RACHEL BUCHANAN: Thank you for joining us for FSOpenLine, Freedom Scientific’s global call-in show. And I normally go through the details of how to ask us questions on Zoom, but today our FSOpenLine is being hosted on Clubhouse. This isn’t a permanent change, but we are giving it a go. So I guess we can introduce the other people onstage with me, which are my colleagues Eric Damery, Matt Ater, and soon to be Glen Gordon. So how are you guys doing?
MATT ATER: I’m doing great. This is Matt Ater, so that’s my voice.
ERIC DAMERY: And this is Eric Damery, and we’re so glad to be here with everybody. We haven’t done it in the evening for a while, but this is always good. We get a different group of people. And while we generally schedule an hour, I know we’re going to be here for a little longer than that tonight. So you’ll have some questions. You’ll be able to raise your hands. The way we really kind of run FSOpenLine is we try and get as many of your questions in as possible. We bring a few topics to the table, and we’ll certainly talk about those. But this is your time to ask the questions, and we’ll try and come up with the answers. Now, Glen joined us. Now he’s disappeared. Oh, there he is.
MATT: It’s probably the Internet. There he is.
GLEN GORDON: It’s great to be here. The one thing I did want to mention upfront, and that is that it is the ninth year of the WebAIM screen reader survey. And I presume that many people who are listening to this and participating use a screen reader. Just a thought. I might be wrong. So if you’re in that category, it would be great if you’d fill it out. And I think if you search for WebAIM Survey #9, like the Beatles’ Revolution #9, you will find it.
ERIC: Yeah, especially if you use JAWS. So I’ve invited a couple of people up onstage. We’ll call on you, and we’ll take you in order, if that’s okay. And I want to start with Rylan Vroom.
RYLAN VROOM: Ah, very close, Eric. It’s Rylan. It’s funny how many people miss the L.
ERIC: Rylan, sorry. Sorry, I missed that.
RYLAN: Oh, no worries. So my question was around braille displays. I’m a heavy user of braille displays. And the only Focus I have is a 14, and I love the multilayer commands that JAWS seems to have natively with the Focus. And I’m wondering if it’s at all possible to achieve similar functionality with, say, my VarioUltra 40 or my Humanware BI X.
GLEN: Are you talking about the ability to enter Windows key combinations? Is that what you’re meaning by the...
RYLAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. That kind of thing, like the full control of a computer.
GLEN: So we consider that to be a little bit proprietary to our displays. There’s nothing that’s preventing the other display vendors who have drivers from implementing that on their own. But we did some custom work for the Focus in that driver, which is why there’s the support currently. But point taken.
RYLAN: Awesome. Yeah, no, it’s, you know, and I love the Focus. It’s just, you know, depending on where you live in the world, the governments may not allow you to access one braille display over another. And so that’s why I bring it up.
GLEN: You sound like you may say “about.”
RYLAN: I do say “about.”
RACHEL: That was my guess, as well.
ERIC: Well, thank you, Rylan.
RYLAN: Thank you for having me.
ERIC: Yeah. And how about Sean Whalen?
SEAN WHALEN: Hey, good evening. How are you all doing?
ERIC: Very good. How are you?
SEAN WHALEN: I’m good, thank you. So I actually kind of just jumped into this room moments ago. Is this – I think my question might be a little specific to me, but not completely. Is this an appropriate place for something like that?
ERIC: Yeah, we’ll be the judge of that. Go ahead and ask.
RACHEL: Yeah. Go ahead.
SEAN: So I’m running the most recent version of JAWS, and I’m just running into a recurring problem inside of Word, navigating with the Quick Keys. So once I turn the Quick Keys mode on, it’s exclusively a problem related to navigating by bookmark. If I’m going forward through the document by bookmark, it works just fine. But when I try to move backwards by bookmark, it just takes me immediately to the last bookmark in the document and gets stuck on that. It’s like basically SHIFT+B, the only thing it can do is take me to the last bookmark in the document. And it’s something I’ve talked to folks on the support line about, and they basically say it’s not replicated. They haven’t heard of it. But I’ve got it going on on, like, three different machines with two different JAWS licenses, different versions of Office. It just seems unbelievable to me that I’m the only one.
ERIC: When you say different versions of Office, is this 365 subscription?
SEAN: So one place where I’m running it is the 365 subscription. One is a 2016 download and install. And one is I believe a downloaded and installed not running the web-based version of 365.
ERIC: Yeah. And you say that moving forward seems to work okay. And any time you try and go back with the SHIFT key you get to the last one.
SEAN: Right, takes me right to the last bookmark in the document, regardless of how many there are, regardless of where I am when I press it. Yeah. I’m a heavy bookmark user is the reason I’m big on navigating Word documents by bookmark, and it just becomes a real issue for me.
ERIC: I’m happy to have you send me an email with an attached document where you have the problem with the steps. Let me see if I can reproduce it and make sure it gets logged. If I can’t, I’ll bring some other people in, and we’ll see if we can figure it out.
SEAN: That would be highly appreciated, and it’s great to have an opportunity to connect with you so directly like this. Where would I send that email?
ERIC: You can send it to edamery@vispero.com.
SEAN: All right. Beautiful. I’ll do that in the next couple days here.
ERIC: Very good.
SEAN: All right. Thanks a lot.
ERIC: Thanks. Unless, Glen, if you had any ideas. I’m thinking this is just one we’ve got to reproduce.
GLEN: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like it’s a problem at our end. You’ve done everything you can to sort of prove that. And so you come across as a very credible witness.
RACHEL: Yeah, thanks for popping in and asking your question.
ERIC: Yup. And how about next can we get Ali Fahad?
ALI FAHAD: Thank you, first of all, for inviting me. This is my first participation in Clubhouse initial. I have two concerns. One is about YouTube, and one is about the notification chevron button which is called at a system tray for the JAWS special command like INSERT+F11, I think. When we move to seek slider in YouTube, so we press SPACEBAR, and it automatically shifts a long way. For example, if the video is of 29 minutes or 30 minutes. And when the time is 00, I press SPACE on the seek slider, it automatically switches to 10 minutes, 15 seconds; or 15 minutes, 18 seconds.
