RACHEL BUCHANAN: Hello, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us live for FSOpenLine. This is our June 2022 episode. And before we get in and talk about everyone who’s here and jump into our topics, just in case you don’t know how to engage with us already, ALT+Y will raise your hand if you’re on Windows and JAWS. And if you dialed in on a phone, you’ll use *6 quite quickly to mute yourself, and it’s *9 to raise your hand, and *9 again to lower it. So I think most people know how to engage. Other than that, we also have a group on Clubhouse, as well as Zoom, so you can ask questions on either platform. And we should be able to communicate quite well between one another. And then of course joining me are my colleagues Eric Damery, Glen Gordon, Matt Ater, along with several others who are here. But those are our primary hosts, co-hosts. How are you all doing?
MATT ATER: Well, welcome, Rachel, and it’s another OpenLine, so thank you.
GLEN GORDON: Yes, it’s great to be here.
RACHEL: Well, I know we had some recent updates. I believe that was one of the things we were going to start talking about initially.
ERIC DAMERY: Yeah, we just rolled out our June update. We were hoping to get it on Tuesday morning. It ended up hitting on Wednesday morning. Sorry for the delay, folks, but I hope everybody has gotten it and enjoyed getting started. We put a pretty exciting new feature out for JAWS Fusion customers. And that is the Notification History Manager, where all of these notifications that are coming in from either the OS or browser or other applications that are constantly hitting you can be now reviewed, dismissed. You can choose never to see them in your history again. You can choose to change how they’re spoken. Maybe you’d want to hear a sound instead of a spoken message, or maybe just change the spoken message. So quite a feature.
MATT: What would be a common theme or common notification that you started with? And we’ll start with Eric, like, what’s one thing you did on yours right off the bat?
ERIC: Well, the first thing I messed with was Edge because Edge is notorious for pushing these notifications when pages are loading, when it’s completed. So you create rules to kind of filter those things out. And that’s the first thing I did when I started with it.
MATT: What about you, Glen?
GLEN: I did Edge as well. But I also started doing the announcement that, when you copy links to the clipboard from either Dropbox or Teams, that’s usually a really long announcement. And I shorten them to copy because all I want to know is did my key take effect. I don’t really need to know the name of the file. I was on the file in order to copy the link.
MATT: One of the ones I did was I didn’t like all of the Dell notifications for all the updates, the alerts that at such-and-such updates available. And it gave the entire lengthy message about what the update was. All I needed to know was that it was a Dell update. That’s it. So I just shortened it to Dell Update.
GLEN: Does this mean you Dell the Dell messages?
MATT: Exactly. I also did...
GLEN: You know what’s nice?
ERIC: I was going to say, Matt, what’s nice about that rule is you can change what the output spoken message is going to be, but still leave the full message in your list. So if you really wanted to go back and get the version and see everything, it’ll still be in your list. But the next time when it’s coming in it’ll just say “Dell message,” you know, “Dell notification.”
MATT: I also found that at times even when you’re in places like Outlook, and you go to the search bar, and you press ENTER after typing in your search, it says “searching.” Well, I expect it to be searching. And then it comes back and says 25 results found or whatever it says. I didn’t need the comment that it’s searching. I kind of knew that that’s what it was supposed to do. And if it didn’t, I’d probably figure it out when there’s nothing found.
GLEN: Yup. Good point.
MATT: So should we take some – should we bring some people up? Because this is what it’s all about, right, is these conversations.
GLEN: Yeah, let’s do it. Absolutely.
RACHEL: All right. So we have Nimer here. I know this gentleman.
NIMER: Hi, how’s it going?
RACHEL: Good, how are you?
NIMER: Doing well. I’m running into an issue where I use Dvorak keyboard layout, and JAWS does not recognize this change of keyboard layout. So other than remapping every hotkey, is there a – are you guys aware of this issue? Or is there any hopes of a fix?
