RACHEL BUCHANAN: Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for FSOpenLine.
This will be our last FSOpenLine for 2023. And before I introduce you to all
of our special guests this evening, because we do have quite a packed show and
quite a few guests, let me remind you of a couple quick housekeeping items just
in case you haven't interacted with us before on this show, or you're not sure
if you remember.
So to raise your hand with Windows and Zoom and Jaws, you use ALT+Y, Yankee. And if you're on the mobile app, you just need to double tap the raise hand button. We will call on you, one by one. Please make sure you leave yourself muted in the meantime, just so everyone can hear the questions and the answers. And then I almost forgot. If you're joining us via phone, you'll raise your hand with star nine, and you'll do that pretty quickly, star nine, back to back. And that will put your hand up.
And without any further ado, we will get into today's show. And joining us today we have Glen Gordon. We also have a few extra special guests here that have not normally joined us. We do have Brett Lewis, who's been with us in the past; and Carl Wise, as well. And he has a few individuals from his team joining us, as well. So I'll hand it off to Carl so he can introduce them.
CARL WISE: Thanks, Rachel.
GLEN GORDON: We're going to introduce them momentarily, not to speak for Carl.
CARL: That's fine.
GLEN: So, Carl, it's great to have you. Ryan has defected for the night. And so he decided he would let the juniors completely take over. And we may give away Lamborghinis with drivers, or driverless cars. Who knows what’ll happen in the next hour and a half.
CARL: Well, I don’t know, but I haven't been called “junior” in a while.
GLEN: Well, if I'm a junior, you're a junior.
CARL: True, true.
GLEN: And we're also joined by Grant Patterson, who is head of technical support for Freedom Scientific. So if you want to talk to the tech support head honcho, he'll be here to help field the questions, as well.
RACHEL: Oh, my goodness. I'm sorry, Grant, I almost forgot about you. Speak up there.
GRANT PATTERSON: Oh, we're doing fine. And thank you very much for having me. Sounds like fun. I do get to participate in the Lamborghini ride; correct?
GLEN: Yes, yes, absolutely. On the road to nowhere.
GRANT: Excellent. Awesome.
GLEN: So, Carl, you are here in part to help field questions, but also to talk a little bit about our development process and how it's evolved in the last year or so.
CARL: Yeah, we thought it might be interesting here to kind of give some insights into some of our thought processes as we tackle new features and maybe talk about some of the developments that have taken place on our engineering team in the past year. For many years, we had a software process where we worked really hard to define features at the beginning, just kind of sit down and really brainstorm what a feature should look like and document it very well. And then we'd send the developer off with the specs and say, “Go create this. And when you're done, you know, come back, and we'll take a look at this.”
And so that's what we would do. They would kind of go into their engineering cave, work sometimes for months, and then kind of come out with exactly what we had defined. You know, we found that, you know, we always got what we defined, but we always – sometimes we didn't like what we got. But at that point it was too late to make decisions and still keep our commitments.
So we began a process some time ago of transitioning to more of an agile process. We transitioned to the scrum software process. And in a nutshell, it means that our feature development is segmented into short time box periods, and a team works together to accomplish a goal. So there's a lot of collaboration on the development side. And by the way, the team is made up not only of engineers, but also testers, documentation, authors, localizers. And there's lots of inspection all along the way so that we can make lots of adjustments. So it's a little bit harder to measure in time, but you're guaranteed that, when you get finished, you have something that people are really going to like.
So the first major features that we pushed through this process were our magnification engine in ZoomText. And so we refactored that magnification engine. And in JAWS we did Split Braille and Face in View. So we thought we might talk a little bit about that today and invite some of our engineers to talk about their experiences and maybe share some insights, some key decisions, and how technologies were chosen and things like that. So today we brought in Brett Lewis and Jost Eckhardt and Oleg Shevkun, who all worked on these key features. So I thought we'd start with Brett, who worked a lot on the Face in View feature. Brett's one of our senior engineers.
BRETT LEWIS: Are you sure I'm a senior engineer, or am I a junior senior engineer now? I need to update my LinkedIn profile.
GLEN: I realized my comment about “junior” probably was taken out of context. So I should say that everybody on this call has been around for a very long time. And to call them juniors, even though I called myself a junior, is probably a misnomer. And so I apologize for inadvertently demoting everyone.
CARL: That's okay. This is my first time on FSOpenLine.
BRETT: I was going to say, this is –
CARL: So I feel a little junior here myself.
