RACHEL BUCHANAN: All right, hello, and thank you for joining us for FSOpenLine, Freedom Scientific’s global call-in show. For those of you who have not joined us before, I’m just going to start out with a few little items that will help you engage with us during the show. If you are using Windows and JAWS, when you would like to ask a question, you will use ALT+Y (Yankee) to raise your hand. If you’ve dialed in via the phone, you’ll use *9 back to back, and that will put your hand up. And then if you’re on the mobile app, all you need to do is double-tap on the raise hand button. We will call on you one by one and then ask you to unmute. And until then, please leave yourself muted so that everyone can hear the participants ask questions, and everyone can hear the answers.
Now, without any further ado, I would like to introduce you to our newest FSOpenLine participant, Ryan Jones. And then of course joining us is Glen Gordon and myself, Rachel Buchanan. How are you all?
RYAN JONES: Hi, Rachel. Doing well. Glad to be here. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Ryan Jones. Eric Damery, as most everyone knows, I think retired at the end of July. And I have stepped into his spot as the Vice President of Software and Product Management at Vispero. So I get the privilege and honor of leading this wonderful team of many people that create, support, train, do documentation, all things around our software products – JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion.
I did want to just mention a timeline because this is a really busy time of the year for us. And this is getting into our season of the next major version of our software release coming up in October. But prior to October, when we release, we do each year a public beta program. And a public beta program means we put the software out there for you, the public, people who aren’t necessarily part of our test department or part of Freedom Scientific the company, or part of our private beta team. We want you to test the software, and we want you to use it on your machines. We want your feedback on how things are working, the new features that we’re working on. We want to hear your feedback on them. And that gives us time to make changes to the software before that final release comes out in October.
And “final release” I guess I should put in air quotes because we always are updating the software. And as any of you who have used JAWS or ZoomText or Fusion for any time, you know we put out releases about every six to eight weeks, or updates. And so “final release” doesn’t mean that we’re never going to change it again, it just means that’s our official version 2023 release, and that will come out in the second half of October.
So on September the 6th we will be releasing what we call Public Beta 1. So it’s the first draft of our public beta software. So you will be able to download and install JAWS, ZoomText, or Fusion. It doesn’t matter what your – as long as you have a licensed – you don’t have to be licensed even for 2023. That’s one of the nice things, even if you are not eligible because of an SMA or any reason. Even if your license is not eligible for 2023, we still want you to participate, and we still allow you to participate in these initial public beta testing versions. So we look forward to that.
And in fact Glen and I just recorded recently the FSCast. And in that FSCast we talk about some of the main features that are coming up here for version 2023 for JAWS and ZoomText. So I won’t take this evening to talk about those. I encourage you to check out the FSCast, take a look at the web pages when we make the announcement and put the release out there on September 6th. We’ll have plenty of documentation about the new features and the changes that you should expect. And then we’ll be asking you to test them and give us feedback on those. So Glen, any additional things you want to add?
GLEN GORDON: I just want to point out to everybody who’s calling in, please call and ask difficult questions. And I’m going to go under the table whenever you ask, and Ryan will be on the spot. So it’ll be great fun.
RYAN: Great. This sounds like a blast.
GLEN: It’ll be a humorous event.
RYAN: It sounds like it will be.
GLEN: He will tackle these with great skill, I’m sure. And I’m not really going under the table. I’m looking forward to talking to all of you.
RACHEL: Well, I’m glad you are because we have quite a few people wanting to ask some questions. Owais Patel, I am going to ask you to unmute.
OWAIS: Good evening, everyone.
RACHEL: Good evening.
OWAIS: My name is Patel. Is it possible to do math correctly in written form in Windows with JAWS, like in an application perhaps like Word, so that I can type with my braille display and then write mathematical equations and stuff for school purposes?
GLEN: You’re not a plant, are you? This is a perfect question because we have a good answer. We have the Braille Math Editor. And the Braille Math Editor lets you input in Nemeth Code braille, that’s the only one that currently works.
OWAIS: UEB does not work?
GLEN: It does not work currently. It is on our list of things to address. Are you a UEB guy?
OWAIS: Absolutely.
GLEN: Okay. Yeah, that...
OWAIS: And the issue is that, while I have a braille notetaker that allows me to write math and stuff quite well for me to read, when I put the document on a USB drive and give my teacher to mark it, they are not able to read it because the information appears as a braille element. And so I was wondering if JAWS could translate math and allow me to write it in a way that I write it in braille, but it translates to print in a mathematical way of understanding.