GLEN: Have you tried enabling an option in Settings Center which I think is called Used Keyboard Manager? Eric, Rachel, do you know?
ERIC: Yeah, it’s not Keyboard Manager, it’s Unified Keyboard.
GLEN: That’s it, yes. Use Unified Keyboard.
NIMER: Yeah, it doesn’t work.
GLEN: Have you turned it on? Have you tried it?
NIMER: I have. Yeah. It doesn’t make any difference.
GLEN: So in our testing it did speak the characters properly if you had typing echo on. But that’s apparently not what you’re wanting to do. You’re wanting the keys to move with the mnemonics as opposed to being in the spot where they currently are? Is that correct?
NIMER: Yeah. So when I change keyboard layouts, when I change to Dvorak, for example, the layout changes, and I’m able to type and everything works. What doesn’t work is the JAWS commands are not using the new layout. As an example, H, where H is for headings, in Dvorak it’s where the letter J is on the QWERTY layout. So I press that command, and JAWS does not go to heading. It says jump to line. This is jump to line command.
GLEN: Well, I’m glad you raised this because relatively few of us use the Dvorak layout. And we had heard that there were some issues, and so we were thinking it had to do with the typing and the labels and hadn’t focused enough on the Quick Keys and other things moving. And your timing is good because we are trying to polish off the Unified Keyboard for JAWS 2023. So this will push it up to the top. And I can’t guarantee that we will solve it, but we will at least endeavor to.
ERIC: I’m curious. Is this something that was working that stopped?
NIMER: No. No, it never worked.
GLEN: Part of the problem for us is we’ve historically used what are called “scan codes” for mapping the keys to the commands. And that’s very much associated with where the physical keys are as opposed to the logical layout. And I’m hoping that with the Unified Keyboard Manager we can at least provide an option to not use those scan codes. So that may be the way we fix it.
NIMER: Great, thank you.
GLEN: Thank you.
ERIC: I made a note on that one, Glen. We’ll take that up with one of the guys.
RACHEL: So Mr. Paul Hunt should be making his way to the stage in Clubhouse.
PAUL: Okay. Good to talk to you guys tonight. I have a couple of issues. One is – I think it’s something that just happened with the latest versions of Office 365. In Microsoft Word, there’s a command, ALT+Windows+DOWN ARROW and ALT+Windows+UP ARROW. I’ve been using JAWS for 30 years and finally discovered them in the last six months, how you can actually have it read a row. That’s not working in Word right now.
MATT: And that’s a table command; correct?
PAUL: That’s a table command; yes.
MATT: So if I’m not in a table it says “not in a table.” So I just tried it, and it said “not in a table.” I’ll go to a table. But keep going.
PAUL: Yeah, so it doesn’t say anything when you’re trying to go up and down rows. Now, you can read the current row, but you can’t go up and down rows. It doesn’t read the row. Of course you can do cells. But the row was so much nicer.
GLEN: If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t realize this command existed. And the way that I read and read rows of a table is to do a Say All because Say All mimics that behavior.
PAUL: But you can move, you can do a Say All through the table, but you can move down the rows, and you can do it one row at a time, which is very nice. And it works on web pages. It used to work in Word, it just doesn’t now.
GLEN: We will investigate.
ERIC: Okay, I wrote that one down.
PAUL: Okay. The other thing is more frustrating; okay? I use QuickBooks Pro. Now, QuickBooks Pro has – they have third-party scripts by My Blind Spot, Albert Rizzi’s organization. He’s the guy that everybody got off the Southwest Airlines plane, and they protested on his behalf, they had to cancel the flight and all that because there was a guide dog. But anyway, they have third-party scripts. They work in JAWS 2021. They worked in JAWS 2022 until either a recent update or a Microsoft update. I think it’s a combination of the two. Now when you load QuickBooks Pro with JAWS 2022, JAWS completely freezes while you’re in the application. You can’t use arrow keys. You can’t do anything. It says nothing. It doesn’t even tell you the scripts are loaded. I contacted tech support, and they said, basically, “They’re third-party scripts; we don’t support third-party scripts,” and basically left it at that. And so...