BRETT: Exactly. Yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Face in View feature and how it all worked its way through this new agile process. And I think it really worked out well for us. I mean, we kind of started with this whole idea of, you know, we wanted this application that would help you get prepared for meetings. You know, as a blind user, what would make that a good experience? And we had some ideas and thoughts and everything, but we didn't really know how to make it a reality.
And so, you know, maybe the first thing we started out with was looking at some different models to do things like detect a face. And then we started thinking about, well, you don't just want to detect a face. We'd like to tell you more about the face. Like, is your face turned to the left or to the right, or up or down? And so we had to look for a model that would help accommodate those kinds of things.
And then once we had sort of worked our way down to a model that was effective and gave us the information we wanted, we started adding things like, hey, we need to know about the brightness. You know, as a blind user, I don't know if most of you guys, but I've definitely sat in my office, you know, and blithely tuned into a meeting, and everybody's like, you know, it's totally dark where you are, which is just a little embarrassing. So, you know, we wanted to add this brightness detection.
And then we had sort of a working prototype, and we would demo it to our sprint reviews every two weeks. And probably the biggest thing and the most startling thing for me that we learned from this process was, and this probably won't startle anybody else, but you really shouldn't let engineers do design. And we were, as engineers, designing things like, hey, how should we give feedback to the users? And, you know, as an engineer, we'd sit in front of the computer and say, oh, you know, your face is to the left of the screen or whatever. And we found that, you know, showing it to other people and having them test it, that really wasn't all that helpful.
And so we ended up reworking some of that positioning information to really focus on giving you as a user directions on how to get the camera in position for you. Rather than, you know, assuming that you're going to have to do some kind of mental rotation and gymnastics to get your positioning correct. You know, it's easy to think that we're done. I mean, I was happy to see 2024 come out and this feature ship. But we really – it's a live feature, and it's going to keep developing based on your feedback. And, you know, I hope everyone – really stay tuned for sort of the next iteration of Face in View.
GLEN: Do you think we could have done it had we not switched to an agile process?
BRETT: I think it would have been slower. I think we would have done like an initial very rough version that would have, you know, let, as I said, sort of the engineers dictate what kind of directions. And I think it would have been probably received with sort of lackluster enthusiasm. And, you know, mostly what I've heard from our users is the feedback’s been pretty good. So I think that's been probably the big change. Maybe we would have gotten there, but we would have taken another year to get there as opposed to coming out with something that I think was, you know, pretty remarkably useful in its initial release.
CARL: All right. Well, our next engineer here is Jost Eckhardt. He's another one of our senior engineers. He works largely on ZoomText. And he's got – he has deep experience in the area of screen reading and magnification. And he's also what we call, along with Brett, a scrum team product owner. So they have, they not only do some of the engineering, but they have a lot of say over how the features kind of come out and work with others in the company to really identify the right feature. So Jost, let's hear about your engagement with the magnification engine.
JOST ECKHARDT: Yeah. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. So with ZoomText, we have been looking at performance improvements for quite a while. And then beginning of the year, we decided to take on a big one, basically writing a new magnification engine by combining the existing two processes that we had, and that were identified at the main cause of the performance and bringing the performance forward. And luckily, I really have to say, we started pretty much at the same time with the new agile scrum process. And that turned out very well, you know, by two reasons. The one thing, we had a team that included testers. So our approach was from the very beginning to have very rigorous testing, both manual testing and also automated unit testing. We needed to prove that what we do is correct and also complete, that we didn't miss anything, and there's so many variations in the magnification that it really needs extreme good testing.
And the other thing, like Brett mentioned, with the short cycle, so every two weeks, we had an increment that was a testable new version. And so not only our testers, but very soon, after like 14 weeks, we had the first beta version out, and our beta testers could also start testing the new engine. So that incremental process and the test-driven process really made a huge difference in what we were able to achieve.
GLEN: And I think it's worth pointing out that there was no panic at the last minute to say, “Oh my God, we got it wrong. We have to roll it back.” It seems like it's been amazingly smooth, given the immensity of the changes.
JOST: Yes, yes. And I think that the safety of the agile process of that really helped, yeah. There was, luckily, no panic on the end, which usually you have; right?
CARL: It's interesting. When we look at the records of how many bugs were found and fixed, the testers were finding things, and we were identifying them early and fixing them. So lots of things were found and fixed, but it just wasn't all stored up for the last minute. So, yeah, that was a huge, huge improvement.
