this industry years ago was involved with Arkenstone and was one of the guys that used to help answer a lot of questions for me in understanding OpenBook when I was getting started. So Mickey, it’s wonderful to hear your voice.
MICKEY: Thanks. It’s good to be involved in the meeting. I just wanted to congratulate you guys on all the work that you’ve done. And recently there’s definitely lots of improvements. And I’ve, of course, you know how I am, I always have more suggestions. But it’s really – you guys have taken a really hard look at the products of JAWS and made it look/work a lot better than it has in a long time.
GLEN: Do you have a couple of areas that you’ve noticed have improved this go-round?
MICKEY: The thing that I appreciate the most is hitting TAB and not hearing “Tab.”
GLEN: The small things sometimes really make a big difference, don’t they.
MICKEY: Oh, yeah. It really, I mean, that little word, you know, thousands of times a day, literally, sometimes, you know, it actually saves time. So that’s – probably would say that. But I also – I feel that the speech is smoother than it was.
GLEN: Excellent.
ERIC: Yeah. I think it’s much more responsive. And Mickey, if you’ll pay attention, probably the January update will get some UI included. But we’re working on a solution that is going to lift a lot of the blank lines. So if you’re one who reads through web pages a line at a time as you down arrow through the web page and hear a lot of blank spaces with JAWS, you’ll notice those will go away, and we’ll have a setting in there for people to be able to turn it back on if they like it.
MICKEY: That’ll be really cool.
ERIC: Yeah, we’re continuing to look for any of those places where we can speed things up.
MICKEY: The other thing, one last thing, though, is I find, though, that it’s still repeating things. And if I need to be, you know, find a way to be more specific, we can do that later. But it’s still – it’s better, but it’s still repeating things after, you know, it says something, and then it says exactly the same thing again.
ERIC: Is this when your arrowing down on a web page, or just more generally when you’re tabbing between items?
MICKEY: Generally when you’re tabbing between items.
GLEN: Yeah. If you can find a couple of those? I try to be attentive; but, you know, as with anything, you get used to stuff.
MICKEY: Oh, yeah.
GLEN: I always notice, when I’m doing a presentation, all the warts because then I’m listening really carefully to try to observe when we’re saying too much.
MICKEY: Right.
GLEN: So if you notice some of these things and can point them out, we’ll do our best to take care of them.
MICKEY: Sounds good.
ERIC: Well, thanks, Mickey. It was wonderful to hear you. And I follow you on Facebook, so I do see you out there online all the time. So anyway, good to hear from you. Thanks.
MICKEY: Thank you.
ERIC: So I want to go and find Richie, who had his hand up first. Richie, are you with us?
RICHIE: Yes. I’m with you. What’s this deal with this new Microsoft Edge that’s coming out in 2020? I keep hearing it’s going to be all brand new. And what’s the deal with that new Microsoft Edge?
ERIC: Sure. So, Glen, you want to share a little bit about what’s going on with Microsoft and what they’ve done?
GLEN: So we’re really happy you asked this question, Richie, because it was on our minds as something to talk about tonight. So Microsoft, about four or five years ago, decided that they were going to reinvent web browsing, and they created their own browser that they called Edge. And it never really got the market share that they were hoping for. So about a year ago they said, “We’re going to base the new Microsoft Edge on the same platform, called Chromium, that surprisingly, Google Chrome is also based on.” So they’ve been working and having sort of preview releases come out over the last six or nine months. Finally, at the beginning of next year, they’re going to have an official release.
Most people who’ve tried it find it works just about the same as Chrome does with JAWS. There are a couple of anomalies with ZoomText at the moment, but they’re not keeping you from using it, they’re just preventing a couple of small items. But either way, it’s another alternative. Based on the same thing as Chrome, you’ll get the same functionality; some Microsoft-specific features, of course. But it’s going to be a much better experience than the Edge that’s been out there. Unfortunately, the name of the product remains the same, and it’s actually going to refer to two different versions for a while. But once we get over that, I think the general experience of using Microsoft Edge, the new version, is going to be great.
ERIC: Now, Glen, have you heard any details about how they’ll roll that out? Because from what I’ve been able to gather, it’s going to appear on Windows 10 for people. It’ll start to roll out to them around January 15th. And I’m assuming it’ll just replace the original Edge that was on your machine. So I think a lot of folks won’t even know. And I think that’s why they kept the name the same. And I think a lot of people just won’t recognize the difference.