ERIC: Did they have you try and remove the scripts and run under default and see if...
PAUL: No. I don’t want to remove them.
ERIC: You don’t have to remove them. But the scripts are installed in your user settings, I believe?
PAUL: Yeah.
ERIC: So you can go into the Options menu of the JAWS main menu.
PAUL: Okay. I’m going to Application settings.
ERIC: And you can manage Application settings. And you can say Run with Default Settings to take your user scripts out.
PAUL: Okay. So how do I put my user scripts back in again?
MATT: It actually doesn’t take them out completely.
ERIC: It doesn’t take them out. It just turns them off.
PAUL: So how do I turn them...
ERIC: Then you just toggle that checkbox back off again.
PAUL: Turn it back on, okay.
ERIC: Yeah. So it’s right there in the Options menu.
PAUL: I don’t know that it’s going to really – it may help it starting, but it’s not going to solve, I mean, those scripts were written for a reason.
ERIC: Doesn’t solve the problem, but it narrows the problem down to is it something within the scripts.
MATT: Yeah, I mean, I think the folks at QuickBooks should be reading out at this point, and we can reach out to them. We do know some folks there. So we’ll reach out to them, as well.
PAUL: I still can use 2021. I just don’t like the workaround if I don’t have it. I like to keep current.
GLEN: Yeah, makes sense. Well, thank you, Paul.
PAUL: Okay. You’re welcome.
ERIC: Thanks, Paul.
GLEN: I just want to make a comment about supporting third-party scripts. Our support folks don’t necessarily know anything about those scripts. And so they can’t provide the same level of support in many cases that they do with the things that we directly support in the product. But that doesn’t mean we want to leave anyone hanging out to dry. If you’re having issues, and there are scripts that are important to you, we want to work with the people who wrote the scripts to make sure they have a good experience. And so I know it’s a little ambiguous, but I just wanted to make that statement.
RACHEL: We’re going to switch to Clubhouse.
BHARAT: Hi, can you hear me?
RACHEL: Yes, hello.
BHARAT: Hi. So my name is Bharat, and I’m from New Delhi, India. I have a number of things I’ll go through quickly. So recently I think with the previous version, previous update, they released a feature wherein we could disable the Performance Impacting Features in Excel. There was a checkbox which was introduced in Quick Settings. And my files do experience a lot of difference if I were to disable this checkbox. And unfortunately at the moment it can only be done on file-by-file basis. We can’t do it on a permanent basis. So I was wondering if you could introduce it through the settings.
ERIC: I made a note about it. It makes good sense.
GLEN: I think we were a little hesitant when we started because we didn’t know if we were going to actually make things better. We thought we were, but we weren’t positive. And so we were afraid someone would turn them off globally and miss out on things. But it sounds like at least for you this is making a big difference.
BHARAT: Yes, it is. And one could – so let’s say if I took so much pain to disable it all the way for all the sheets, I might as well go in there and implement, I guess.
GLEN: This is fortunately something that shouldn’t be hard.
BHARAT: The other thing is about WhatsApp. We seem to be using WhatsApp quite a bit on the desktop side. I was wondering if there was anything that we could introduce in JAWS to make things a little more convenient. At the moment, if one is in a particular chat, and I’m chatting with that person, whatever number of messages they send, JAWS doesn’t notify me at all. And I get notified once I move away from that chat. Either I switch into some other chat or I move to my desktop or somewhere else, if the focus changes.
ERIC: We have heard others mention WhatsApp and bring this up. We know it’s an important application outside the U.S. in particular. We’ve got a lot of people trying to use it. So that was a good example of something that should work. I made a note.