And my second concern is sometimes we press WINDOWS+B to move the notification chevron button. And sometimes it does not read the icons in proper basis. For example when I switch to Freedom Scientific Microphone using your – Freedom Scientific Voice Assistant is using your microphone. And suddenly it says JAWS for Windows. And that’s when I move to my Internet connection, it suddenly switches to say you can safely remove your device, so that sort of stuff.
ERIC: So on the chevron button, I don’t know the exact answer to the problem. But one of the things I advise people is to avoid having to deal with the overflow, which is what the chevron button takes you to as an overflow for your system tray.
Now, this can easily be remedied if you open your Start Menu, type the word Select, and you’ll find something that talks about being able to select all items in your system tray. That’s the thing that’ll come up. You press ENTER on that, you land on a button that says always show me everything in the system tray. You hit SPACEBAR on that button, and then ALT+F4 out of it, and you’re done. And now that chevron button’s gone, and you can move to your system tray, and you should be able to cycle through all the items or, better yet, INSERT+F11 in JAWS will put them all in a list.
So one more time. I think open the Start Menu. Type the word Select. Press ENTER. When that comes up, press SPACEBAR on that item. And you’re done. And the chevron button will be gone, and you won’t have to deal with it.
GLEN: The one other thing to check for is, if your mouse happens to be down in that system tray area, if you use the PC cursor to move back and forth, the mouse is going to sort of win. And so even if you move the PC cursor, it says, “Oh, the mouse is sitting on this other icon. Let me announce it.” So moving the mouse away from the system tray might be another thing to look into if you find that what Eric suggests doesn’t fully solve it.
ALI: So Glen, your point is valuable for those who use mouse. I do not use mouse on my desktop. In fact, I did not plug the wire of my mouse because I normally use keyboard.
GLEN: But JAWS still – tell me if I’m wrong, Eric or Matt, who can see this.
ERIC: I think you’re right. There’s still a mouse on the screen.
GLEN: There’s still a mouse on the screen. You just can’t control it with a physical mouse. But there is a mouse pointer, and it sometimes can get moved there. And, you know, just...
ALI: It’s a very valuable point. It’s a very valuable point. So Glen, can you just tell me, even I do not use touchscreen? So where can we find that sort of mouse you are talking about?
GLEN: So if you press the dash key on the number pad, you’ll hear it say “JAWS cursor.” And the JAWS cursor...
ALI: Yeah, definitely.
GLEN: The JAWS cursor actually is linked to the mouse, even if you don’t have a physical mouse on the screen. So if you move the JAWS cursor and make sure that it’s moved away from that bar, that may be a good way to perhaps solve this, as well, or solve a different part of the problem.
MATT: I would like to clarify, Glen, that every computer’s still going to have the mouse on the screen no matter what. So plug one in or not, there’s going to be one. This is Matt speaking. So just want to make sure you guys knew that. So that’s why I think turning that dash on and then maybe pressing the UP ARROW, as Glen said, or is it the 8 on the number pad, that would move it out of the way.
GLEN: And we probably should start doing that ourselves automatically. When you’re down on that bar, make sure that the mouse isn’t there.
ERIC: Yeah, good point.
ALI: Okay. Thanks, sir, for your valuable feedback. Can you move ahead to YouTube seek slider?
MATT: They use a lot of hotkeys in YouTube. So I would try using their hotkeys. So you would have to turn the virtual cursor off.
RACHEL: That was my suggestion.
MATT: And then K will play and pause the video, okay, from anywhere. So it’s not going to use your Quick Nav keys; okay? And then I don’t know the exact number, so Rachel, you’re going to have to correct me if I’m wrong.
RACHEL: I think it’s like 10 to 15 seconds.
MATT: No, but you can type the number 1, and it’s going to go one minute forward; right? And 2 will go two minutes forward.
RACHEL: Oh, yeah. I don’t know. I’m not that cool. I use the...
MATT: There is a, yeah, there’s a sequence for that. So K will play and pause.
RACHEL: J goes back.
MATT: I don’t know.
RACHEL: Yeah, J is back and L is forward. So you can fast forward and rewind with J and L.
MATT: Okay, good.
RACHEL: That’s what I use a lot.
MATT: I didn’t know that.
ALI: Okay. I got the point. So is there any training video on the YouTube channel of Freedom Scientific to how to turn the virtual cursor off and then use YouTube properly?
MATT: We’ll check. There are some YouTube videos. I’m not sure if they taught that. There are some YouTube videos on how to use YouTube. But send an email to training and request that, and it’s training@vispero.com.
RACHEL: But I can tell you two steps where you can get a list of the commands, if you’d like to look at a list of them. You want to toggle off the virtual cursor with INSERT+Z. And then press the question mark, and it will bring up a list of all of the native YouTube commands.
ALI: Okay, thank you. Thank you to all.
RACHEL: Yeah.
ERIC: All right. So how about Rob Slief?
ROB SLIEF: Good evening, everyone. A couple of things. I was online last week, and I heard Glen talk about those individuals who were having difficulty accessing the emoji panel. And Glen, you said something about the startup setting?
GLEN: Do you have Start Menu Out of Process enabled?
ROB: Where would I find that?
GLEN: If you go into Settings Center by pressing the JAWS KEY and 6 on the number row, and search for – I think Start Menu will find it for you. And it’ll say something about Access Start Menu Out of Process. Now, this is a double-edged sword because, if you do have it on, you probably turned it on because you were having problems accessing the Start Menu. But that we just realized is incompatible with our support for the emoji panel. And so I would be interested in knowing if you have that option on because at least that’ll tell us if we’re on the right path. And then maybe we can pursue offline, but pursue nevertheless whether or not turning that off we can get the Start Menu back in the more traditional way we support it.
ROB: Okay. Now, here’s the real reason I phoned in. I am an intense Excel user, particularly with financial statements where we are comparing actual to budget. And there’s a variance column where often the number is negative. So I’ve turned down my punctuation to minimum level. I use some. What I’m doing is I’m setting up a conditional cell so that, if the number is negative, it either changes the font color or the background color. And what I’m trying to do is set up a speech and sound scheme where JAWS will automatically announce if the background or font color changes from the default. And Dennis was kind enough to send me sort of how you go about setting a Speech and Sound Scheme. But it’s not detailed enough. I end up going down this rabbit hole and cannot figure out for the life of me how I get that to work.