Well, thank you, Jost. I appreciate you coming and sharing. And, you know, you talked some about the integration with test, and I think that has just been a huge evolution in our process. We've had a test department for many, many years. But we've really, in the last couple of years, been able to join these efforts together and put testers on the team with the engineers. So they're really working in a highly collaborative state very early on.
And the next feature we want to talk about is Split Braille, which was just a major feature for us in 2024. And I want to give a shout-out to Joe Stephen, who worked for a long time and continues to work on this Split Braille feature as an engineer. And I know some of you all have heard from Joe in the past. But I wanted to give Oleg an opportunity to share tonight because Oleg was one of the testers on that team. And so I wanted to kind of get this from the test experience, from someone who was testing early on. And by the way, Oleg is joining us from Germany, so it's about 2:00 in the morning his time. Thank you, Oleg.
OLEG SHEVKUN: A bit later than that.
CARL: Oh, is it later?
OLEG: 2:20, I'd say, or something like – yeah, yeah.
CARL: Thanks for joining us. Take it away.
OLEG: Yeah, good to be here. Thank you. So you're getting it right from the tester's mouth, like from the horse's mouth. You know, quite frankly, it is amazing because like in 2020, when the pandemic was going on, Freedom Scientific released Split Audio. And I was sitting there in my home, and I was thinking, oh, how about Split Braille? And I was wondering why people are not doing anything about it. Why isn't there a Split Braille option where you can have two things on the braille display at the same time?
Well, apparently they were thinking about it, and they were developing it. And then as I joined the company again, because I had been working for the company many years ago, and I was rejoining it, I got the privilege of working on the team that did it. And the beauty of it is that, yes, Carl said quite rightly, you work in cooperation with the developers. And yeah, big shout-out goes to Joe. Joe is a genius.
But what was happening is we have several testers, Olga and Rusty and myself, and Ron Miller and other people in the company. First of all, we got the chance to work on developing the feature. We could get together and say, okay, how would this work? What modes would we have? So buffered mode, what should we buffer? How should we buffer this? Then the attributes mode or annotations view or whatever. How should all those things work? And we were discussing that, seemed to ad nauseam.
But then Joe starts implementing it. And what is happening, in the past – Carl is right. In the past it was coming down to developers, from developers to testers at the last stage of the process. Well, here we could get a bit of the feature, part of the feature, like pretty much every day or every second day. And you would work with us. And another thing that we discovered is we were discovering use cases. And I would say, “Joe, hey, I'm learning a foreign language and many people will be doing this.” Or “Joe, I'm doing a math homework and maybe many people will be doing this. A buffered mode is great for math homework if it only had this feature.”
And Joe is sitting there and says, “Hey, I've done it. I'm going to do it.” And that's how great features come together when you're using it from the very beginning, and when you're adjusting it from the very beginning. And then our users started chiming in, and they were saying, “Oh, these changes need to be made. These adjustments need to be made.”
And the last thing I would want to say about this is we're all waiting for a multiline braille display. And, yeah, we've been thinking of how to work with multiline braille display. But the multiline braille displays are either not quite affordable yet – that will come, but not yet – or other reasons. We have our 40 cells or 80 cells or even 20 cells braille displays. And the question is, can we show more on these? And the answer has been a resounding yes. We are showing more of these, and we are eager to hear what our users have to say, what our users can suggest. It's a lot easier now to consider and implement those suggestions and make them into wonderful features. Thank you.
GLEN: And when the multiline displays come, you can probably guess the kinds of features that might be spread across those lines; right?
OLEG: Absolutely. And we're all looking forward to that.
CARL: You know, Glen, the last thing I wanted to mention about this process, this journey that we've begun here, is that when you get through these increments, you have small pieces of releasable code. And then we have our major release and our updates. But this process is lending more towards, you know, when we have a release, it doesn't mean that the feature is done. It is production. It's releasable. But we have more ideas, you know, in the pipeline. So when we look at some of these features, like Face in View or Split Braille, it's easy to envision. You know, the process is continuing. It's not the end.
RACHEL: I have a comment related to that, actually, because one of the reasons you guys joined us for this little intro – and I know people are anxious to ask their questions. We'll get there in just a minute. But another reason is also not just because Ryan wasn't here, but because we wanted to do something a little different and a little special because this is the last day of Sharkvember. And if you didn't know, Sharkvember was our first modification to the month of November we've ever done. We called it Sharkvember for the first time, and we devoted this entire month to celebrating JAWS, Fusion, and ZoomText in the community of people who use our software. So we did a lot of fun things this month, and that was just one of the reasons that we also include this little intro. I won't go on and on about Sharkvember because I know people want to ask their questions, but I did want to mention it.