GLEN: And I just want to – I want to do a shout-out to Kelly Wills, who’s our most recently hired developer in the scripting department. And he has come in hitting the ground running and is making some nice improvements to scripts. And I have a feeling this issue may have his name on it.
BHARAT: Wow. Happy.
RACHEL: We have a lot of questions, and we’re going to try and knock as many out as we can. So Brian’s iPhone?
BRIAN: So I have two very closely related issues. They deal with JAWS updates. Recently for some reason JAWS has stopped notifying me about automatic updates, even though I have the automatic updates setting turned on. And as a result, I’ve missed a few JAWS versions. The last version it notified me about was the February 2022 update. And when I go to check for updates manually, it thinks that I have the latest JAWS version, even though I’m a couple of versions out of date. The second thing is that for some reason the update window, when it displays a list of updates, does not always take focus automatically. I have to ALT+TAB to it.
ERIC: So the first issue, I’m not sure what’s going on. Something may be amiss in part of your install. Have you downloaded, you know, you can just go download the full version and install over top. Have you done that at any point?
BRIAN: I will try doing that.
ERIC: Just go to the home page under Software, under Downloads. Pick JAWS and take the JAWS install right from there, from the June update, and let it install right over top. And if it doesn’t install, you may want to call Customer Service, Customer Support, and let them help resolve that.
BRIAN: Okay. The second thing is that when I press ALT+H and then P to check for updates, the window where it either says...
ERIC: Oh, it doesn’t take focus, yeah.
BRIAN: It doesn’t take focus, yeah.
ERIC: That I can’t speak to. Unless something else is popping up, if it’s consistent?
BRIAN: It’s doing it almost every time I check for updates. I end up having to ALT+TAB to it. And as a result I don’t know if the window has popped up because it’s not there until I ALT+TAB.
GLEN: I’m the eternal optimist. I’m hoping that when you download the June update, that world peace and world hunger are just around the corner, and your update problems are solved, too.
BRIAN: That would be the most ideal thing, yeah.
GLEN: Yeah. But it may not be 100% likely. But that’s why we have a support department. And we’ll work it through with you.
BRIAN: Okay. Thank you.
ERIC: Thanks.
RACHEL: Thank you, Brian. We have Tracy onstage in Clubhouse. Hi, Tracy.
TRACY: Hi. Can you guys hear me?
ERIC: We can. Go ahead, Tracy.
TRACY: Okay. Guys, I’ve heard all these advanced questions. I feel so silly for asking this question. But I’ve been using my cell phone for everything for the last two years. And I bought a computer earlier this year. I installed the latest – sorry, I’ve got COVID – JAWS software. And I’m wondering how can I access like a tutorial because I was trying to write something within Word, and you know how it has the – like the spellcheck comes up, and it has the list of word suggestions? I couldn’t even remember how to access that.
RACHEL: If you can shoot us an email, Tracy, it’s training@vispero.com. We’ve got YouTube videos, podcasts that you could listen to, just to go over these. Or we could just send you some cheat sheets that you could read in Word. So it’s kind of up to you, but we can send you a ton of materials for your reference, if you’d like.
TRACY: Yeah, okay. So training at what again?
RACHEL: It’s training@vispero.com, and that’s V I S P E R O.
TRACY: And is that dot com or...
RACHEL: Yup, dot com, sorry, training@vispero.com.
TRACY: All right, cool. Thank you guys so much.
RACHEL: All right. I hope you feel better.
ERIC: And I hope you feel better.
TRACY: Thank you.
ERIC: And never feel bad about asking a question. You should feel bad about not asking a question.
TRACY: I know. It’s just crazy because I used to work for the IRS. And, you know, you have to be trained on JAWS to work there. And it’s like, I don’t know how in the heck I’m back at the beginning. It’s crazy.
MATT: Did you work in one of the call centers, Tracy?
TRACY: I did. I worked in Oakland.
MATT: Yeah, I traveled around the country in the ‘90s training everybody at the IRS. So it’s been a long time.