GLEN: That’s sort of what our Braille Math Editor does. I think the problem here is that we’re currently limited to Nemeth Code, and you’re using UEB. My guess is that once we have this working with UEB, this will do what you’re after because you can enter it in braille, and you can hit a button, and it will turn it into math inside a Word document in the standard Word format.
OWAIS: Okay. And my second question, and I apologize for asking too many questions this evening.
GLEN: It’s only two.
OWAIS: Okay, thank you. My question is that with JAWS and braille, what I have noticed over the years is when it comes to writing documentation, Freedom Scientific only describes the methods of working with and connecting using its products such as the Focus line of braille displays and JAWS, but does not address other braille displays, for example, and the commands to use them. And as a result, what tends to happen from time to time is once you’re connected, okay, the connecting part may be a bit easy. It’s pretty universal. Makes sense. So far so good. But then as soon as one wants to start working with the braille display, they have no documentation that truly guides them on how to use their particular braille display with JAWS. And then they become stuck.
RYAN: I think that’s good feedback.
RACHEL: That is good feedback.
RYAN: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s definitely something we will look into. Thank you for those comments. Thank you for bringing that to our attention.
RACHEL: Yes.
OWAIS: Thank you.
RACHEL: And next we have Dennis onstage at Clubhouse. Dennis, you can unmute and ask your question.
DENNIS: Hey, Ryan. Hey, Glen. Ryan, welcome to the team. I’ve been on here before when Eric’s been on.
RYAN: Great.
DENNIS: I look forward to good things. Three things. One, I know Eric knows about this. Have you made any progress with the MLB Player in JAWS? Two, is there any chance, I know you guys do a discount every year at convention, here USA side. Is there any chance you could do more than one, in case somebody doesn’t have that money at convention time? I had repairs and things that came up. I just didn’t have the money this year to do any of the sales. And I think it’d be great if you do them, you know, like twice a year. And can you touch on what’s coming new in JAWS 2023?
RYAN: So can I ask you, Dennis, when you ask about discounts, are you asking for software, for braille displays, for other hardware.
DENNIS: Software.
RYAN: Okay.
DENNIS: Well, I mean, ideally, you know, whatever you would discount at convention time.
RYAN: Right. So the short answer is yes, we can – and I am in the process of considering other times of the year that we might do discounts. So I think that’s just something to keep an eye on. I can’t say, I don’t even know yet when a schedule like that would be, to be honest. But it is something that I’m considering and kind of looking at how we might do that. And we may be able to do it in some different ways. So stay tuned on that part.
DENNIS: Okay.
RYAN: You asked about 2023 and upcoming features. I’ll just mention a couple of things very briefly for everyone. And then, like I said, please tune in to the FSCast. Glen, is that going to come out next week?
GLEN: Yes. It will come out actually before the replay of FSOpenLine comes out. So it’s going to come out on the last possible day to still be in August. It’s coming out on Wednesday the 31st.
RYAN: So August 31st.
DENNIS: Geez, Glen, you’re cutting it kind of close there, aren’t you, buddy?
GLEN: Oh, no, no, Dennis. Plenty of time. It’ll be out, you know, by 11:50 p.m.
RYAN: And it depends on what time zone. He may move out to the Pacific to catch a couple extra hours here.
GLEN: Yes, I don’t believe in wasting any time. I push it to the limit. So yes, it’ll be out on the 31st, and Ryan is prominently featured, both talking about features and also demonstrating the Smart Glance feature.
RYAN: I would like to make one note. One of the things that we were able to do, I know many people have had this issue over the last couple of years, and I think many have had it and didn’t even know they have it, and that’s a challenge with certain Dell computers. There’s an application that comes installed that works with the audio drivers called Waves Maxx. And it’s turned on by default when you get a Dell computer. And what was found is that that application, because the testers, the creators of that application don’t necessarily know or probably think about screen reading technology which is playing audio feeds all the time into the speakers, some of the ways that that application was developed started causing some challenges with JAWS. And I think many of you have experienced that, that the computer would slow down after a few hours. You might start getting weird behavior. Things would freeze up. And so our advice has been to disable that application.
But we have found a way to work around that. And so we were able to make a change now in JAWS 2023 that will get us around that issue. And so far in our testing it’s worked quite well. So that’s one of the things. It’s not like a glamorous new feature. But it’s a way that’s going to make our lives a little bit easier, not having to turn off that feature on Dell computers. So we talk a little bit more about that on the FSCast. But it’s something that I wanted to make mention of because I think it will be a good improvement for folks.