GLEN: Oh, they will know. It’ll work a whole lot better.
ERIC: Well, it’ll work a lot better for people with access technology products. But I think there are a lot of sighted folks that didn’t mind the Edge experience. And I think they’re trying to mimic that as close as they can with the new one.
GLEN: Well, thank you, Richie. Appreciate you joining us again this month.
RICHIE: Thank you.
ERIC: All right. So let’s say hello to Deborah. Hello, Deborah Armstrong. How are you? I’m trying to unmute you.
GLEN: I just unmuted you, I think. Debee?
ERIC: Well, I unmuted Anil. Anil, are you there?
ANIL: Yes.
ERIC: Okay. Let’s start with you. I’ll figure out what’s wrong with Deborah.
ANIL: Okay. I want to know what’s happened with OpenBook. Is it continued to update? Or just you support for time being and bring back the features with JAWS?
ERIC: Yeah. That’s pretty much been it. We have not done updates on it. And when we came out with the updated OmniPage, that only went into the JAWS side. So we’ll continue to update OCR built into our technology. Probably will not improve the existing OpenBook, but it doesn’t mean we’ll rule out a new scanning and reading software program in the future. We just haven’t got it on the roadmap at this point.
GLEN: One of the big things that...
ANIL: My next question is I want to know what’s happened with new Office 365. I am facing sluggishness in Excel.
ERIC: So something is going on, and we should definitely get you connected with our tech support. Are you up to date on everything?
ANIL: Yes.
ERIC: Windows included?
ANIL: Yes.
ERIC: Yeah. So we should definitely have you talk to tech support because I was just in Excel doing some work today, as a matter of fact, in 365, and things are going very well.
GLEN: When did it last work for you, Anil?
ANIL: I am having it work well a month ago. And right now it’s normal when I enter any numbers. But when I am trying to enter formula, it’s very slow.
GLEN: That is a great clue. Because I bet you, Eric, you’re not entering a whole lot of formulas.
ERIC: I am not. Anil, maybe, if you’ll drop an email to me, edamery@vispero.com, I’m sending myself a note right now, and I’ll check on this, as well.
ANIL: Okay.
ERIC: I still can’t unmute Deborah.
DEBORAH: Yes, you can.
ERIC: Oh.
DEBORAH: Can you hear me now?
ERIC: I can hear you.
DEBORAH: So I have a visual question for you, Eric. And I apologize for the bad audio. I’m commuting, and it’s changeable. I work with a lot of sighted people who actually are the ones who train our blind JAWS users. And I’m curious if the new Scan cursor has any visual indication that it’s active. And I also want to know about any other visual indicators for the other cursors. What can I tell sighted people to help them so they don’t get so confused about the different cursors?
ERIC: Well, that’s a great question. And unfortunately, the news isn’t good. So there is not a visual indicator for them when they’re moving with the Scan cursor other than the mouse pointer hopefully is going to track in the vicinity. And I say “the vicinity” because it’s going to be around the element, but not necessarily exactly where you’re situated all the time.
GLEN: We probably could draw a box around the element.
ERIC: Yeah, and that would probably make some sense for us. And we certainly need that on the Fusion side anyway. So that’s an area that I think we’ve got to focus on this year.
DEBORAH: I think one area I’d like to see you really focus on, too, is finding ways to get sighted people more fired up about JAWS. In our college we do have a problem getting the sighted people who train JAWS to actually see it as a viable solution because they find it too complicated. And so because they don’t depend on it, they don’t really master it. And then that is bad communication for our blind students who may be new. And they’re confused, and the sighted trainer’s also confused.
GLEN: Do you think some of them would be willing to have like a focus group call with us?
DEBORAH: Possibly. I could certainly work on it. But I like the idea that you now have YouTube videos. I think that’s a start in the right direction. I’ve been trying to send links to those videos to our sighted trainers. Again, just anything we can do to fire them up and make them not think of it as something too complicated to master.
GLEN: That would be great. And I think, you know, I think hearing some of their first-hand perspectives, if they’re willing to talk, would help us because we’ve been dealing with this stuff for a long time. It’s easy for us. It’s not necessarily as easy for someone who doesn’t live and breathe it daily.
DEBORAH: Yeah.
ERIC: And Deborah, I also think, Deborah, making sure that those students are aware of the fact that they can get this stuff installed at home with the student-sponsored licenses, and expose them to that basic training material in the menu system so that our experts can help to teach them.