TRACY: Oh, wow, so you must have known, like, Laurie and...
MATT: Oh, yeah, yup.
TRACY: Yeah. Great couple. All right, thank you.
RACHEL: Thanks, Tracy. All right. Joe Weiss iPad on Zoom. I’m asking you to unmute.
JOE WEISS: Thank you very much. And thanks for this opportunity, great information. I have an email question about AOL and Yahoo. I have Windows 11 that I just purchased with a new computer, using JAWS ‘22 and the latest upgrade. And I get into both on their websites, and I arrow down, and some of the fields do not populate. And yet in my other computer, which is Windows 7, JAWS 21, and an older version of Internet Explorer, it’s been working fine for years and years. So it’s really troublesome on, you know, you can put in the To and From and the Subject line and all of that. You get down to Compose, and it seems like it just doesn’t take. I hit a letter, and it jumps me up to some field above or below. So I didn’t know if you had any thoughts on that, or whether I just need to download Outlook for this computer and sync it with AOL and Yahoo in that direction.
RACHEL: This is one of those tasks where if you write in to Training, we will try to replicate it, Joe. We will try to see if we can figure out step-by-step and see what you’re experiencing. So if you email us at Training, we will do our best to go through this process and see if we can figure it out. Is there a reason you stick to those email accounts and don’t go to Gmail?
JOE: Well, actually I have FIOS, so I have a Verizon account that goes back for a number of years. And I used AOL on the Windows 7 computer until they moved us off of Outlook, and I had to go to the web-based AOL platform, and had again no problem until I started to set up this new Windows 11 computer and found that it wouldn’t allow me to populate all of the fields, especially in AOL it was the Compose field. All of the others are fine. So I’ll be happy to take this offline with you via Training.
RACHEL: We have Yvonne onstage in Clubhouse.
YVONNE: Hello, hello. The Surface Pro computer, that’s like where it’s got the keyboard and the screen you can detach, make it like a tablet; right? I’ve got that part right.
ERIC: Yes.
YVONNE: Does JAWS work with the tablet part?
MATT: The challenge that most people have is it’s not the same experience as using an iPhone. And so for most people their first experience with touch devices was with the iPhone when it comes to accessible touch devices. And so out of the box you’ll have to get used to different gestures and learn those. But you can use it. It’ll just take some time to get used to it because it’s not just like using a simplified iPhone experience.
YVONNE: Do you guys have training on that?
MATT: We don’t today.
YVONNE: All right.
MATT: But you could email – we could send a list of gestures to you for sure.
RACHEL: Absolutely.
MATT: Yeah, we have a list of those. So we could definitely do that.
ERIC: Is there a reason why you want to use it just as the tablet without the keyboard?
YVONNE: So I can sit in my chair and lay it in my lap and not have to sit a computer on a table or a desk.
ERIC: So I’m assuming this is for consuming information, maybe reading emails and deleting and not necessarily writing things?
YVONNE: Yeah, it’s mostly just to, like, surf the web and do things.
RACHEL: And just to reiterate, I do use a touchscreen laptop with JAWS. And you will get used to it. It’s not that different. And but also it’s a great thing. If you can try it out at all, it’s definitely worth trying it, if you can.
YVONNE: Cool, thanks.
ERIC: Thank you.
RACHEL: All right, thanks, Yvonne. So we have Venkat onstage in Clubhouse.
VENKAT: Yeah, thank you, ma’am, for taking me. I would like to say something about your Clubhouse presence. You are mainly doing sessions for the beginners on Clubhouse. Why don’t you increase your scope on Clubhouse like you can do sessions on advanced topics, and you can do generally Q&A sessions. You can also do tech news and all that now. So this is a suggestion I wanted to give. Thank you.
RACHEL: All right. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. We do do two sessions a week in Clubhouse. One is Beginners Corner on Wednesday, and then earlier in the week we do focus on more advanced topics. So check out Ask Sharky, and we do touch on some more advanced things there. But also if you get more specific suggestions, please send an email to training@vispero.com.