GLEN: And I, for one, appreciated all of the tips that came out during the month. I'm hoping this will not only be a Sharkvember thing, that tips will continue to come in a somewhat regular form, if not every month, some months.
RACHEL: Yeah, and every single month you will find tips in the message center. So definitely make sure you're checking your message center and looking because we are doing a couple tips a month at least.
GLEN: Excellent.
RACHEL: We already have several hands up, so let's just go in order. Go ahead, Mitch.
MITCHELL: Hey, guys. Any idea on what you're doing with the Outlook app that's replacing the Mail app in Windows 11?
GLEN: We started talking with Microsoft about this app, I think two years ago now.
CARL: I think it was two years.
GLEN: And so we did an initial pass. They gave us an early access version of it. We did an initial pass. We identified a variety of items that made the app at that point less efficient for a screen reader user than the standard Outlook desktop app. They have since made a bunch of changes. We'll be making another pass probably shortly after the first of the year to offer similar feedback to them. We've made some changes in JAWS 2024 in particular to allow better restriction so that, for instance, when you open a message, typically when you're on a web page and a particular area is a mini document, you've been able to wander out of that mini document to the rest of the content of the page. And that's somewhat disconcerting as compared to a message you open in desktop Outlook.
So we've begun to add this restriction where, if there's a document as part of a larger web page, there'll be a way for JAWS sort of transparently to restrict to the area of that little document to make it feel more like desktop Outlook, even though it's actually a web app under the covers. So we're working on it. It's going to be an ongoing process. Microsoft is slowly encouraging people to move, but you should not panic that, at the beginning of 2024, if you're using Outlook in its classic form or you're using the standard mail app, you'll be able to continue using it. And certainly if you try either the new Outlook or the new mail app, we'd appreciate your feedback – things you like, things you don't like, things you'd like us to improve. So does that do it, Mitchell?
MITCHELL: Yep. Thanks. I just wanted to know you guys were putting that together.
GLEN: Yeah. Well, fortunately, we have really good relationships with folks at Microsoft. We want to talk to them about it. And one of the really nice things is they want to talk to us about it because they're as concerned about getting a good experience as we are.
MITCHELL: All right. Here's a piece of feedback you guys might be interested in. When you use the Face in View, and you're in a Zoom session, it doesn't work. You got to be out of the session for it to work.
GLEN: Yeah, it's true. Once you've connected, you can't currently use Face in View to get information unless you turn off your video. And so we're bothered by it. We're working on trying to figure out what options might be available.
MITCHELL: All right. Thanks, guys.
GLEN: All right. Thank you very much.
RACHEL: Hi, Matt Ater.
MATT ATER: Well, hey, everybody. How is everybody today?
GLEN: Good. How are you? Are you still vacationing with the sharks?
MATT: No, I'm not anymore. I'm actually live in Baltimore after leaving Vegas. So, yeah, just riding in Ubers, hanging out, listening to you guys. Life is good.
GLEN: Excellent.
MATT: So, Carl and Grant, what changed in our Citrix support after 2023? Didn't we do something new to support Citrix?
CARL: We did some things, I believe it was in the 2023 cycle, to just make the support a lot easier. And maybe, it may have been towards the end of the 2022 cycle. Actually, Jost worked quite a bit on that with just better diagnostics and troubleshooting around Citrix.
MATT: Technology is changing; right?
CARL: Yeah, well, you know, one of the things they did is they tightened up the security around their channel management. And so we had to make some changes around there as well that improved the code, you know, overall; and, again, made getting Citrix up and running a little easier.
RACHEL: All right. Well, we have another question here. I'm going to ask Paul to unmute.
PAUL: You know, in JAWS 2022, you guys fixed the sentence navigation, changed the keystroke from ALT+UP ARROW and ALT+DOWN ARROW to ALT+PLUS and ALT+MINUS, but you haven't fixed the focus. Those keystrokes don't work. They do the same. They just don't.
GLEN: The focus keys that do that are still sending ALT+UP ARROW and ALT+DOWN ARROW, and they need to be sending now ALT+NUMPAD+PLUS and MINUS. Is that correct?
PAUL: Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Something that will make it work. Yes.
GLEN: Okay. Thanks for the tip.