DEBORAH: Absolutely. And I think everybody out there, share that with people who are less experienced than you because they need to start learning on their own. And you take it one day at a time, you don’t have to find it overwhelming. One task at a time. The other tip I always tell people is listen to the training with something else. If you know your iPhone really well, then use your iPhone to listen to the training, or your Victor Reader Stream, and then you can be focused on just learning the task on your computer.
RACHEL: Absolutely.
ERIC: Yeah.
RACHEL: And one of the aspects of that issue that we’re looking at a lot in 2020 is really trying to make our non-visual products more sighted friendly. So that is something that we’re looking at and trying to just go at it at different angles and present things so that it’s not so confusing when it’s not completely visual.
DEBORAH: Thank you. Please mute me now.
GLEN: Thanks for calling, Debee. We did get a note from Richie while we were talking to Debee, asking how do you turn on the Scan cursor? And the truth of the matter is, you turn it on the same way you turn the JAWS cursor on. But if you’re in specific apps where the JAWS cursor wouldn’t normally work, starting with JAWS 2020, you have access to the Scan cursor. A good example of that would be the Store, the Microsoft Store; the weather app. I don’t know whether the news app still exists. Things like that, some of the modern apps, the modern settings screens. Experiment a little bit. Worse comes to worst, you’ll hear “blank.” But in many more situations now you’ll actually get meaningful content.
ERIC: Mikhail, I’ve unmuted you. Are you there?
MIKHAIL: Yes, I’m – can you hear me?
ERIC: Yes, we can. Go ahead.
MIKHAIL: So I have two related Excel questions. So they relate to the cell text visibility feature. This is the feature where JAWS tells you like if a cell is overlapping other cells, or if the contents are cropped. So my first question is, I noticed that it looks like this is just a workbook-specific setting. So I was wondering if you can confirm, can the setting be enabled globally for all Excel workbooks?
ERIC: That’s a good question, and I’m not sure about the answer to that. I think it is file specific; but I’m not positive, either. Rachel, I’m not sure if you know. This may be something that we would cover in one of the Excel webinars.
RACHEL: I am pretty sure it is file specific, and that there is not a global setting for that.
MIKHAIL: Is there any way to, with that setting enabled within an Excel spreadsheet, to bring up a list of cells that – basically where the cell content doesn’t all fit in the cell, or whether it’s cropped or overlapping, kind of to do like an easy quick check?
GLEN: We might be able to do that, actually, since we seem to have the technology to tell if the cell is cropped, which I thought went away with Office 2013. But I’m glad to see it’s working well.
MIKHAIL: Yeah, I mean, I think that that feature’s working pretty well. And if there were a way to do that, to bring up that list, that would be very helpful because otherwise the only way I can check if specific cells are cropped or overlapping or fine is by either going through each cell in the spreadsheet that has data or getting sighted assistance. So this would be a lot more efficient, if there were a tool like that to bring up such a list.
ERIC: All right. Thank you, Mikhail. And next let’s talk to Ryan. Ryan, are you there?
RYAN: I am. Can you guys hear me?
ERIC: Yes, we can.
RYAN: Great. Two quick questions. Are you guys still offering scriptwriting courses? And second question is, is there an ETA on the new ElBraille?
ERIC: So the second question let me answer first. Should be any moment on the ElBraille. We are anticipating that that thing is going to release. I don’t have an exact day at this point. But, boy, we’ve been anticipating it. And I have seen it, and I’m telling you, it’s worth it. It’s a great one.
RYAN: Excellent.
ERIC: And the first question, the scriptwriting training, Rachel, we don’t get a lot of call for it these days, and I don’t think we’ve been running any classes at our location. Do we still do anything onsite?
RACHEL: We’re not offering any courses. We do still have that “Basics of Scripting” book available. But I know a lot of people do want something more advanced than that. So we do have some other course content that we’ve been pointing people to. If you go ahead and send an email again to training@vispero.com, I can email you all of the other scriptwriting resources that Dan Clark has compiled. And he’s been sharing those with people as they write in and inquire about that.
RYAN: Okay. Yeah, I’ve looked at the script manual, and I was actually hoping to maybe actually have some onsite training or classes because that just might be a lot easier to grasp the concepts than trying to read through a manual.
RACHEL: Yeah, I can totally see that. And we do work with some contractors on that. So again, email us, and we can shoot you some contact info.