MATT: If you email training, we’ll schedule time with you to work that out, okay, because we’d love to solve that problem because this is something that can be done.
ROB: Oh, wonderful.
MATT: And so why don’t we do that. And that’ll be the easiest way. So training@vispero.com. And what was your name again?
ROB: My name is Rob.
MATT: Rob, okay. Just in case 17 other people email and say the same thing, I want to make sure that Rachel and I watch for that email coming in. This is Matt speaking. So Rachel will work with scheduling time with me to work with you on that. So this is one of the greatest features of JAWS, and it’s still a very complex feature. So I get that it’s hard. But we should be able to make that work.
ROB: Thank you so much, Matt. And I appreciate you inviting me to comment tonight. Thank you so much.
GLEN: Hey, thanks, Rob.
MATT: Not a problem. Thank you.
ERIC: Laurie L.?
LAURIE: Yes, good evening, Eric, Glen, Rachel, and Matt. I really appreciate it. I’ve been a long-time JAWS user for 21 years. So, okay. First question. With regard to Microsoft Word, I’ve noticed all of a sudden when I’m working in a document – I’m a legal transcriptionist. And it doesn’t seem to matter what document I’m working in in Microsoft Word. But I’m working in a document, and all of a sudden I’ll hear something like – JAWS will all of a sudden announce – and I’m wondering if it’s a bubble or something that appears and then disappears on the screen. Create an interactive timeline or outline of your document, if that makes any sense.
MATT: They put like little bubbles on the top corners of the screen sometimes to kind of inform you of features.
LAURIE: Okay. Okay.
MATT: Because they want you to use them based on something, some action you’ve taken. They assume you want to use that feature.
GLEN: So I have a theory, which may be completely off, is that these are coming through as UIA notification events. And if you don’t mind missing whatever other UI notification events are coming through in Word, because at the moment it’s a binary switch, when you’re in Word, you can hit JAWS KEY+6 on the number row and search for Notifications in Settings Center. And I think UIA Notifications is going to be what comes up. Uncheck it and see if the problem goes away.
LAURIE: Okay. Okay.
GLEN: We are keenly aware of this problem, that there’s a little bit of a fire hose effect with what Microsoft is deciding to announce through these notifications. And there currently isn’t a way to have granular control. It is something that we’re thinking about making easier and possible to turn off selected ones.
LAURIE: Right.
GLEN: I don’t know if that’ll help, but at least it’s worth trying.
LAURIE: No, I’m definitely going to give that a try. You know what, I do have another question, but I will have to come back because my daughter just ran off.
GLEN: Uh-oh.
ERIC: All right.
LAURIE: Yeah.
RACHEL: Go handle that. We’ll be here.
GLEN: I don’t think we’ve talked to anyone tonight that we’ve ever talked to before on FSOpenLine, which is exactly what we were hoping for.
MATT: I think the next guy we’ve all talked to. But maybe not on FSOpenLine.
GLEN: That’s because I jinx it.
MATT: There’s Daniel. I mean Matthew.
MATTHEW: A very good evening to everybody, and a very, very bright and early good morning from the U.K. I don’t actually, well, I sort of have a question. But I actually came up to share some dubious knowledge. I’m not sure that Rylan is still in the room. But if he wants to emulate Windows keystrokes with the Brailliant BI 40 or the BI 40X, that is implemented in the driver, and it does work. I don’t know about the VarioUltra. But it works for the Brailliant.
The question that I had was a very brief one. Have you had reports in since introducing the new Outlook feature of Quick Keys not switching off properly? So I’ll be in an email, reading it. And I’ll go to reply, and my Quick Keys will be on. And I’m sure I didn’t turn them on.
MATT: This is my hated feature, Matthew. It’s a bad feature. It’s not a feature, it’s a bug. And I’ve sent in a bug report; and you should, as well. This is Matt speaking. Because I’ve reproduced it. I’ve sent the bug report. We need to solve this one because it’s a mess.
MATTHEW: Yeah, yeah. This is the problem. I can’t reproduce it. So far it’s random, which is why I haven’t sent anything in.
MATT: I can reproduce it if I hit CTRL+R from the inbox without opening the email.
GLEN: And that’s how I respond to all my mail, and it never happens. It absolutely never happens.
RACHEL: Me, as well. Never happens to me. And that’s how I respond all day long.
MATTHEW: Well, look. As long as I’m not the only person to have the problem, I will stop trying to solve it.
MATT: I’ve sent the bug in. I had this several years back, when this happened. And I do not know what’s happening. But I can make it happen right now. I can just swing over to my computer and do it. It’s no problem.
MATTHEW: Yeah, okay. That’s fine. As long as...
GLEN: So Matthew, do you think this is new? Is this new for you with the latest update? Because it...
MATT: It happened in April for me. This is Matt.
GLEN: Okay.
MATTHEW: You see, I can’t remember exactly when it started. But I only noticed it a couple of weeks ago, which would tie in – when did the update come out? I can’t remember.
MATT: Last week.
MATTHEW: Yeah, like it’s recent enough that I would be reasonably certain that it’s with either this update or the update before. But most likely this update.
GLEN: Now, I talked to another developer who was looking at this problem recently. And what I can’t remember is did he sneak it in right before the May update? Or is it slated for July? Because he did make a change. And so tomorrow I’m going to call and ask him if his change made the May update.
MATTHEW: And interestingly, if it did make the May update, then it’s made it worse because it worked absolutely flawless for me before the May update. So actually reverting it would probably fix it for me.
GLEN: Yeah.
MATT: I’m glad I’m not the only one right now, so that I can prove that it’s just not my computer.
MATTHEW: That’s fine. As long as I’m not the only one, I’m happy just to sort of keep turning Quick Keys off.
RACHEL: Misery loves company.
MATTHEW: Yeah. There you go. Thanks very much, everyone.
GLEN: Cool, thanks.
RACHEL: All right.
ERIC: All right. So can we try Deborah?
DEBORAH: Yes. So I have a Focus. And when I hit the mode selector button, it usually toggles between sentence, paragraphs, lines, and display panning. But sometimes it toggles between list mode on and list mode off. What is list mode, and what conditions cause it to toggle between those two states?