PAUL: And the other issue I have, and I've not been able to do this properly, creating frames is something I can never get to work. Even if I use the CTRL+SHIFT, the double left bracket to mark off the beginning and the end of a frame, I can never get them to fire. I understand the events and how they work and all that kind of stuff. I just never get them to fire. So I'm concerned that I'm not getting to the right place on the screen. And I’m wondering if there's any blind guys out there who are good at it.
GRANT: I'll jump into the pool on this one. And frames is not something we get a lot of calls on. I used to use them quite a bit 10, 15 years ago when we came out with them. Typically, if they're not firing, it's usually the title of the window that has changed, and you need to just change that rule. But if you give us a call in support, we can certainly take a look at it. But it's usually the name of the window that's messing you up, keeping your frame from firing correctly.
PAUL: Yeah. And I have checked those, and the names have been right.
GLEN: So just out of curiosity, Paul, what app are you finding it potentially useful in?
PAUL: Well, I'm a trainer, and I work, I train for the IRS. And one of the things on their outline is you have to be able to train people on how to use frames.
GLEN: Ah, okay.
PAUL: So it's a requirement that probably should be deleted from the outline, but it’s still – since it's there.
GLEN: They might have some legacy apps where they're really relevant.
PAUL: Yeah, that's true. That's true. And I would try to do them like a file open dialog box. I was just trying to get it so when I tab into the, you know, file name, it would just say something like, “Do you really want to do this?” It just echoes some simple message, and it just never – it doesn't fire. Or if it fires at all, it fires in the wrong place.
GLEN: So I vote for taking Grant up on his offer.
GRANT: Give support a call. If the tech you get is not real familiar with frames, mention my name, and it will come to me. I'll run through it with you.
PAUL: Thanks, guys.
GRANT: All right, Paul.
RACHEL: Thank you, Paul. All right, I'm now going to ask Terry to unmute.
TERRY: I've noticed in 2024 that when I'm in Word, and I hit the previous paragraph command, that instead of – like, let's say you're parked a few characters into a new paragraph. Instead of going to the beginning of that same paragraph, it's jumping to the beginning of the prior paragraph. And that's new behavior that, you know, didn't exist in prior versions. So I'm hoping you could fix that or look at it.
CARL: I've got some news on this one. I was just looking in our records, and this one was just recently found and fixed. So we should see a fix for this in the December update.
TERRY: Okay. Thank you very much. I love JAWS, and I always – you know, it's a great product. Thanks.
GLEN: Thanks, Terry.
TERRY: Yes, you're welcome.
RACHEL: I'm going to ask Mandy to unmute.
MANDY: I actually do have some feedback about Outlook. I got a sneak preview of it somehow today. There was – actually, it was a freshly, a very freshly received this week computer from Computers for the Blind. But what happened was, when we opened it – so the program name was called Outlook (New) in parentheses. And this was the confusing part because it's asking you do you want to switch to the new Outlook, which is not the same as when Outlook 365 or Outlook 2021 asks you that question. It's very similar to the Windows Mail app that this Outlook is replacing. So I think we're back into that.
And I couldn't use the ALT key to navigate the tabs and ribbons or, you know, to navigate to get into the tabs. And I couldn't use CTRL+Y or Go To Folder, and I was disappointed about that. But for both of those things were solved by pressing F6. But now I need to figure out, well, how do we actually switch to have the actual “new” new Outlook because it only offered that option on the first open of it. So it's probably somewhere buried in the settings. We just didn't find it in time.
CARL: Well, typically Outlook has – does have a control up in the title bar to try new Outlook. And I don't know if that shows up all of the time or under what conditions that appears.
MANDY: I sort of – I expected that it would, but it didn't.
MATT: Aren't those like – they feel like – and I'm talking from a low vision perspective. But aren't those like a separate box that pops up on the screen, and F6 kind of gets to it, but you can't get there through ALT or something like that?
CARL: I just tried it in Outlook. Again, I've got the – I guess the Win32 or classic Outlook on my desktop. I've kind of switched back and forth between the two. And if I just use the ALT key to move to the title bar and then press TAB, it's the first tab is a control called Try the New Outlook. So I'm not sure if you're in Monarch. I would expect it to be kind of in the same place to revert, but I'm not sure.
GLEN: Carl, how about if you run Windows Mail, can you get to the new one?
CARL: Well, in Windows Mail I actually am using the new one.
GLEN: And does it say Outlook (New) in the title bar?