GLEN: And it probably will make it to what will likely be our final 2022 update in October. I can’t say that for sure. But it’s certainly a possibility because it would benefit all sorts of folks.
RYAN: We definitely will do that if at all possible to help, though, yes. So thank you.
DENNIS: Anything else of interest?
RYAN: Yes, but I don’t want to spill all the beans tonight.
DENNIS: Come on, Ryan.
RYAN: Only part of them.
DENNIS: Oh, come on.
RYAN: And so let me leave it at this. I might intersperse a few things here along the way this evening. So...
DENNIS: I mean, that was the teaser for tonight. I mean, one thing? Come on.
RYAN: We’ll see what else, what other tidbits might come out this evening. So thank you, Dennis, for your questions and your comments.
DENNIS: All right, thank you.
RYAN: Appreciate you.
RACHEL: Thank you, Dennis. I like it when they beg about the features, it’s funny.
GLEN: Dennis probably was not the best behaved kid on Christmas.
RACHEL: You think? He was probably up in there shaking those boxes. You know he was. I am going to now unmute David Kingsbury. David? So I’m going to ask you to unmute. There you are.
DAVID: Am I unmuted now?
RYAN: There you go. Hello.
RACHEL: You are. Nice to hear your voice, David.
DAVID: Thank you. I kept getting this thing. The hostess asked me to unmute. Okay. I did it. Stayed muted. So anyway. For, I don’t know, a couple years or so now, Acrobat Reader has had a feature called Sticky Notes, which is essentially you can put comments into a PDF similar to how you do it in Word. And it’s very easy to put one in. Only problem is I have not figured out a way to actually accessibly get at those at all and read them. So, well, I guess it’s a question. Is that an accessible feature? And if it is, be great to know how you do it because I have not been able to figure out how to get to those Sticky Notes or comments. And if it’s not, it would be – I think it would be a very nice thing for you guys to work on making accessible.
RYAN: David, can I ask if you use these in – you said Acrobat Reader or Pro? Does it matter? Can you add these Sticky Notes or edit them in either version?
DAVID: I only use Reader. I don’t have Pro. I’m assuming you could add them in Pro, but I’m just talking about Reader.
RYAN: Okay. I made a note of this, Glen. I don’t know if we’ve looked at this before. But I did make a note if we haven’t, that is something we should look at. I’ve not used that feature, the Sticky Notes, myself in Acrobat.
GLEN: I don’t think Adobe has made any changes in the accessibility support to Acrobat in at least 10 years. So maybe they have suddenly added something. But we have not heard from them if they’d added that support. And if they have, then we can obviously expose it. But if they haven’t, then, you know, we’ll need to reach out to them and see if they have any appetite for adding accessibility support because we only get the data that they offer up to us.
DAVID: You can put the Sticky Notes in. So that sort of makes me tantalized to think maybe there’d be a way to get to them. But you’re saying that they have to somehow grant you access in some way so that you can make them accessible?
RYAN: At a software level, yeah.
GLEN: They have to expose it to us. It used to be, in the old days, in the old days before electrical power, nobody knew about accessibility except for screen reader companies. And so we would, like, pluck things off the screen and so forth. And over time those techniques because of how software has evolved have become less and less available. And so now it’s sort of a nice dance that we do with the developers of the software, where they expose information to us. We retrieve it and then provide it to the user. So without that dance, without them making something available to us, like for instance the Sticky Note associated with a piece of text, we’re not going to be able to grab it.
Thank you for calling this to our attention. And in trade, I just want to point out to those of you who are looking for books on a variety of things, including formatting your documents with Microsoft Word, which I think was just an outstanding book by David...
RYAN: Yes.
GLEN: He is quite the accomplished author.
DAVID: Thank you.
RACHEL: Quite an excellent book. Thank you, David.
RYAN: Thank you, David.
DAVID: Thanks.
RACHEL: Next onstage in Clubhouse we have Ebraham.
EBRAHAM: Hi, guys. How you doing?
RYAN: Hello, good evening.
EBRAHAM: Good. So I just had a quick question. I was wondering if you could let me know how to reenable Screen Shade. I’ve forgotten how to do that recently.
RACHEL: INSERT+SPACE+F11.
RYAN: So INSERT+SPACE+F11 will toggle it on or off, yes.
RACHEL: Right. That’s what I like to use because I can turn it on and off.
EBRAHAM: So we’re using INSERT+11 or INSERT+SPACE, which one?