GLEN: Ryan, is this just for your own personal knowledge? Or do you have a task that you want to accomplish as a result of learning?
RYAN: We’ve started using a CRM software called Method. And they’ve got combo boxes where I can go into forms mode, and the box opens up, but I can’t access any of the dropdowns because they’re really not, I guess, they weren’t built accessible, unless I go out of forms mode. Then I can scroll up and down through. So I need to be able to move my mouse cursor to a certain location on the screen and then access those items. And I just think it would give me a lot more functionality in my day-to-day job.
GLEN: Makes good sense. Thank you very much.
ERIC: All right. Well, thank you, Ryan. Send an email in to Training, and we’ll see if we can’t get you connected with someone.
RYAN: Great. Thanks so much.
ERIC: So let’s see about Steve Cutway. Steve, you’re there.
GLEN: A belated Happy Birthday, Steve.
ERIC: I don’t think he’s hearing us. All right. Let’s try Michael.
MICHAEL: I have two questions and a request. My first question is that I have been experiencing problems in Windows 10 1903 update, when every time when I’m doing something, JAWS suddenly shuts off. Any idea what’s the problem with this, why this occurs?
ERIC: Are you doing the update and this is where JAWS is having the problem?
MICHAEL: No. My updates are completed. And when I’m doing something in Word, and when I’m exiting from Word, JAWS just shuts off. And I have to basically manually enable JAWS.
GLEN: Are you running JAWS 2019 or 2020?
MICHAEL: This is the 2020 – this is the 2019 release because this computer is covered by my school district.
GLEN: So I have an answer for you which will be unsatisfying.
MICHAEL: Okay.
GLEN: We have had a long and storied history with trying to deal with things like exiting Word. And we finally came up with a solution where, in those cases where you get a hang for a few seconds, we may not have entirely eliminated those, but we’ve improved that scenario a lot with JAWS 2020. So I don’t know exactly what’s causing your problem. But if it has to do with a hang when exiting Word, perhaps when the Save As dialog comes up, I think we’ve done a reasonable job of reducing the hangs. And if they do happen, they tend to be shorter.
MICHAEL: All right. Thank you. My second question is when is the, I mean, is it possible to integrate some OpenBook command to JAWS OCR when using PEARL?
GLEN: What commands in particular are you hoping for?
MICHAEL: Like in OpenBook, like when you press ALT+1 you open up Word. That way the stuff that was captured, that’s captured with PEARL and go directly into Word instead of in the result viewer.
GLEN: Have you tried selecting everything in the Results Viewer and then pasting it into Word?
MICHAEL: Yes.
GLEN: How well does that work?
MICHAEL: All that, you know, end up forming everything into tables, which I don’t appreciate, I’m sorry to say.
GLEN: You’re talking in terms of when you’ve scanned something with a PEARL camera using the JAWS OCR feature.
MICHAEL: Yes.
GLEN: Regardless of what it is, even if it’s not a table.
MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah.
GLEN: When you bring it into Word, it appears as a table.
MICHAEL: Yes.
RACHEL: And you can’t do a paste special to eliminate that?
MICHAEL: I can.
RACHEL: Okay.
MICHAEL: I can eliminate that, but it has happened to – it turns out that it skips too much lines in that view.
RACHEL: Yeah, it does do that a lot.
MICHAEL: The arrow key.
GLEN: Well, I think the answer is, and this is one of the things that’s been on our list to get done, is to be able to have JAWS automatically OCR directly into Word, rather than the Results Viewer.
MICHAEL: All right. Thank you.
GLEN: And I think that’s the answer, and that’s a feature we’ve just got to get to.
MICHAEL: All right, thank you. Thank you, Eric and Glen.
ERIC: Thank you, Michael.
MICHAEL: Thank you.
ERIC: All right. And Paul Hunt was on here. There you are, Paul. How are you, Paul?
PAUL: Doing okay, Eric. Can you hear me okay?
ERIC: Yes, we can.
PAUL: Good, good, good. Okay. I’ve got a couple questions for you. First of all, Rachel, you answered the question partly with Skim Reading. And I got the new exercise, I looked at it, and it worked very well.
RACHEL: Oh, I’m so glad.