CARL: All it says – I see my – I see our company logo in the top left. And then it says Outlook by the search bar. I think that's the control or the ALT+Q control.
GLEN: Right.
CARL: But then I have the same – I definitely – on the right in the toolbar, I mean the title bar, I still have the new Outlook toggle, and it's toggled on.
RACHEL: And I found some information online that says if you don't see that toggle, go ahead and try to update your Outlook because it should be showing up for everyone who has the latest version.
GLEN: So I think we're probably not going to be able to make much more headway here tonight. But if you can't find the information, just, you know, with your favorite search engine, come back to us, and we'll try to help.
MANDY: Okay.
GLEN: Thanks, Mandy.
MANDY: Thank you.
RACHEL: All right, I'm going to ask Richard to unmute.
RICHARD: Good evening, all, and thank you very much. I appreciate JAWS. It keeps me working. And I appreciate great technical support and great training. And I use Microsoft 365. I live in Outlook, Word, and Excel. And I have a couple of Outlook items. They're both small. When starting Outlook with multiple profiles, should read individual items in a list of profiles that the user has set up. And JAWS is very inconsistent about reading the list. So that might be – and I believe that someone mentioned this on an earlier quarterly call.
GLEN: You're absolutely right, and we thought we solved it. So let me ask you a specific question. So when you're in the list, and arrowing up and down doesn't work, if you TAB away from the list and then SHIFT+TAB back, does that fix it?
RICHARD: You are – you’re entirely correct. Exactly.
GLEN: We just need to look.
RICHARD: Okay.
GLEN: Yeah, no quick answer.
RICHARD: Thank you, and I appreciate that. And I have another issue, which also is small. In advanced search in Outlook – again, I'm using Microsoft 365. And after you specify the search criteria, you will go to Browse where you specify the folder, and then you may mark the folders that you want to search. For me, I often search all folders, so I just simply go to the top of the list, which is the master folder for my email. I click that, and then I click Search Subfolders and Proceed. But the folder names in that list, when you check them, do not indicate that they have been checked. It would be handy to be able to know the folder is checked as you check it, and it would save time.
GLEN: This is going to sound like an excuse. So yes, yes, we should fix this. The question is, can we? This is legacy Microsoft UI. They've probably not given this a whole lot of love because their preferred way of searching these days is by using ALT+Q to get to that search box and entering in conditions like From: and Subject: and so forth. I like that feature, except I want to search just the current folder, and that's not the default, and I hate having to select another folder.
MATT: I have the same issue, Glen, with that same discussion, the example you just gave. There's somewhere that you can say “search current folder” on the ribbon. I add that to the Quick Access Bar, so it becomes number one in my Quick Access Bar. So I hit ALT, then 1, and then it puts me in the search box. I type in, and it searches that default box.
GLEN: Ah. Very good.
MATT: And that's the effective way of doing it is use the Quick Access Bar to your power because it's the point of the Quick Access Bar. Remove the stupid things they have up there for mouse users, such as – I'm sorry, Carl. I know you're a mouse user. But, like, the repeat, undo, redo, save, or send, those are all commands we all do with keystrokes. But, like, this is a perfect one to put on the Quick Access Bar. Move it to the first position. There's some great JAWS Power Tips on how to do this. Move it to the first position or whatever position. Remember what number it is. Hit ALT, the number, then it will default to whatever folder. So there's a method to this for sure.
RICHARD: Is that advanced search of all folders?
GLEN: No.
MATT: You could.
GLEN: Yeah, that's a different feature.
RICHARD: Okay.
MATT: Oh. I don’t know about that.
GLEN: So advanced search is Microsoft's old way of searching. They now have this thing called “integrated search” where you press ALT+Q, and you get one search box where you can enter, you know, fairly complex searches. So that's sort of their way forward. The advanced search still remains. And we will investigate if those check boxes can be announced as they're checked.
RICHARD: Well, thank you. And, again, I appreciate your great support.
MATT: And I'll tell you, Glen, I think that as we continue to see Microsoft and others make changes to certain applications like Outlook, we have to help people understand they're not making changes to everything. And, you know, for example, this happens to – and Grant, I think, uses some of our low vision products, too. When you use their dark mode that's built into the app, the dark mode only works for the base app. But as soon as you bring up a dialog like CTRL+Y, it flashes bright white. So that's why the features in ZoomText or Fusion still have great value for doing the reverse video because we're doing the entire screen, not the application.