RYAN: INSERT+SPACE, followed by F11. It’s a layered command, that’s right.
EBRAHAM: All right, thank you.
RYAN: I was just thinking of a joke, Glen. Why didn’t JAWS get sunburned in July?
GLEN: Because it had Screen Shades?
RYAN: There you go.
RACHEL: Oh.
GLEN: Where is the rim shot when we need it? Oh, there it is.
RACHEL: All right. George.
RYAN: This is what happens when we have dead time.
RACHEL: George on Zoom.
RYAN: George, save us, quick.
GEORGE: Good afternoon. Or good evening.
RACHEL: You did it. Thanks, George.
GEORGE: I liked that joke. I’m going to put that on Facebook. Well, I have a quick question. At work we use Teams. And the way we use it is that each office has their own, I guess their own thread. And when it pops up, I like to read it, but with JAWS I had to, like, ALT+TAB, ALT+TAB, ALT+TAB to Teams. Is there a way I can get to the notifications with keystrokes?
RYAN: So let’s make sure I understand what you’re asking. So when you get a new message that comes in, you might hear JAWS say “Message from Glen Gordon,” something like that. And then you’re not on Teams right then, but you want to hear that message.
GEORGE: Yes, sir.
RYAN: Yup. So part of it you can get to with the Notifications Manager or the list of notifications. That’s only if, though, JAWS actually reads the whole text. So I know for me in Teams most of the time I just hear a notification that says so-and-so sent me a message, basically. If you hear that in the notification manager, you’re only going to get that text that JAWS spoke. If that notification actually reads you part of the message or the whole message, then you can get that in the Notifications History. And I will say sometimes that Teams does bring up an actual screen notification because sometimes I find it when ALT tabbing around there’ll actually be a window there from a recent notification with a CLOSE button and a REPLY button. So I don’t know exactly the pattern that Teams uses of when or how long that stays open. But I do see it on occasion.
GEORGE: Is there a way to get to that pop-up?
RYAN: The only way that I’ve known is ALT tabbing.
GEORGE: Okay.
RYAN: Or you could do INSERT+F10 to bring up the list of running windows.
GEORGE: Oh, there you go.
RYAN: But it depends on how long it stays on the screen.
GLEN: The other thing that some people do is assign a Windows Hot Key to Teams. Do you know what I’m talking about?
GEORGE: Yes, sir.
GLEN: When you have the shortcut, you can assign a Hot Key to it? And if Teams is already open, hitting that Hot Key in a couple of seconds will take you back to Teams. And so that often is fewer keystrokes than either having to ALT+TAB a bunch of times or bring up the INSERT+F10 dialog.
GEORGE: Now, again, how do I do that, in terms of the Hot Keys? I’m sorry?
GLEN: There’s plenty of documentation actually online. If you set up setting up a shortcut key for a Windows app, they’ll talk about it.
GEORGE: Okay. Okay.
GLEN: Worse comes to worst, contact training@vispero.com. But I think you’ll be able to find a couple of things online that’ll walk you through it.
GEORGE: Awesome. I appreciate that. Thank you, sir.
GLEN: Thanks.
RACHEL: On Clubhouse, onstage we have Majar Shefi.
MAJAR: Good evening.
RACHEL: Good evening.
RYAN: Hello.
MAJAR: I have a quick question about braille tables. I’m a bilingual. I use English and Arabic and like to change between them easily, without needing to go to Settings Center and change braille table each time, you know. As doing ALT+SHIFT in the qwerty keyboard, is there a modifier key to do that when using a braille display?
GLEN: Have you gone into Settings Center into the braille profiles dialog? Have you explored that?
MAJAR: No.
GLEN: Okay. So two things. There’s something in Settings Center called Braille Profiles. And that’s sort of the advanced braille where you can pick the languages you care about, and you check those, and then a key on the braille display will allow you to switch between them. If you like taking part in webinars and listening to recordings of webinars, Adi Kushner did one, probably in November of last year, but we archive them.
RACHEL: If you send an email to training@vispero.com, we’ll send you a direct link because Adi was – it was very advanced. It was good.
GLEN: And he also walks through making some of the changes.
MAJAR: Yeah. So I’ll go to your website and check your webinars and see. Excuse me for another question. I’d like to get the JAWS 2022 offline installer, but I didn’t find it on your website. I found only the online and a beta version for what’s called the ARM, ARM processors. But I didn’t find the offline installer. So where can I get it from?