PAUL: It seems to be working better because it seems like you might have been doing some work on Skim Reading because I noticed that in Word, with documents like the original Empowerment Zone document, that it would just either hang up or not work at all. It looks like it might be working a little better now. I’m hoping that you’ll update, not only the exercise on the Surf’s Up! page, but you’ll also have a Skim Reading – but you’ll also update that book. And by the way, those books usually are – the regular, the supplemental books are usually in the Table of Contents, as well. The laptop has always been there. So I don’t know why the user had trouble finding it. But I hope that, you know, Skim Reading’s a wonderful feature, and I hope that you continue to maintain that.
ERIC: Paul, can I ask a question?
PAUL: Sure.
ERIC: On Skim Reading, do you use it – how do you navigate? Do you go generally just by having it jump paragraph to paragraph and read the beginning? Or do you set it up to look for phrases?
PAUL: I do both.
ERIC: Okay.
PAUL: I do both. I teach people to – I’m a trainer. So I teach people to have it look for phrases, different rules. So I take them through the whole process, and I want people to be able to do it all.
ERIC: That’s great. I know it is, it’s a fantastic...
PAUL: It’s a great tool.
ERIC: ...feature for people who are looking for a lot of material that they’re trying to jump through.
GLEN: That’s one of those sleeper features.
PAUL: Yeah, but it’s great. My other question is I have Fusion. I use Fusion because my wife uses ZoomText as well as JAWS. And so we have a Fusion license. And I am not sure of the update workflow. Here’s the problem. You’ve got three different products. You’ve got the Fusion update; you’ve got the JAWS update; you’ve got the ZoomText update. What is the proper procedure to follow when updating?
ERIC: So let me...
PAUL: It’s not clear.
ERIC: Yeah. So what we try and accomplish whenever we do a release is we try and release all three products. And if you update as Fusion, you’re getting the latest JAWS and the latest ZoomText at the same time. You’ll get them both. Now, after we released 2020, we did an update just of ZoomText, and you would only be aware of that update for ZoomText if you ran as ZoomText. So if you tried to do an update of Fusion, I don’t think you got it. But that was an unusual update. We don’t generally just do the one product.
PAUL: Well, see what I usually do, I have Fusion. But Eric, what I usually do is run JAWS. Usually I don’t run Fusion unless I need – unless I want to do something in Fusion. I mean, let’s face it, it’s a good attempt. It works probably okay. But there is overhead with Fusion that you don’t have with JAWS. So I don’t run Fusion unless I need it.
ERIC: Yeah, absolutely.
PAUL: And the problem is, if I go – running JAWS, I get a message that there’s a JAWS update. What is the procedure I’m meant to follow? Am I actually to go into Fusion and look for a Fusion update?
ERIC: Not at all.
PAUL: Or am I just to update the JAWS, just update whatever...
ERIC: No, you can just update the JAWS. And when you run Fusion the next time, it’ll have that JAWS update. And what will happen, if you didn’t update the ZoomText yet, when you run Fusion it’ll say there’s an update for you, but it will only be getting the ZoomText version.
PAUL: Okay. Because I actually did get the update. I just got the update through ZoomText. So that worked. But those are my two questions. I just really appreciate the response that you gave me on the Skim Reading and all that kind of stuff, you guys, and I’m looking forward to the new training.
ERIC: That’s great.
RACHEL: Good deal.
ERIC: All right.
GLEN: Hey, thank you, Paul.
ERIC: Thank you, Paul.
GLEN: We got a couple of a written questions from Jessica Dale. And I was thinking it might be good to address them because I don’t think she really wants to have her voice on the program. One of them is how do you turn off the labels of keys? We’ve turned the TAB key off by default, but a lot of the other special keys sometimes speak. Eric, I know you’ve walked people through this before. Can we point out the general spot where that happens?
ERIC: You know, that’s something I used to show in presentations all the time because I wanted to teach people how to turn off the ENTER key and the TAB key. And now you’ve caught me off guard, and I can’t remember the exact steps. But having said that, I think if you go to the support page, that Freedom Scientific home page under Support, and go to Technical Support, in the search field type in “silence tab key,” and you’ll find the instructions to go into key labels. That’s the name of the feature. I believe you can get to it in the settings center. If you search for key labels, you’ll probably find it there, and that’s where you go into the feature to be able to find the keys that you want to silence.
GLEN: Excellent.
ERIC: And if she sends me an email, I’ll point here right to the right place: edamery@vispero.com. Just remind me about key labels, and I’ll send you the instructions. Did she have another one?
GLEN: The other one had to do with our FSCast tip about how you could actually enable links in selected emails. No, no, not enable links. Enable pictures. Enable graphics to be downloaded. Do you know the tip I’m talking about?