MATT: Do you want me to take it?
ERIC: What application?
GLEN: I hope you can take it.
DEBORAH: Well, that’s my question.
MATT: I can try. I can try. So it’s whether or not you’re on the desktop. That would be list mode versus whatever the other mode is. So it’s showing...
DEBORAH: So it’s just paragraphs, lines, display panning.
MATT: Those are going to be in text.
DEBORAH: Ah. So if I don’t have...
MATT: So you’d be like on the web or in a Word document. You’re going to see the line, sentence, paragraphs, panning. And then if you’re on the desktop, you’re going to see the other mode.
DEBORAH: So if I list...
RACHEL: What about...
DEBORAH: Oh, go ahead.
RACHEL: Sorry. What about in Windows Explorer, Matt? I was just going to ask. And when is this for?
MATT: It’s going to be list mode.
RACHEL: That’s what I thought, okay.
MATT: Yeah, yeah. It’s going to be similar to the icon. So anything that’s like a – that’s actually a list, that’s what you’re going to see.
GLEN: But what’s the difference?
DEBORAH: But I’m stuck using...
GLEN: What’s the difference between list mode on and list mode off?
DEBORAH: Yeah.
MATT: I don’t know. I’m just telling you what it does. But you know what, I’m sure there’s somebody out there in the audience who actually knows. Come on.
RACHEL: Yeah. I mean visually – yeah. I mean, I think this – I actually don’t know. I’m not going to guess. I don’t know.
MATT: Yeah, somebody ping Dave Baker to this room. He’s probably tell us.
DEBORAH: Well, what I hate is having to use those itty-bitty buttons for display panning. And whenever it decides not to let me have the display panning, I’ve got to hit the itty-bitty button. So that’s my issue, and I’ve gone to...
MATT: So Deborah, I think at some point, and I don’t know, you know, if you agree with it, but I think – and I don’t know how complicated this is. I believe that that should be in an application setting, not – you should be able to do it by an – so if you’re in Word, you should set it to display panning, if that’s your mode. And if you’re in the browser, and you’d prefer line mode, you should be able to do that and set that in the configuration, in Settings Center, rather than just, you know. Because right now I think it’s just a global setting.
DEBORAH: I will try that.
MATT: No, I don’t think you can. You can’t. That’s my point is I think that’s what we need to do.
DEBORAH: Yeah. And also you need to document what list mode on and off means.
GLEN: As soon as we figure it out.
MATT: Somebody ping David.
DEBORAH: Thank you.
MATT: I’m going to ping him into the room while we’re sitting here.
RACHEL: Thanks, Deborah.
ERIC: Yeah, thanks, Deborah.
MATT: Deborah’s been in this industry a long time, so it’s great to see her come in. So thank you, Deborah.
RACHEL: She’s brilliant. She has amazing feedback for us always.
MATT: Varun, you’re up.
VARUN: I have one problem with JAWS, and a few requests, like new features. So there’s a setting in Windows 10 that’s called Show Suggestions as You Type.
MATT: The text predictions is, in my opinion, a very disruptive thing because it’s actually making little bubble noises, as well. So I’ve actually turned it off on my computer because I found it very disruptive, especially in Outlook, because it constantly was trying to interrupt me. So I’ve actually turned the feature off.
VARUN: Okay, thanks. The new features that I had in plan was is there a way to find out the state of the toggle keys, like the CAPS LOCK, INSERT, and the SCROLL LOCK keys, like without turning them actually on or off?
GLEN: There is a way that we can detect what their state is. At the moment, however, we don’t have a key to just announce them without modifying. But it’s a really interesting idea. Would you be interested in hearing them one by one, or just hearing any of them that may be on? You know, hit a key, and it says “Num lock on, caps lock on.”
VARUN: Yeah, that’s sort of nice, right, like it’s used by say people who are sighted, so they can just quickly look at it, and then figure out the state of it.
RACHEL: So like a list, like what you see when you do INSERT+F11 or F10.
GLEN: Except I wouldn’t show it in a list, probably. I would maybe say it. And then if you hit it twice or something, it would put it in a virtual buffer?
RACHEL: Oh, she said she wanted – yeah. Oh, well, that would work. She wanted it to be sighted accessible.
GLEN: What I thought you meant when you said “sighted accessible” was sighted people can just look at the keyboard.
VARUN: I meant was that sighted people can look at the keyboard and figure it out.
GLEN: Ah, okay.
RACHEL: Oh, I didn’t know that they could do that. That’s just nifty.
VARUN: That’s on the standard keyboard; right?
GLEN: Yeah, there are lights or something.
VARUN: And then I would like to add a new feature to the alt text in say Word or anywhere. So like, so that it can be – like it’s come up in the results viewer so that we can really quickly navigate the alternative text to an image or somewhere.
GLEN: What are the things you want to get at it with this feature that is hard to do now?
VARUN: It’s like when you navigate a document, and suppose there’s an image in the document. So if JAWS would automatically start reading the alternative text; right?
GLEN: Right.
VARUN: So along with that, like. But then it’s like it’s going to read it off in one shot. So but if you missed off some portion of it, so there’s no way to figure it out or granularly control what’s read. I mean, it’s a very long sentence or something.
GLEN: So there is actually a way you can do that now, and that is the JAWS speech viewer. Do you know the speech viewer?
VARUN: Yeah, yeah. INSERT+SPACEBAR+H.
GLEN: Yes. And then what I have been known to do is have JAWS say whatever it is that you want to review granularly, do INSERT+SPACEBAR+H, go to the bottom, and there the text will be, and you can copy and paste it and read it.
ERIC: In the latest build from May, you could actually say the voice assistant command Clear History, and then do whatever you want to do. And then voice assistant command Copy History.
RACHEL: But it sounds like what this suggestion is is basically just being able to virtualize the alt text, which does sound like a pretty cool feature. Like if you’re reading a website, the alt text can slide by. Is that essentially just being able to virtualize the alternative text?
VARUN: True, true. Yeah.
MATT: Well, this is a good recommendation. So thank you for that. Let’s...
VARUN: Can I go on?
RACHEL: These are good suggestions.
MATT: Yeah, these are good ones.
RACHEL: Oh, do you have another?
VARUN: Yeah, yeah.