We have Bruce on Zoom. I’m asking you to unmute.
BRUCE: Hi. I had a couple of braille questions. You’re going to love these. The first one is something that just actually occurred this afternoon with one of our students. She’s reading French. She’s learning French. And she uses, as many, many people who are learning a foreign language do, she’s using uncontracted braille, but with the French accents. And so the only options I’m seeing that would work for that are French Unified braille, which is, even uncontracted is too complicated for a situation like that. I was wondering if there’s any way that JAWS could support this kind of learning environment.
GLEN: So besides Unified French, do they have no other tables?
BRUCE: No. They have Computer Braille, Unified Grade 1 and Unified Grade 2.
GLEN: And she doesn’t want...
BRUCE: But this is a very, very common way for students of foreign languages to read. They’ll use the English tables, but they want to use the French accented letters.
GLEN: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Okay. And the UEB tables don’t contain the French accented letters.
BRUCE: Well, the UEB tables will make the UEB version of the accents, which don’t work when you’re actually reading French. It gets very, very convoluted. So, for example, an E acute is a .123456 using foreign language braille. But in UEB you see the prefix that shows that it’s an acute accent, and then it’s followed by the E.
GLEN: Ah, okay, so by showing it in French you’re going to be violating the UEB rules officially, but...
BRUCE: Right. But by showing it in UEB, you’re violating the French rules. So it’s kind of weird. Well, I’ve got one more question, then, that is definitely JAWS related. The INSERT+4 dialog, can we add more accented letters to that? Because there are a whole bunch of accents, especially in French and German, that aren’t represented by what’s there. And it’s very, very hard to quickly enter these accented letters in if you’re using standard keyboard commands. But the INSERT+4 dialog makes it very easy, but it’s not complete.
ERIC: I made a note on that, too. That makes good sense to try and get those added.
RACHEL: Thank you so much. We have Shao onstage in Clubhouse.
SHAO: Hello, yes. It’s Shao. Yeah, I’m curious to know if you guys have had this problem where you try to perform an OCR, gosh, I forgot what it’s called, but when you try to do OCR with JAWS; right? And it says the OCR components have not been installed. And I’ve tried doing a JAWS repair. I’ve tried uninstalling JAWS, and I’ve tried reinstalling, still to no avail. The client that I’m working with has OpenBook. I don’t know if that makes a difference. But they have OpenBook, and we try to use OpenBook. It does not work, either. And the scanning function for OpenBook does not work. And OCR does not work. So I’m at a loss as to what to do. It keeps saying, if this keeps happening, call Freedom Scientific technical support. And I’ve tried doing that. We’ve tried doing a repair. No luck.
GLEN: On a particular computer.
SHAO: Mm-hmm.
ERIC: What’s the operating system?
SHAO: Windows 11. It was Windows 10, and it wasn’t working. And then of course my client updated to Windows 11.
ERIC: Ah. So it wasn’t working when it was Windows 10, either.
SHAO: Yes.
ERIC: And then they upgraded the computer to Windows 11, and it still doesn’t work.
SHAO: Yup, mm-hmm.
GLEN: And is this scanning from a scanner? Or is this like doing OCR of a PDF or...
SHAO: Both.
GLEN: Okay. Neither one works.
SHAO: We’ve tried both. Mm-hmm. It still keeps telling me that the OCR components are not installed.
ERIC: And you’ve talked to our tech support? They’ve gone through this with you?
SHAO: Yup, they’ve gone through...
ERIC: Or did they just try and do a repair? Or...
SHAO: They just tried to do a repair.
ERIC: Yeah. So I think we’re going to have to get deeper into it.
SHAO: Yeah.
ERIC: Did they ever suggest to you to uninstall, remove shared components, and start over?
SHAO: Did that. I did that myself.
ERIC: Okay.