ERIC: I do. That was one that Deborah Armstrong actually had given us. And I would point you back to the FSCast that came out last – earlier this month, or was it last month, I think, where that tip was included.
RACHEL: Right, and her question is specifically how to do that en masse, I think, not just for an individual. Because I guess she does it a lot for her work.
ERIC: I see, for all email.
RACHEL: So go ahead and send an email to Training. We do try to work with you on those tasks and give some step-by-step instructions. So send us an email to training@vispero.com, and we’ll try to work it out.
ERIC: And if I can, I just want to let everyone know so that we’ve started something new on the FSCast with Power Tips. And if you’ve got something that you use that others would benefit from, you can send those in to the FSCast guys. And we go through them, and each month we’re going to try and pull someone that has submitted something out and get them listed on the FSCast, and you’ll win a half an SMA. You’ll get a free year. If you’re on the Home Annual Licenses, you’ll get a free year of Home Annual License applied to your serial number. So it’s a good place to send something in. You never know what’ll happen. And I know there’s a good one coming up this month, so.
Let’s try and get back to Steve Cutway. Steve, are you there now?
STEVE: Can you hear me this time?
ERIC: We hear you.
GLEN: We can.
ERIC: Loud and clear. Go ahead.
STEVE: My apologies. Glen’ll appreciate this. I’m using a new audio interface, and Zoom hadn’t selected it.
GLEN: I feel your pain.
STEVE: Thanks very much for your good wishes, Glen. I could hear you guys just fine. And, yeah, it was a milestone, as you probably heard. So 70 years old, man.
GLEN: Oh, I thought you were 90.
STEVE: Thank you. Thank you.
GLEN: You’re welcome.
STEVE: Thank you very much.
GLEN: Any time.
STEVE: So first of all, I would like to commend you on the new JAWS Scan cursor. I’m impressed with how well it works on modern Windows 10 apps like the calculator.
GLEN: Excellent.
STEVE: Just one, I have one thing, and I want to just comment then on the Windows update issue. I think the gentleman who was having issues with it, you certainly do give lots of progress as to what’s going on. I just did the Windows update from 1903 to 1909. And I don’t know if you guys have done them. You probably have. It’s never gone so smoothly, I mean, it takes like five minutes because of course the cores are identical in the two operating systems. So they’re really not changing much.
GLEN: Yeah, never took five minutes for me. You probably have an in to the folks in Redmond.
STEVE: Well, I don’t know. But, no, from 1903 to 1909 because all they did was they actually downloaded the updates in the October 8th update. They just didn’t turn them on until you actually run this enablement package.
GLEN: Oh, okay.
STEVE: So it literally takes, I mean, I did two machines in about 10 minutes. But anyway, I had no problem hearing what was going on, and I have not had any problem. If anything, it’s too verbose in the sense that, if you can tab away from it, from the list, if you’re in the Windows update list that shows those 10 items, you’ll hear it. If you don’t want to hear it, you’ve got to tab probably out to the search box, you know, that’s in every settings window there.
Anyway, I would like to add my voice to Deborah’s. And Rachel, I certainly would be happy to help if I could, but I deal with sighted people trying to use JAWS, as well, or trying to understand it. And I think one of the deficiencies is they really cannot see in a way that makes sense to them what we’re hearing. And of course the most notable, I suppose, place that is, is on the web.
And I remember talking to Dan Clark several years ago about this. And I think you address it in Fusion because I think you get that visual indication, don’t you, in Fusion, about where people know. But I know people will say “I have no idea where you are.”
ERIC: Well, and we’ve tried to...
STEVE: Because of what the virtual cursor’s doing. And I understand what the issue is. But I think it’s really tough. And of course it’s a paradigm, too, that’s very different for sighted people. And Eric, you are one of the few that really gets it, and it’s always impressed me. But it’s tough. And I appreciate from the sighted person’s perspective that it’s really tough.
ERIC: We have tried to address that now in later versions of JAWS. So if you go into IE or Chrome or even Firefox now, and as you’re navigating with JAWS, like when you’re moving by headings, there is a green box that we’re drawing around the heading that you’ve moved to.
STEVE: Correct. Correct.
ERIC: And when you move down through the virtual buffer a line at a time, we can’t get exactly the line that you would move to because we’re actually maybe over a line and a half or two. So it selects or puts it around a block of text, and so you’re not exactly seeing the exact word being read. But you are seeing the general vicinity where you’re located.