RACHEL: Okay, let’s do one more real quick.
VARUN: So is there a way to figure out, like put in a different sound scheme just for Say All?
MATT: That one’s just come up recently.
RACHEL: I know.
MATT: Actually, if you bring up your sound schemes, there is one called Say All with Sounds.
GLEN: I don’t know that we load a special sound scheme for Say All without someone needing to explicitly select it.
MATT: No, you do have to select it. That is correct. So you’d have to bring up the list of schemes and then choose that specific scheme.
VARUN: Okay. Thank you.
GLEN: Okay.
MATT: But great, great suggestion either way because I think we’ve talked about that, as well. So Shannon Dillon, you’re up.
SHANNON DILLON: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Thanks. I have a Teams question.
MATT: We love Teams. Let’s do it. I’m joking. I actually use it all day long. But go ahead and ask.
RACHEL: Matt, you’re not joking. You do love it.
SHANNON: Oh, that’s wrong. I hate it. Every piece of it. So my assistant occasionally has to get on, access my computer through Teams to basically do stuff on my computer with like, like if I have a training I have to complete that’s inaccessible or whatever.
MATT: That never happens.
SHANNON: Right, never.
MATT: Inaccessible trainings, yeah.
SHANNON: Never, never. So the CTRL+SHIFT+T lets her see my screen; right? And then she requests access, and I have to SHIFT+TAB to get over to Allow Access. And at one point it used to sort of flash, really flipping quick on my braille display. And I’d be able to, like, smash ENTER and, like, get it. But it seems like I can’t get that to happen anymore. Like I can SHIFT+TAB all over, and I just can’t. And there’s some toolbar.
MATT: Yeah, so I did invite – Jeff Bishop raised his hand from Microsoft, and he may have the answer to this. So we’re going to let him, since he raised his hand, he has no choice but to answer the question.
JEFF BISHOP: That’s quite all right. I would actually recommend in this case that you use the Windows Quick Assist feature.
SHANNON: Oh, okay.
JEFF: This actually would allow you to allow her to take full control of the window.
SHANNON: Okay.
JEFF: And she’ll be able to see everything that you’re doing, and you can actually follow along. It will work fine with even JAWS running. So you just do that by going to the Start Menu and typing in Quick Assist.
SHANNON: Okay.
JEFF: And then you can then just follow the instructions onscreen. You need to exchange a code. And then you’ll need to give her control of your...
SHANNON: Of the computer.
JEFF: ...of your screen.
SHANNON: Okay.
JEFF: And it’s just a browser window. So it’s no big deal. You should be able to follow that along. You won’t have to worry about something appearing or disappearing.
SHANNON: Okay.
JEFF: It won’t just automagically disappear on you or anything like that. It’s a pretty easy process to utilize. So Quick Assist is one way to do it.
SHANNON: Okay. And will she be able to then go from there on to, like, the Internet and do a training for me, or go into Word and fix something for me?
JEFF: She can. She can do anything on your computer that you would like. I use it every day. Or not every day, but I use it very often with team members and people that – when I need assistance with something, you know, for example, for working on a Word document or a PowerPoint deck or whatever the case may be, then we’ll just launch Quick Assist, and they can see everything that is going on on my computer. They can even go back to their desktop and look at something there and then come back and all that. So it’s a pretty cool tool.
SHANNON: Okay. Yeah, because we have to do everything remotely. So it’s like she’s in another place.
JEFF: Yup, yup. The only thing that could potentially be a problem for you is if your firewall at your corporation or whatever could be blocking that. But probably not. But probably not.
SHANNON: Okay.
MATT: If they’re allowing Teams remote access, they probably are allowing that.
JEFF: Yeah, they’re probably allowing it, yeah. Okay. Thank you.
MATT: And Jeff, you’re doing this with JAWS, and you didn’t see a problem.
JEFF: I did not.
MATT: Okay.
SHANNON: Okay.
JEFF: And one thing about Team sharing, and I’ve not done this where it’s shared my screen, or shared my screen but not done the remote portion, you may want to try F6 to see if it’s there through the F6 key instead of the TAB key.
SHANNON: Oh, okay. Because it’s some toolbar. She’s telling me it’s a toolbar.
JEFF: So the F6 moves to different – think of them as regions, like a web page. And it would move to different things. The other thing you could do is INSERT+F8 brings up a list of buttons in Teams for JAWS.
SHANNON: Okay.
JEFF: And so you may be able to bring up the list of buttons and see what buttons you see and then do it from there.
SHANNON: Okay.
GLEN: There is one more thing you could try, if you wanted to do the Teams, and that is turn on the virtual cursor and search for – and then it’ll sort of appear like a web page. And if you know the label of the thing you’re trying to click, you may be able to do an INSERT+F, which is a JAWS Find, and search for that string, and get there.
SHANNON: So if I’m looking for something that says Allow Access, can I type Allow Access?
GLEN: You can.
JEFF: You could probably keep it simple and just type Allow.
SHANNON: Allow.
RACHEL: Yeah, yeah.
JEFF: And most likely it’s a button. So you could just hit the letter B, like when you bring up that list of – or when you switch to the virtual; right? Because of the use for buttons.
SHANNON: Oh, when I switch to the virtual viewer. Okay, cool. Thank you. Awesome.
JEFF: Because, I mean, I’d be shocked it’s not a button. So, but F6 is usually your friend. Actually, sorry, I said F6. It’s CTRL+F6 in Teams.
SHANNON: Okay, okay.
JEFF: Just to clarify. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting they’ve changed that. Excellent. So thank you for coming up. Great question.
RACHEL: Yeah, but we threw a ton at you. So if you don’t remember any of that, I don’t blame you. So email us at training, and we can help you, training@vispero.com.
SHANNON: Great, thank you.
RACHEL: And we can, like, try to help you work out the steps and document them so it’s not so all just word salad.
SHANNON: Right. I’ll go write it down. Thank you. I appreciate it.
RACHEL: Thank you.
GLEN: Thank you.
MATT: Let’s move to the next person. Douglas Howard?
DOUGLAS HOWARD: When I use antivirus software, it’s called Acronis?
GLEN: Yeah, it’s either Acronis or Acronis, I think.