GLEN: Will you contact them again, tell them you talked to us, and that we think that there is – that we would like them to use the Logman UI in verbose mode........
SHAO: Log?
ERIC: You should write to one of us.
SHAO: Okay.
ERIC: And then let us put you in touch with them.
GLEN: Good point, Eric.
SHAO: I will do that.
ERIC: Will you drop me an email?
SHAO: I sure will. Thank you.
MATT: I love how technical Glen just got. And Eric goes, don’t you dare do that.
GLEN: I wasn’t going to go on for too much longer. I was just going to dictate 30 lines of printed code.
MATT: Logman UI dot this dot that.
GLEN: No, there was a period after Logman UI. It was not a run-on sentence.
MATT: No commas.
SHAO: So I appreciate it. And yes, I will email you guys.
ERIC: You can send it directly to me.
SHAO: Thank you.
ERIC: Edamery.
SHAO: Okay. Thank you.
GLEN: Yes. Avoid me, clearly.
ERIC: And then, if you would, when you send it to me, you might just in the subject line make sure you mention “OCR failing – FSOpenLine.”
MATT: You could also write “Logman UI” in the subject line.
ERIC: No, no, no. OCR...
SHAO: I don’t even know if I can remember that. I’m like, wait.
MATT: We have to pick on Glen once in a while.
SHAO: Well, thank you. I will do that.
RACHEL: I am unmuting Ian. Are you there?
IAN: Okay, great.
RACHEL: Yeah, hi.
IAN: I have JAWS Professional, and it actually expires this year. And I want to switch to a Home and then get the five-year license.
ERIC: So you have an ILM license, or you have a Home Annual License now.
IAN: Now a Professional.
ERIC: And you don’t need it because you want to use it at home. And you’re in the U.S.?
IAN: Yeah, Boston.
ERIC: So you can make this purchase, and you can go through the eStore to do it, or you can call Customer Service directly. And they can assist you in finding the five-year option. Okay?
IAN: Will the Professional license just, like, just stop then?
ERIC: It’ll stay right where it is. Whatever version it’s at, it would just stay there.
RACHEL: All right, thank you. We have Lanny onstage in Clubhouse. How are you, Lanny?
LANNY: I’m a newer JAWS user. I actually have been using NVDA, just switched to JAWS. I am learning to program, so for one I’m curious about resources for somebody who wants to use JAWS to program. I need training materials, that kind of thing. And I want to learn to use it with Visual Studio code, which is my preferred programming environment.
GLEN: There are a couple of things that I would suggest looking at. The American Printing House for the Blind just finished their National Coding Symposium. That was the second year of that. And if you search for National Coding Symposium, you should be able to get to all of the resources that they’ve posted. Because in addition to having people talking about just the careers of being a software developer and so forth, they also have some preconference activities for which the documents and lesson plans are there. And I think that may give you somewhat of a good introduction in terms of resources, as well.
There’s also a mailing list called program-l which is a whole bunch of blind folks who are using software development tools and writing code. So that may be another option. I think those of us who have done it largely try things, experiment, reach out to others on lists, you know, get support that way and slowly begin to bootstrap ourselves. So do not feel badly about asking others. If you show an interest and resourcefulness, people will bend over backwards to help you.
ERIC: I muted Lanny because there was some background noise coming through. So I hope that helps. Rachel, should be get another call or two in?
LANNY: I did have another question. I think that was my phone.
ERIC: Oh, go ahead. Okay.
LANNY: I also had another question. I’m trying to use Thunderbird. That was my preferred email client before with NVDA. And when I try to use it, when I use SHIFT and the ARROW keys to try to select messages in the preview, a lot of times it’ll just say “selected.” It won’t say which messages are selected.
GLEN: So you’re arrowing down. And rather than hearing the name of the message or the subject and “selected,” you’re just hearing the word “selected.”
LANNY: Exactly.