GLEN: It’s on the same page, I’m 99% sure. If you go to freedomscientific.com/downloads, then choose JAWS, and if you read past all of that other stuff, it will say Corporate Users or People in Secure Environments. That may be the clue. And then you can download the offline installer.
MAJAR: Okay. So thanks for your time.
RACHEL: Thank you, Majar. I’m going to ask that Jose Martinez, who is on the stage in Clubhouse, go ahead and unmute and ask your question.
JOSE: Well, first of all, good evening. I’ve got two things, feedback and a related question. So I have a Surface Laptop Studio, recently purchased it and love the thing. The one thing that I’ve noticed was maybe similar to Waves Maxx with Dell. I have not found a way to disable power management on the soundcard. So if I don’t turn on the checkbox for – I forgot what it was called. But, you know, it’s the digital silence checkbox.
GLEN: The sound player, yes.
JOSE: It keeps the driver open. Yeah, keeps the driver open and everything. If I don’t check it, then it’s going to cut off and, you know, it’s going to shut itself off automatically. I have not found a way to disable that system-wide. But I wanted to know if you’ve received complaints about it from other people.
GLEN: We have gotten similar complaints. I didn’t hear specifically the Surface Studio. This is very useful information because as luck would have it, we’ve been having some dialogue with the power and performance testing team at Microsoft. And they do test Surface Studio. And so being able to point out that the current – this is the current generation of Surface Studios, has this problem?
JOSE: The Surface Laptop Studio.
GLEN: Okay. Yes. I will, I mean, who knows, who knows if we tell them what they can do. But they did express some interest in working with us to try to come up with a way of resolving this.
JOSE: That’s good to know.
GLEN: Does the Silence Player solve it for you?
JOSE: It does on the stable build. I’m currently on the Insider Preview. And that one is flaky. Sometimes it works, and other times not.
GLEN: So this is the Inside Preview of Windows 11?
JOSE: Yes.
GLEN: Okay. It is possible that the driver that Ryan mentioned at the beginning of the episode here that will fix the Waves Maxx problem, it’s managing audio a little bit differently, and it keeps the Waves device alive for a second and a half after audio finishes.
JOSE: Oh, okay, okay.
GLEN: And so that might do the same thing as the sound, you know, the Silence Player in some cases. But it’s unlikely to work where the Silence Player fails.
JOSE: Got you. Okay. Well, I’ll be – I guess if you could keep us in the loop on this, I’m interested...
GLEN: Will do.
JOSE: ...to see what you come up with.
GLEN: All right. Thanks. Thank you very much.
JOSE: Thank you.
RACHEL: Nolan, J.J.? I’m going to ask you to unmute on Zoom.
NOLAN: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I’m just wondering, probably a simple one, but I can’t figure it out. In Microsoft Word, how do I keep Quick Keys enabled?
RYAN: So you’re pressing INSERT+Z to turn Quick Keys on; right?
NOLAN: Yes, yeah.
RYAN: And then you notice when you ALT+TAB away or go to some other application and come back to Word, Quick Keys are no longer enabled.
NOLAN: Exactly.
RYAN: Glen, I don’t know that we have a way right now to keep them on.
GLEN: We don’t.
NOLAN: It says there used to be in an old version.
GLEN: There is some precedent for this because we do this for crabs – for crabs – for tabs in Chrome these days. And so it’s within the possibility, realm of possibility for us to do it in Word, as well. I actually thought you were going to say you did a Say All and then Quick Keys is off after the Say All is done. And I know we did that for a reason. But as someone who loves using Say All, I find it disconcerting when my Say All is over and Quick Keys aren’t on. So are you impacted by that one, as well? Or just the ALT tabbing thing?
RACHEL: We may have lost our questioner.
GLEN: Okay.
RYAN: Well, I think we – so this is a good note that we need to go back and look into that idea of keeping Quick Nav on in Word. Maybe we can make an option to make it sticky. But it is certainly something we should consider. So thank you, Nolan, if you’re still there.
RACHEL: Thank you, Nolan. Sorry you got dropped off. Onstage in Clubhouse is Heathrow Tech.
HEATHROW: Oh, thank you so much. You know, I firstly want to say it’s such a pleasure to finally get to speak to all the amazing people behind JAWS. I’ve been using this since 3.2, ever since the days of school. I have a few questions. So in this day and age, I’m still using the MMC consoles, you know, these consoles that are famous for crashing and stuff like that. I’ve recently encountered a problem where, if I select Run as Different User – because, you know, in an enterprise environment, for security we do things under different users – JAWS now would just say something like Tree View. And if you’re arrowing down it’s just Tree View all the way. It doesn’t read the stuff under the Tree View or the List View. I’m just wondering if maybe there’s something that I might have missed in JAWS, you know, in order for JAWS to read this under a different user.