DOUGLAS: But when I use the screen readers, it won’t speak. Like it says for updating, but it won’t speak any of the things to click on, even when I put it in a JAWS cursor.
GLEN: Not all programs are created equal, and that is true of antivirus, as well. Some work better than others. We finally have a good relationship with both Avast and AVG. And I’m not speaking to whether or not they are good antivirus software, but they are two of the players there. And they tend to work reasonably well. I think they put a lot of their content in a web page that their UI brings up. So it may be another thing to try.
Or you can do what many of us do, and a lot of security professionals do, which is just run the built-in Microsoft antivirus. There is some consensus in the security community that antivirus is not always going to catch lots of stuff. Yes, it’ll catch some. But Microsoft’s been in this business for a long time, and so they’ll catch the obvious things, as well. And there’s no replacement for being smart about what you click on, and using two-factor authentication and all that stuff. So you might want to, you know, consider trying that, as well. And I think one of those two options may help.
DOUGLAS: Okay. Well, thank you to you guys, thank you very much.
GLEN: Hey, thank you.
ERIC: How about Ravi is unmuted.
RAVI: I’m a new screen reader and JAWS user. I do tech support. And I was wondering if there’s a way to, when we remotely log into a computer, to a client’s computer, if I could use JAWS, or if there’s any utilities that I could use?
GLEN: I’m presuming you’re doing support for non-JAWS users. I mean, they might be JAWS users, but that’s coincidental to you.
RAVI: That’s right, yeah. Yeah. I mean, they’re end users, consumer end users. They buy, you know, I do tech support for printers by remote login.
GLEN: And what remote software do they use?
RAVI: We use ISL Online.
GLEN: We don’t – I don’t know about...
RAVI: Consumer to team viewer.
GLEN: Yeah. We’ve been trying to find someone who will partner with us on that topic and have not thus far found anyone. Typically the technology that they use for remoting the session back to the person who’s the agent is to simply just do a screenshot and constantly update the screenshots and pass the keys through. Which means that a program like JAWS has no way of getting beyond the screen and figuring out what the individual controls are. We work around that, you know, with things like RDP and Citrix and AWS and all those things. But the remote apps have been a big challenge for us because it will require cooperation with them, and it’s been hard to get their attention.
We’d be very happy to talk to this company about working with them and making things work with JAWS, if your company is large enough to try to exert some pressure and see if they can make a contact for us. Right? If you’re a big user of their software, your company has more sway over them than we do, since we don’t use it.
RAVI: Right.
GLEN: Is that, I mean, I don’t know whether that even seems possible. But it’s a little something we cannot – we cannot solve this on our own.
RAVI: Okay. So at this point, as far as you know, there is no remote software that works.
GLEN: No, and it’s not just us. It’s screen readers completely. You will not find a screen reader that works with them.
RAVI: I see.
MATT: Okay. Let’s see who’s up next.
ERIC: Slan is here.
MATT: Oh, Slan’s here. Okay, go ahead, Slan.
SLAN: Hi, Aslan Fannich. I’m from Colombia. Okay, sorry for my talkback. I have no headphones. It would be good if you had an option to speak password characters as you type them, or something like that.
GLEN: We used to do that, and people said that was a security issue because you never really know who’s listening over your shoulder. And I know in the privacy of your own home or office that’s not a problem, but it’s very hard to enforce that. And since we run essentially to take the place of your eyes, we feel like the right thing to do from a security standpoint is to give the same feedback as a sighted person would get. And just like you may forget what you’ve typed, so might they. And so that’s sort of how it is. I have noticed that more and more sites now do have a button that says Show Password, where you can turn that on. And if you turn that on in the site, if they have that button, then of course just like a sighted person could see it, JAWS will read it.
ERIC: Some people have mentioned to me that they actually will ALT+TAB or go into Notepad, type it, select it, copy it, and then go paste it in.
GLEN: That’s a great idea. And in fact I’ve been known to do it. So, yes, thanks.
SLAN: Okay, thanks a lot.
ERIC: Okay. Thank you.
SLAN: Have a good night.
GLEN: Thanks.
RACHEL: You, too. Thanks.
ERIC: That’s great to get calls from Colombia.
GLEN: Yeah, it really is wonderful.
RACHEL: From all over.
ERIC: How about Paul Hunt? And then, Kamal, we’ll keep you on deck.
PAUL HUNT: Hi, can you guys hear me?
GLEN: Absolutely.
MATT: Hi, Paul.
RACHEL: Hi, Paul.
PAUL: Good. Well, this is new. Clubhouse is new for me. Okay. I have noticed since the first of the year – I do webmaster stuff for the American Council of the Blind with Texas, and we use WordPress, and it has a very good editor called the Gutenberg editor. And I have noticed that since the beginning of the year that when you’re trying to edit something, the characters you type don’t speak, and you can’t – when you use the arrow keys, they don’t work.
RACHEL: Did you ask Elizabeth about this at our training email list? I’m just curious because she does edit in WordPress for the blog.
PAUL: Oh, okay. No, I did not. I called the regular tech support line.
RACHEL: Oh, okay, okay. Well, I can see why you did that.
ERIC: This might be a good question to come into the training area.
PAUL: So I just send to training@vispero.com? Or should I write to...
RACHEL: Yeah, you can send it to training@vispero.com. She’ll get it.
PAUL: Okay, will you ask – okay.
GLEN: I have a question, as well. Does this always happen? Or just sometimes?
PAUL: Well, it seems to happen in the newer WordPress editing in the paragraph blocks. There’s also a block called the Classic Block, and it seems to work in the Classic, but it doesn’t work in the regular blocks. And it used to work very, very well. So, and I really would prefer – I don’t like to regress. I’d much rather stay with what...
GLEN: We would like to fix this. If all of that fails, and you don’t make headway, can you find out if I can have a guest account on the server long enough to experience the problem? Because that would be a very quick way to potentially get to the root of it.
PAUL: Yeah, I can do that. I mean, I’m actually administrator for that server.
GLEN: I mean, I don’t need much. I just need to be able to create a post. And I promise I won’t publish.
PAUL: No, no, no. No, that’s okay. I will try these other things first. And if not, yeah, we can do that.
GLEN: That’d be great. We really want to fix it because, if you’re seeing it, it means other people are seeing it. And, you know.