STEVE: Okay. I’ll point that out to them because nobody had actually – I knew that it worked, that it worked with tab, and it worked with headings. But I didn’t realize the line by line. But I do think that that is certainly, you know, it’s that whole comp paradigm. It’s tough for sighted people.
ERIC: Yeah. And this is an area that, you know, I’ve always, unfortunately, we have just so many beta testers and developers who are not necessarily seeing any of it, so that’s not something that gets raised by them too often. And I try and voice how important that is, and we do try and get as much of that in there as we can.
STEVE: It’s probably most notable in the education sector, too.
ERIC: Absolutely, yeah.
STEVE: Yeah.
ERIC: All right.
STEVE: Keep up the good work, guys.
GLEN: Thank you, Steve.
ERIC: Thank you, Steve.
STEVE: And Rachel. And Rachel, you, too.
RACHEL: Thank you so much.
ERIC: Thanks, Steve.
GLEN: We got a question in chat from someone who needs to use Zoom a lot because she is the president or at least actively involved with the Committee of Blind Citizens in Ontario, Canada, I suppose. Rachel, we have a Zoom training session; do we not?
RACHEL: We do. It’s just about, I think, 15 or 20 minutes. And you can download it or stream it if you go to FreedomScientific.com/webinars. It’s archived there. And, yeah, let us know if you have any trouble accessing it. And it should walk you through the basics. There are some more advanced things that you’ll need to know if you’re going to be hosting meetings. But once you master those basics, if you still have questions or want to go further, send us an email.
ERIC: Rachel, if somebody is going to be hosting meetings, is that something where Brian Hartgen’s additional scripts could be beneficial?
RACHEL: Absolutely. So we’ve built in the functionality to mute announcements and things into JAWS, which was the functionality of Brian’s basic Zoom scripts. But he still has those professional-level scripts that are really nice if you’re going to be hosting meetings and webinars.
ERIC: Yeah, that’s Hartgen.org, H A R T G E N dot org. And the Training Department can point you to him, as well.
So listen, maybe we can sneak two in here before we’re done. How about Abraham?
ABRAHAM: Two questions. First one, will you be adding better support for the application Wireshark, which is used by people in technology to read TCP tracing?
GLEN: It is a question that’s come up multiple times before, and I personally have an interest in it. I have interest in more than things than I have time. But it is something that I hope to be able to actually make some headway on in the next six to nine months, in 2020. It’s my 2020 New Year’s Resolution. It’s interesting because this has come up on four or five FSOpenLines now. People have asked about Wireshark. So it’s clear that, for people who want to do computer administration or forensics, this is the tool.
ABRAHAM: Okay. Thanks. Second question is my company and a lot of companies are using Slack for, for lack of a better word, direct messaging other people and teams. Will you guys be providing any education or training material to more efficiently work with Slack? And will you also provide better support for Slack?
RACHEL: You know, that’s a great question. Why don’t you send us an email and tell us about what you’re doing with Slack, and that you’d like to see training in that. We don’t get a lot of requests for that. We do get a lot of requests for training on teams and more educational content in that area. And I have...
ABRAHAM: Will do.
RACHEL: Go ahead.
ABRAHAM: No, sorry, go ahead.
RACHEL: I haven’t had much problem using Slack on the web interface, but I have not used the desktop app. Which are you using?
ABRAHAM: I’m using the desktop app. And the main issue I’m having is when we create custom apps or what Slack calls “bots.” They appear in tables and text. If I’m scrolling down, it says “Cannot read.” But if I scroll up, then it can read the text.
GLEN: That’s a really interesting question. This may be something that has a technical solution.
ABRAHAM: I hope so.
GLEN: So I was going to say, if you write to Training, and we get a better idea of the kinds of thing you’re doing, if at all possible, if we can replicate the situation, we’ll have some hope of being able to solve it.
ABRAHAM: Sounds great. Thank you.
RACHEL: Have you tried that on the web interface? I’m just curious.
ABRAHAM: Web interface, it’s kind of clunky and hard to move around.
RACHEL: It is. It is a lot more navigation.
ABRAHAM: Yeah, with the desktop app there’s a lot of great shortcut keys which I can easily move around. And for the most part, it works great. It’s just for a few quirks here and there which makes it annoying to use.
RACHEL: All right.
ERIC: All right. Well, thank you, Abraham.