GLEN: No. Sadly, I don’t think you have. There are permissions issues when JAWS is running as one user, and then you’re logging in as a different user. And the last time this came up, I was assuming it was us, and I ran Narrator, and Narrator had the same problem. Have you tried Narrator, just as sort of a point of reference, to see if you see the same issue?
HEATHROW: Yeah, I did try Narrator. But then I just thought, well, maybe that’s just another limitation of Narrator, you know, because I hardly ever use that really. It’s just JAWS all the way.
GLEN: Well, no. And we appreciate that. But sometimes it’s good to try something else; right? Because if you had said, for instance, “Oh, Narrator worked fine,” then our initial response would be, of course, you know, we have a bug. But yes.
HEATHROW: I’m with you.
GLEN: Yes, there is a problem. And the only way I can think potentially around it, long-time ago JAWS, in the days of XP, you probably remember that we would run as a service.
HEATHROW: Yes.
GLEN: And we made that go away for a variety of reasons. And that potentially would be the only way to maybe make it work.
HEATHROW: So what I just find myself doing is logging onto another server, and then just doing it that way. But ideally I would like to do it from my workstation, just, you know, for ease of use and more for convenience than anything.
GLEN: Yeah, I mean, it’s a perfectly fair request. It’s just it’s not obvious to us how we can make this happen without jumping through some hoops.
HEATHROW: Yeah. Well, it would really be great. And, I mean, you know, another question relating to these MMC consoles is the famous event viewer, you know, because us admins, you know, when something goes down, people want to know who, when, why, what, how.
GLEN: Yes.
HEATHROW: And we need to look through these logs, and it’s a little bit painful to have to look through the event viewer, you know, with JAWS. And sometimes, I mean, I’m not blaming JAWS. I’m not blaming the MMC. But it will just crash, you know, and we have to just start all over again. So, you know, I wonder if you guys can maybe at some time, you know, if possible, pay some, a little attention to these consoles, if possible.
GLEN: You know, we try to. And any time there’s a specific situation that can be reproduced, that makes it easier for us to actually address it. There are a couple of, speaking of consoles and text tools, sometimes I like using either a very old tool from the Windows Resource Kit of years ago called Dumpel, D U M P E L. And there’s also a PsLogList from Sysinternals, which both will go through and extract the contents of event logs and basically put them into text files. And so you could theoretically then do searches and other things on them. So I don’t know if you’ve tried those or considered them.
HEATHROW: That’s great, some great advice there, Glen. I will definitely have a look into this. And then just my last question. So I’m looking at purchasing a remote license for JAWS. But the thing is, I manage like about 99 servers. So I wanted to know, if I have JAWS on my workstation, would I be able to, with one license, like a remote license, do I need to purchase 99 of those, or will it cover me for all these servers? I’m not too sure, really. I haven’t honestly read up really on the remote. It’s just something that came up as I was listening to the, you know, the discussion. And I thought I’ll just ask here.
RYAN: So the remote access flag that you would put on your license would be for your host or your machine that you are using. You do not have to have it authorized on all 99 servers. So if you’re using one machine that you use to access any of those 99 servers, for example, then remote access would be purchased for your machine, like your laptop or PC that you use, not for each of the machines that you might potentially access with it.
HEATHROW: Okay.
GLEN: But if you’d like to buy 99 licenses, we will celebrate.
HEATHROW: Oh, goodness, if I had the money, I’d support you guys all the way. But thank you so much, again, Rachel, for taking my request, and to you guys for answering my questions. I really, really appreciate it.
GLEN: Excellent, thanks.
RYAN: Thank you.
RACHEL: Yeah, thank you.
HEATHROW: Thank you.
RYAN: And just as a side note, half of that discussion was like way over my head. Glen, I’m glad you’re here. Rachel, we’ve got to find somebody we can talk to now that I can understand what they’re talking about.
RACHEL: Yeah, we have all these smart folks come to FSOpenLine.
RYAN: I know.
RACHEL: Next we are going to ask Slan here on Zoom. Thank you for waiting.
SLAN: Yeah. It’s worth the wait, yeah, it is.
RACHEL: I’m glad.
SLAN: I’d like to ask if there is any possibility that in future JAWS updates that we have the option to either replace the previous version or keep the previous version. I mean, right now we keep the previous version each time we upgrade to a new version. But it would be wonderful if we had that option to definitely replace the previous version for the newest one.