PAUL: I’m not an originalist. I’ve never been original about anything. If I’ve thought of any idea ever, someone else has thought of it and dismissed it. I just know it. It’s just, you know, that’s the first way I approach a problem. If it’s happened to me, it’s happened to somebody else.
GLEN: Exactly. So all the more reason for us to get to the bottom of it.
PAUL: Okay. That’s all for me. And this seems to work okay. I just didn’t know whether I was doing it right when I got in. So thank you for at least answering my call tonight. I appreciate it.
GLEN: Cool.
ERIC: Thanks, Paul.
PAUL: Okay.
RACHEL: Thanks, Paul.
ERIC: All right. And Kamal?
KAMAL: Good evening, everyone. How are you guys doing?
GLEN: Good, thanks.
RACHEL: Good.
KAMAL: Excellent, excellent. So just a couple of quick comments. You guys certainly, Matt and Jeff, certainly saved the day because I have – today I got a brand new Dell XPS 13. And my typical laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad X1. I was working on the Lenovo laptop all day with JAWS and doing a lot of emailing back and forth. Occasionally I ran into the issue with the Quick Nav keys with Outlook, but not enough to make anything of it, really.
And then I started using my Dell. And every time I went to send an email, I ran into the issue of replying. Actually it was more replying to emails I ran into the issue. And I’m thinking, okay, this must be – I must be hitting some key on that keyboard. The keys are very small on that keyboard and causing me the issue. In fact, I did pack the damn thing to send it back tomorrow to Dell.
But now it sounds like more it’s an actually a bug, probably, with JAWS and Outlook. Hopefully it will be resolved quickly. And just another quick comment about the antivirus, actually. One thing I’ve tested and put on my wife’s computer is Trend Micro. Works wonderful. It’s completely accessible from the point of install to the point of using it. Just in case somebody else also is looking for an alternative antivirus software.
GLEN: That’s great.
KAMAL: Yeah, yeah.
ERIC: All right.
GLEN: Thank you.
KAMAL: All right, well, thank you. Thanks, guys.
ERIC: Thanks. Eva, can you unmute?
EVA: Hello.
ERIC: There you are. Hi.
EVA: Here I am. Mine’s just a one question, but it’s a trouble I’ve been dealing with. It is to do with my Humanware Brailliant. I have a Brailliant BI. And when I connect it with Narrator, it works perfectly. It pops up everything. But for some reason, I have JAWS 2021, and it is not detecting it. I’ve added and removed it several times in device and settings.
ERIC: I know what the problem is.
EVA: And I don’t know what to do.
ERIC: Yes. If you go to the support page on Freedom Scientific, and under JAWS Technical Support just type in Narrator. Search for Narrator, and you’ll find that it pops right up. It’s the top thing.
GLEN: Narrator’s braille support is incompatible with JAWS, and I think the braille support of other screen readers. And so once you enable it for Narrator, essentially you have prevented JAWS from ever seeing your display until you disable it for Narrator.
EVA: Oh, wow. Okay.
GLEN: And then it will work.
EVA: Okay, awesome. Thank you.
ERIC: All right. Well, we had a great evening.
RACHEL: We did. This was a really good show. We had a lot of good questions.
MATT: I did turn off hand raising. So I think we had two people left onstage. Let’s just do the last two. So I turned off hand raising, and I apologize for those who had raised their hands. We will do another one of these in the next quarter. But we also, just to let everybody know, on every Monday at 10 a.m. Eastern we do an Ask Sharky. And so you can always come in and do that here on Clubhouse. So follow this club, if you’re not. Follow those who are onstage from the company.
This is Matt. We have Glen, Eric, and Rachel. And so if you follow us, you’ll see whenever we speak. But every Monday morning roughly 10 a.m. Eastern time. And then every Wednesday, we move it around, but it’s the Beginners Workshop, for those who need that. So we’ll continue to do stuff out of this room. So definitely join us for that. And I think, let’s see, who are the last two folks up here? I think, Obsidian Butterfly, you are up.
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY: Thank you. So I have a question for actually Eric. Eric, is there any plans in the future for you guys to ever do Tandem with Fusion?
ERIC: That’s a great question. So right now you can do Tandem, but only from the speech perspective. So you don’t get the magnification that comes across. But you can actually do it if you can run just using your speech piece. And this is something we would love to do. We’ve talked about it a few times. And we know that there’s a big challenge in getting it done. So it’s on the list, but I don’t know if we can give you a date that something like that’s going to work.
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY: Okay. I ask because I’m an instructor, and sometimes I have to work with Fusion clients. And it would be very helpful if I could go on their computers and kind of put them where they need to be and it be highlighted. But I never saw the option for Tandem in there. So I was just curious of where it is.
MATT: It’s still in the JAWS UI. So you can do your INSERT+J, U for Utilities, and then arrow down to Tandem. And then there’s, like, connect to my computer, connect to their computer, that kind of stuff.
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY: Okay. Even though they’re – and how do you get them to...
MATT: They’re going to do the same thing.
ERIC: Are they running Fusion?
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY: Yes. I’m running JAWS, and they’re running Fusion.
ERIC: Okay. So you want to tell them to do the same thing. Go to INSERT+J. Go to the Utility menu.
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY: Okay.
ERIC: And they’re going to allow access to my computer.
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY: Correct.
ERIC: And you’re going to, from your JAWS, INSERT+J, go to Utility menu, and you’re going to control their computer. So you’re going to have to pass them a code that they would type in.
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY: Yes. I was just curious can it be done because, like I said...
ERIC: It should work JAWS to Fusion, yes.
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY: Okay. All right. Thank you. That was my question. And my other one I kind of solved while I was waiting, so thank you.
ERIC: Okay. All right, thank you. And Chris Polk, I think, is the last one.
CHRIS POLK: Yeah, I’ve just got two really quick ones. Just got, well, I had the problem with my Surface Book 3, and I just got the 4. Have any of you guys seen, and it may be a Windows thing in general and just not these machines, when they come from sleep, the key interrupts for controlling the computer seem way laggy for about 20 seconds.
GLEN: But does it get better on its own? Or do you have to restart?
CHRIS: No, it gets better on its own after about 20 seconds of beating on it.