GLEN: I think it’s a bug. Thunderbird went through a major update probably six or eight months ago. It was their first major update in a really long time. And we did some work because JAWS was not working well at all with it. And we fixed the obvious things, and the things that got pointed out to us. And this may be just one that fell through the cracks. And this is something we will look at because Thunderbird has a devoted user base. And if this isn’t working this is something we should fix.
LANNY: Okay. Thank you for looking into that.
RACHEL: All right. We have another question here on Zoom from Chris Hendricks’ iPhone.
CHRIS: Hey, thanks. I jumped into this Q&A open session a little late, but I don’t – I have not heard this discussed or this question in a while. Has there been any marketing or outreach to the consumer groups and/or employee groups on providing script writing to make sure employees have the availability or the available tools that are embedded within JAWS to maximize their job performance?
MATT: So if you’re asking have we reached out to consumer groups and organizations to provide a training class, it sounds like, on how to do scripting and things of that nature? Is that what you’re asking?
CHRIS: I think just how much proactive has Freedom been to make sure that people that use JAWS know that JAWS scripts are available to make them more employable and to make them successful in their jobs.
MATT: Yeah, we typically try to work with the employers on this topic. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing both. And it’s a mix of not only Freedom Scientific, but our sister company TPG Interactive, who does scriptwriting for companies.
CHRIS: Right.
MATT: And so we do a mix of both on that topic.
CHRIS: Thank you, Matt.
MATT: Yeah.
CHRIS: Appreciate it.
MATT: Not a problem.
RACHEL: I will say also, Chris, that this is a topic, scripting, that we discuss a lot in our training and outreach department. It comes up a lot. We take a note of people who have interest in it. And we’re aware, I guess I should say, and it’s a larger conversation. And I totally agree with what you’re getting here, that scripting should be a larger part of our community, and second what Matt said.
GLEN: Yeah, because there aren’t that many end-users who feel empowered enough at this point to be able to go in and write small scripts that could really be, you know, major productivity boosts for them, but that may not be all that generalizable.
MATT: What’s funny, I mean, when I was working for a client, one of the things I did was what ended up becoming a feature, which is the letter N inside of the emails, so that I could move through the emails quicker. And I did it for a client because it was just so tedious to go through all the headers in a message. And, you know, sometimes those scripts do become features over time because we learn it’s way better as a feature in the product than it is some of the extra effort that scripts have to do.
RACHEL: Shall we wrap up for the evening?
ERIC: I think that sounds like a good plan. And I’ve taken a lot of notes on many of the comments that have come in. And I’ll take the to-do to go back and turn some of these things into bugs and exercise on them and see what we can get fixed.
MATT: And I’m going to go run Logman UI when we finish this.
RACHEL: All right.
GLEN: I’m going to go lie under the table till morning.
MATT: I think it’s going to be – I think that will be deleted from any recording.
GLEN: Of course not. Especially not now.
ERIC: When is the next FSOpenLine, Rachel? Are we in August?
RACHEL: The next FSOpenLine is going to be in August, most likely.
MATT: Oh, yeah, we ran this one a little late; right?
RACHEL: We did, yes.
MATT: It was supposed to land right around the holiday time, and it got a little crazy with the travels and stuff. So, yeah, we ran this one about a month later than we had planned.
GLEN: And I just want to say what a high-quality group of callers we had this time around.
MATT: And some people we’ve never heard from before.
GLEN: Yes, which is even better.
MATT: Yeah, I love it when we hear some new voices, and seeing such a mix of people asking questions, and even hearing some folks who had switched to JAWS now, and I love hearing that, too. So that means we’re doing some right stuff. So that’s good.
RACHEL: When we asked to share at the beginning, we had more than a dozen shares. So I love to see that, and attribute it to getting some new participants, perhaps. And we didn’t get to everyone, but that sometimes happens.
GLEN: Thank you all very much. We’ll see you in August.
ERIC: Thanks.
MATT: Excellent. Have a great day.