RACHEL: All right. I have Angela here with their hand up. I'm going to ask you to unmute.
ANGELA: So I've been assisting students who are JAWS users, and one of them was flummoxed by the Microsoft Game Bar. They did WINDOWS KEY+G, the Game Bar popped up, but JAWS wasn't announcing what this app was, nor the navigation of it. I understand that's not Freedom Scientific's responsibility, that's Microsoft. But there’s just – I wanted to let you all know of the incompatibility.
GLEN: Yeah, that's supposed to talk. You may have discovered an unfortunate Easter egg.
ANGELA: Maybe there was an update to Game Bar or something. There was another incompatibility while I was assisting a JAWS user, trying to set up the Windows Speech Recognition, which you can launch with WINDOWS KEY+SHIFT+S, I think it is. The wizard of getting your voice to be recognized didn't get read by JAWS.
GLEN: Thank you. I mean, those are two things that I would have thought we would have heard about already. But thank you very much for alerting us to them.
GRANT: I just duplicated the WINDOWS+G with the Game Bar, and she's absolutely correct.
RACHEL: Absolutely correct. I did, too.
GLEN: Well, thank you, Angela.
ANGELA: Yeah, thanks.
GLEN: Do you have more little hidden gems for us?
ANGELA: That was it. Well, I guess I have something that I need to get better at, which is in a web browser when I want to do INSERT+F3 to see the virtual, what is it, HTML features, like headings list, buttons list. So often I do the JAWS Find instead because I guess I'm on a menu bar or something that doesn't count as like the actual web page. And I think it may be confusing, not just to me, of like, I'm on a web page, why am I not getting the virtual, the HTML features list? Why am I getting JAWS Find instead? Because it's the same, you know, INSERT+F3.
RACHEL: You can try CTRL+F6, and it does kind of make sure you're in that browser window.
GLEN: I love that keystroke. That's really new to me. And I used to tab my way. You know, once I got to the address bar, I had to tab through lots of stuff. And when I heard about CTRL+F6 to always get to the browser, I was just – I was thrilled.
RACHEL: Yeah, it's a good one.
ANGELA: That's valuable. Thank you.
RACHEL: Thank you, Angela. I'm going to ask Tyson to unmute.
TYSON: So I've come across a couple issues when working with clients and one personal. I'll start off with the personal one. I'm using, first of all, Windows 11 and JAWS 23, current update. And on Outlook I'm using the 365 version. I've recently, in about the last five days, hit this interesting thing where if I use the arrows during the inbox to move up and down through the messages, it won't read them. And it'll read maybe the first one, and then as I arrow down, it doesn't read them. If I left arrow, it'll read the message, or not the message, but it'll read the subject line, the sender subject line. And if I down arrow, it'll read the next one, but then go silent for the one after that. And I have to keep repeating this kind of down and left action with the arrow keys to make it work.
GRANT: Yeah, so that is definitely not a known issue. And Tyson, the first thing I would have you do, along with trying Narrator, would be default mode with the INSERT+SPACE+Z to toggle the default mode and see if you still have the same behavior. But definitely give us a call. You know, we can tandem and walk through that. You've got something weird going on. You can't live with that.
CARL: This is kind of ringing a bell of a similar issue I had heard of at one point where someone had their screen kind of stuck in a restored mode where it was really tiny, and content was not visible on the screen.
TYSON: Are you talking about just the screen itself or the Outlook?
CARL: Like the Outlook.
GRANT: Yeah, just maximize your window, HOME+SPACE+X.
TYSON: Yeah, that’s what I was just going to say. I'll just try maximizing it. While I'm doing that, the second issue that I came across with a client yesterday, he's using Windows 11, JAWS 23. And he was using the Gmail standard view in the web browser in Chrome. And whenever he opened an attachment in an email, and he would read through the attachment and then close it, it would throw him out of the message table and all the way to the top of the web page. So he would essentially have to start over again by using, you know, going to the table, going through the entire table, through his messages list, finding the one he wants again, and then starting back into it.
GLEN: I think this is a good one for us to look to, especially because standard mode is going to become the only option come sometime early in the new year.
TYSON: Yeah.
OLEG: What happens if you open the attachment in a new window by pressing SHIFT+ENTER rather than ENTER?
TYSON: We tried that and it won't work.
OLEG: It won't work? It will throw you back?
TYSON: We tried both CTRL+ENTER and CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER, and neither of those worked.
OLEG: Okay.