GLEN: Well, that’s really interesting because other people have said that it goes away, and their only choice is to restart. But it might be that they’re not waiting long enough.
CHRIS: Well, sometimes I’m in the position where I can’t reboot. So that’s just where it is.
GLEN: Yeah, no, they shut down JAWS and then restart. But meanwhile the 20 seconds has probably passed.
CHRIS: Right.
GLEN: You’ve offered an interesting clue in that, I mean, more stuff happens when you come back from sleep. I wouldn’t have thought that it would take 20 seconds. As with so many problems that end up becoming long running, it gets in front of a developer, and then everything works just fine.
CHRIS: Right.
GLEN: Do you have more than one Surface Book? Or have you tried this...
CHRIS: Yeah, it happened on the 3 and the 4.
GLEN: So maybe a Surface Book is in our future.
MATT: Is it the Surface Book?
CHRIS: Yes.
MATT: Oh, I actually have it. And you know what, Glen, both Carl and I have Surface Books.
GLEN: Okay.
MATT: I don’t know what model mine is. I need to look. Does it say the word “three” and “four” on it?
CHRIS: Hell, I don’t know, dude. I can’t see it.
MATT: I love that.
CHRIS: The receipt says it. That’s all I know. Quick other one for you. I have two different profiles, three actually, in Outlook. When I start Outlook – and this is not a big deal. I’m just bringing it up because maybe I’m just being weird and missing something. It will not read those profiles.
MATT: You mean that little dialog that says...
CHRIS: Yeah.
MATT: We should fix that.
GLEN: Well, it’s not a universal problem. I had multiple profiles and could arrow up and down through them. So has it always...
CHRIS: Matt, am I the only one that’s seeing that? Is that just a me thing?
MATT: Well, I don’t use multiple profiles so I don’t know.
CHRIS: Right.
GLEN: Has it ever worked for you? Like is it a regression?
CHRIS: Yeah. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
MATT: No, but what he means, did it work in 2020, but stopped working in 2021?
CHRIS: No, the last time I actually saw it working really well was ‘19.
GLEN: Will you try something next time it fails?
CHRIS: Yup.
GLEN: You may have already tried. ALT+TAB away and back and see if that rectifies it.
CHRIS: That does not. But I tell you what does work sometimes is to tab, you know that OK button right there to choose?
GLEN: Yeah.
CHRIS: And then SHIFT+TAB. Sometimes that works. But sometimes it goes back to blank. It’s just a hit or a miss. I mean, I’ve ordered the profiles and renamed them so they’re in the order that I know.
GLEN: Yeah, but it’s supposed to work.
CHRIS: It’s a workaround for me, and it gets me through. I was just kind of bringing it up. And I see that on multiple machines, even when I’m at somebody’s desk and I have to load JAWS and do my thing, and then it does that. But it does it to me, as well. It’s just weird. It’s not a showstopper for me, but it’s just weird.
GLEN: Well, I believe you because when I’ve tried it, I’ve tried it for very limited periods of time. Like I’ll bring it up, and switch to the other profile, and then launch Outlook without being prompted anymore. So I’m sure you’re right. It’s just we have to figure out why.
CHRIS: Yeah, and doing a Say Line doesn’t do it. That doesn’t read it. It just reads blank. And the text, I mean, it looks normal on the screen. I’ve verified that with people. It looks just like anybody else’s. And it’s maximized and everything. It’s just really weird.
ERIC: Chris, you have more than two, or two profiles?
CHRIS: I have, let’s see, work, the help desk, and then my personal. I have three.
ERIC: Three. And Glen, you said you’ve tried...
CHRIS: I’d be glad to delete them all.
GLEN: Chris, write to me.
CHRIS: Okay.
GLEN: Because I have a couple of things I’d like you to try that might help us isolate this. I’m ggordon@vispero.com.
CHRIS: Okay, got it.
GLEN: For those of you who are now madly copying down my email address, I don’t do support as my day job, and I don’t have that much time to respond to issues. So support, except under extenuating circumstances, is still going to be your best way of getting stuff solved.
CHRIS: I’ll put it’s Chris’s weird Clubhouse Outlook thing.
GLEN: Cool. Yeah.
CHRIS: That way you can remember.
GLEN: I’ll remember you for at least a day, so.
CHRIS: Perfect, got you. All right, guys. I appreciate it.
GLEN: Thanks, Chris.
ERIC: Thanks.
RACHEL: Thank you.
CHRIS: All right.
MATT: So thanks for everybody. Glen, this was great. I mean, it is our first Clubhouse doing the FSOpenLine, so that’s good.
RACHEL: Yeah.
GLEN: Yeah, it’s a great – was a great idea.
MATT: It was yours.
RACHEL: It was your idea.
GLEN: Oh. No wonder it was a good idea. I actually thought it was yours that I repurposed, truth be told.
MATT: No, no. I said we would never do this.
RACHEL: Yeah, and I already said no.
MATT: And I actually had them tweet that out, we’d never do this. And I had to retract myself.
GLEN: Never say never.
MATT: Never say never.
GLEN: Hey, thanks, guys.
MATT: Yeah, I mean, it was good. And, you know, for those who didn’t get the chance to ask questions, like I said, Monday mornings, 10 a.m. We also have a bunch of webinars coming up next month, so follow that. Follow the blog. Follow the YouTube channel. So Freedom Scientific Training is the YouTube Channel. There’s a lot of great content on there. And then ask your smart speaker to play the Freedom Scientific Training Podcast or the FSCast. Right?
RACHEL: Yeah, and so follow everyone onstage and seriously consider subscribing to the blog. We won’t blow up your inbox. So you can enter your email, and we’ll send you a notification when there is a new post. So things like the WebAIM survey that we talked about at the beginning of this session. We’re going to post about that next week. We’re going to – so you’ll have a link that you can click on and just go take the survey. We’ll post about all of the new events. But like I said, usually only one or two posts a week. So it’s not too much. But go subscribe at blog.freedomscientific.com.
MATT: And just like that, we’re done.
RACHEL: Yeah.
MATT: So thanks, everybody.
GLEN: Goodnight.
RACHEL: Thanks, everybody. Thank you Matt, Glen, Eric.
ERIC: Yeah, thank you, Rachel, and we’ll see you all next time.