RYAN: So right now, you’re correct in that when you install a new version of JAWS, it’s not going to give you the option to replace the old version. The reason that we’ve done it that way is so that if you – let’s say you have JAWS 2022, and you do install JAWS 2023 at a time, you know, let’s say in October or whenever. We always want you to have the ability to go back to the previous version if something doesn’t work the way that you need or expect it to in the new version. So maybe the way that you interact with certain web pages, for some reason it changes in 2023. Or there’s a certain site that you go to, and for whatever reason it doesn’t read the same way in 2023, and that causes a problem for you. We don’t want you to be stuck and have no way to go back to a prior version of JAWS without having to reinstall a whole older version. So that’s why we leave the version on there.
Now, you can obviously uninstall the old version, if you desire. But at this point we don’t, and I don’t know that we will automatically, or give you the option to do it. It’s something we can consider. But I wanted you to understand the reason that we don’t do it is because we want a safety net for anyone who has a version and upgrades to a new one. So is there a particular reason that you would like to remove an older version?
SLAN: There are people who have machines with very low resources, like for example in a personal case I have a friend of mine who has Windows 8.1, for example. And what she does is like first she has to uninstall the old version and then put the new one, you know, so that the machine doesn’t get jammed.
GLEN: Yeah, well, she’s not going to be able to install new versions of JAWS on Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 is sort of end of life, and we have end-of-lifed it with JAWS. So 2022 onwards is Windows 10 and Windows 11 only.
SLAN: I see.
GLEN: All right. Thank you very much.
RYAN: Thanks.
SLAN: Okay, thanks.
RACHEL: Thank you. There’s a guy waving his hand around in the audience. He claims to be Matt Ater. I don’t know who he really is.
MATT ATER: I just want to find out if I’m late.
RACHEL: Yeah, you’re a little late.
RYAN: You’re late. Might be in the wrong time zone.
MATT: Is that what it is? It’s like, didn’t you start at nine? No?
RYAN: Nine Atlantic, standard time.
MATT: Oh, okay. All right. Sounds good, guys. You’re doing good. I love it. The audio’s great. The questions. I’ve heard new people tonight.
GLEN: Yeah, we’ve gotten a lot.
RYAN: Oh, we’ve had some great ones.
MATT: Which I think is great. You know, it’s always good to have some new folks. And I don’t – where’s Eric?
GLEN: Did you say...
RYAN: He’s sitting on the beach.
RACHEL: Is he not here?
MATT: Last time I checked on Facebook I think he was at a golf course, chasing alligators. Or alligators chasing him.
RYAN: That’s what I saw, as well, yes.
MATT: Yeah, yeah, yeah, good. Well, welcome, Ryan, to one of these events. How are you doing? You enjoying it?
RYAN: Good, you know, this is fun. I love watching Glen get grilled because I can’t answer half these questions anyway.
MATT: When we start talking about consoles and stuff, I just, it was like, yeah.
RYAN: Yeah, it’s like, yeah, I don’t know. Here we go.
GLEN: Last time it was braille tables. Tonight it was consoles. You know, it’s the people I live for.
RYAN: Actually, these are really good conversations because it’s – we need to know what all of you out there are doing. And that’s why we ask questions, like why do you use this, or why do you ask? Not because we want to reject anything you’re saying, it’s because we actually want to understand what people are doing and how they’re using our products. So we enjoy these really technical discussions.
RACHEL: Well, we have about eight minutes, and Shaneice has had her hand up on Zoom for a good long while. How about we...
MATT: She may have a sore muscle. Let’s get to her.
RACHEL: She may. There you go.
SHANEICE: Can you all hear me?
RACHEL: Yeah.
RYAN: Yes.
SHANEICE: Okay. Through my employer, I have one of those Dell computers that you were mentioning earlier. And that file has been deleted. But what I find is that, if I want to use headphones, now that the file has been deleted, the headphones have to be plugged in prior to me booting up the computer, or I’m not able to use headphones. When the workaround is released with I believe you said JAWS 2023, will that file have to be reinstalled in order for this problem I’m having with headphones to go away?
GLEN: You have discovered one of the reasons why we were so keen on trying to craft a solution. I mean, there were many reasons. But this is one of them because the one good thing Waves Maxx does is manage the headphone jack on these Dell machines.
SHANEICE: Right.
GLEN: So, yes, they will.