RACHEL: Thanks.
GLEN: Have we tried Galaxy Prime Plus? Or have we done that already?
ERIC: No, we haven’t. Galaxy Prime Plus. Are you with us?
GALAXY: Are you able to hear me?
ERIC: We are.
GLEN: We are.
GALAXY: Oh, wow, I’m thankful that I’m on FSCast.
RACHEL: Yeah, thank you for being so patient to ask your question.
GALAXY: Thanks very much, Rachel. It’s a question/request. Can we have a training on how to access another computer from mine? Like is it JAWS Tandem or something like that?
RACHEL: You’d like to see more training on JAWS Tandem?
GALAXY: Yeah, I would like to have a training on that.
RACHEL: So what are you using it for?
GALAXY: One of my friends wants me to help him with his computer, like to set up some things. So we needed to know how we connect to his computer from mine.
RACHEL: Right.
ERIC: And is your friend a JAWS user, as well?
GALAXY: Yeah, he is.
ERIC: Okay.
RACHEL: Well, start off by sending us an email because sometimes waiting for us to put the training in the queue is a bit of a wait. So send us an email, and we’ll work with you to get some step-by-step instructions, training at Vispero.com.
GALAXY: All right. Thanks very much. We’ll definitely do that.
RACHEL: Thank you.
ERIC: Okay. Well, thank you. And folks, if you wouldn’t mind, we’ve got one more. Jacob has been waiting patiently. Jacob, we’re going to sneak you in. You’re the last one.
JACOB: Okay. I’ve just got a really quick question. So I’ve noticed when I use Office 2010 Outlook and stuff, it seems delayed. Do you recommend updating to, like, 365?
ERIC: That’s an easy one. I’ve got it. Glen, I’ll take this one. Jacob, the answer is yes. Update to 365.
JACOB: Because, like, when I open up emails and stuff, it hangs and then finally will say – it’ll, like, I have to arrow down in order to get it to read what I want it to do.
ERIC: Yeah. Are you on Windows...
JACOB: Sometimes it – yeah, I’m using Windows 10, and I’m using the latest one. I just thought maybe 2010 is getting so out of date that it would probably...
ERIC: It is, it is.
JACOB: Yeah, people can use Word and stuff, but Outlook seems to be sort of sluggish.
ERIC: Yeah. Make the leap. You’ll be pleasantly happy and pleased that you’ve done it, and you’ll put 2010 behind you.
JACOB: Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. That’s what I was thinking because, like I said, I put 2020 on here, and I have the latest, you know, the latest updates. So I was just quickly checking.
ERIC: Yeah.
GLEN: Microsoft has made thousands of accessibility improvements, literally thousands.
JACOB: Yes. Yeah.
GLEN: Accessibility improvements in Office 365 over the last three or four years.
JACOB: Yeah. So that’s kind of what I was thinking. But I just wanted your opinion, just make sure I wasn’t, like, completely losing it, either.
GLEN: Well, you might be, but not about that.
JACOB: Might be. I might be, but not about that.
ERIC: Come back and let us know.
JACOB: I will. I will. I will. Thank you very much. And have a good night, you guys.
ERIC: Thanks, Jacob.
GLEN: You, too.
ERIC: Oop, I hung up on him quick there. Well, thank you, Rachel; and thank you, Glen. I appreciate we went a little long, and I apologize. But we got everybody in.
RACHEL: Yeah, we did.
GLEN: It was fun. And it was a good group, really good group of calls tonight.
RACHEL: It was. Thanks for everybody who hung out and waited so long to get their questions answered. We really appreciate it.
GLEN: And we’ve set the schedule for FSOpenLines in 2020; right?
RACHEL: Yes.
ERIC: I think it’s going to be easy. It’s the fourth...
RACHEL: It’s February. It’s the last Thursday in February.
ERIC: Yup. Last Thursday of the month – February, May, August, and in November we’ll do it the third.
RACHEL: That’s absolutely correct.
ERIC: Yeah, I remembered.
RACHEL: So in 2020 we’ll be back for FSOpenLine in February, May, August, and November.
ERIC: Fantastic.
GLEN: Thank you all for joining us.
ERIC: And watch for those updates coming out over the next two weeks. You’ll see updates for 2020 and 2019. So watch for both.
RACHEL: And updates for basic training. Thanks, everybody.
ERIC: That’s right. Thank you. Good night.
RACHEL: Good night.
GLEN: Good night.