RYAN: So you will need to reenable it, that’s right.
SHANEICE: You have to reenable it. Okay. And I was glad to hear that somebody knew what the issue was because this was a new computer for us staff, and we’ve been trying to figure out what was the problem since like November of last year. So they just recently, within the last two weeks, said “Let’s try this.” The IT department really didn’t know. They said “Let’s try this.” And it worked. It stopped the issue that we were having with JAWS crashing. But it created another issue.
GLEN: Tell your IT department they’re really smart.
MATT: If they figured that out on their own, that is impressive.
SHANEICE: Yeah. It took almost a year, but they did figure it out. But, okay, but it’s good to hear that a workaround is coming, so thank you so much.
GLEN: And if you really can’t wait, and they’ll let you install public beta software, you can actually try it in our Public Beta 1, which is going to come out the Tuesday after Labor Day.
SHANEICE: They won’t let me. It’s a state agency. So I’ll have to wait.
GLEN: It’s only two months.
RYAN: Two months.
GLEN: Only two months away.
SHANEICE: Okay. But we’re having a big meeting, so I’ll let them know that I was on this call and that we did find out that was the real issue that was causing the problem with JAWS. So thank you.
GLEN: That’s great. Thank you.
RYAN: Excellent. Glad we could help.
RACHEL: Thank you, Shaneice. And then I’m going to unmute one more person on Zoom. I know there are several people we didn’t get to, and I do apologize. Matthew Bullis, I’m going to ask you to unmute.
MATTHEW: So I would like to know if there’s a possibility to add what – it’s a page from Voiceover on the Mac where it delays the speaking of the hint because I find that for a lot of my students here at the Foundation in Phoenix that JAWS speaks the control, and then it speaks the hint. Then it speaks the access key without stopping. And it’s just – it sounds to the student like a lot of words, and we have to really use JAWS TAB quite a lot to get it to repeat. Which is good practice listening, but I’m wondering if the hint could be delayed, as well as being able to be turned off.
GLEN: You know, it’s funny you ask about this because I had the same thought about a year ago. And when investigating, I realized that there was a bug that we have not yet gotten to the bottom of with what we call our “speech queue,” which is the thing that, you know, plays live region announcements and other things without interrupting the primary speech. And so that’s sort of the perfect place to put this. But there are a couple of things for us to work around. So the fact that you’re bringing it to the top of the pile means this is something we can focus on. We just need to solve an underlying problem before it can happen. But I think it makes great sense.
MATTHEW: Okay.
RYAN: I definitely agree.
RACHEL: I think it’s a great point.
RYAN: And Matthew, have you ever tried, just out of curiosity, to see the effectiveness of changing the voice aliases that you can set to have some of those things speak in a different voice potentially?
MATTHEW: Well, the reason we haven’t done that is because these are public computers, and we don’t want to have to change some sort of setting on every computer that the student logs into, even though the profile settings usually follow. We just don’t want to make a lot of customizations if we can possibly help it for each student.
RYAN: Got you. Well, thanks for telling us this because actually I have been thinking about that, that similar thing. So a good sign to me of something we need to look at is when multiple people have the same ideas and questions. And I think that this clearly has that. And as Glen said, once we unpile some of the technical issues that they’ve got to work through, then this is something we should be able to do at some point.
MATTHEW: Right. And maybe, I don’t know if it’s too hard to do, but switch the access key so it says ALT+S, and then waits, and then speaks the hint if the student doesn’t know what to do.
GLEN: Yeah. That might make some sense, actually, because after you hear the hint a couple of times, it’s like, oh, yes, I know what’s coming.
MATTHEW: Yes.
RYAN: Excellent, thank you.
RACHEL: All right. Good point. We do know our next FSOpenLine date will be most likely on November 14th. So tune in then, and you can check out the page because that date will be updated if it’s going to change. But it’s most likely going to be that date because it’s the only time we can nail Matt down. So.
MATT: That really worked out this time.
RACHEL: Yeah, I know, I know.
MATT: Hey, but great job. I mean, the audio worked; right?’
GLEN: It did.
MATT: Boom. So excellent job tonight. The audio sounds great. Everybody sounds great. And Ryan, congrats on the first round of this. I promise everybody will be harder on you next time.
RYAN: Oh, I expect it.
GLEN: All right. Thank you all very much.
MATT: Thanks, everybody.
RYAN: Thanks all, and we appreciate it.
RACHEL: Thank you, everyone, for joining us.
RYAN: Great evening. Thanks, Rachel. Thank you, Matt.