TYSON: And the third one, which may be an interesting catch, and we've done a workaround for it, is we've installed Fusion 24 on a client's computer a couple of weeks ago when it first came out. And whenever she was at the center that we were working with her, we were getting all of our preferences set and dialed in. We would save it as the default. She left the center, and when she went to start it back up, the Fusion bar came up, but there was nothing there. No speech, no Zoom, nothing. She could try CAPS LOCK, UP ARROW, tried every different thing that I had given her at that point to use, and nothing was working.
She came back in the next day, fired it up, put on Narrator, and we see that it was starting up from the Fusion bar, that Fusion was disabled. So we would have to enable it, and then everything started working hunky-dory. So we went through this a couple of times, and what she figured out was, if she kills Fusion before she kills the computer, it boots back in fine. But if she has Fusion running and shuts down the computer, when it comes back in, it throws it into this old Fusion-disabled mode.
GLEN: Are you able to reproduce her Fusion issue if you let Fusion run through shutdown and restart it?
TYSON: I could try that and see if that works.
GLEN: I think that would be a useful data point for us, just to know if you can reproduce it on two machines or it's specific to her. And that was really great troubleshooting on her part.
TYSON: Yeah, she was just like, you know, I think she did it more out of desperation than out of –
GLEN: Yeah.
TYSON: But yes.
CARL: That's one of those, I'd love to see a support tool package grant on that issue and see if we can repro it.
GRANT: Yeah, absolutely. It's a very interesting one. I'm also blaming fast startup. Maybe there's several possibilities that we can explore, but I'd definitely like to see her live on the phone with us making it happen.
TYSON: Okay, I can figure out a way to make that happen, to arrange that. And who do I –
GLEN: And before you leave – oh, go ahead, ask your question.
TYSON: No, I was just going to ask, when we call up support, who do we – if we get, like, you know, one of the other guys, who do we ask for?
GRANT: Anybody that you get when you punch in, you're going to go through the phone menu system and choose Fusion. Anyone there should be able to assist you with it. If you're not getting a resolution at that point, you need to ask that it be escalated.
TYSON: Escalated, yeah.
GRANT: And it's going to come across my desk. If it's escalated, I'm going to see it, and it will get taken care of. But this is definitely an interesting one, so.
TYSON: Yeah, I get all kinds of fun little stuff come across my way with training.
GRANT: I'll put you on a list if you're the hard guy to figure out, and then we'll try to ignore you.
TYSON: Typically, yeah.
GRANT: Just kidding.
TYSON: All right. Did you have, were you going to ask me something real quick, too?
GLEN: I was going to ask you if, after maximizing the screen, the Outlook problem went away.
TYSON: Oh, let's take a look here because I was busy jabbering with you guys. Oh, I should turn back on speech. Guess what?
GLEN: What?
TYSON: It solved it.
GLEN: Cool. Carl.
RACHEL: Wow, that is something.
TYSON: You're the man, Carl.
CARL: Junior comes through.
GRANT: That's old school right there. That's beautiful.
RACHEL: Boy, Glen, you're never going to live that down.
GLEN: I'm never going to live this down.
MATT: So when can we ever solve the problem where we could just say always be maximized?
CARL: Oh, come on, Matt.
TYSON: That's right, Matt, always be maximized.
MATT: All right. Shouldn't there just be a setting in Windows, always be maximized?
TYSON: Set that on your Quick Access bar.
MATT: Oh, yeah, exactly.
TYSON: Set that to three, just maximize the window automatically.
RACHEL: All right, thank you, Tyson.
TYSON: All right, yeah, thank you guys so much.
RACHEL: And, Alex, I'm going to ask you to unmute.
CARL: By the way, Rachel, Mandy just put an interesting comment there in the chat about maximizing Windows.
RACHEL: I saw that, that you can actually, Mandy says, in program properties you can set it to always have a window maximized.
GLEN: There's so much stuff to remember. Like I knew this in the back of my mind, but I would never have remembered. So thank you, Mandy.
RACHEL: Alex, are you there?
ALEX: Yes. I'm experiencing a weird issue with Microsoft Word 365, either Windows 10 or Windows 11. And this seems to be affecting many versions of JAWS. When working in a bulleted list or in a numbered list, if we are in a line where there's a bullet or number, if we push a routing cursor on a braille display, this will put the cursor two letters after the character we selected with the routing cursor, actually. And same, let's see if we move using the arrow keys, then the cursor on the braille display will always be two characters behind. And this only affects the first line where there's a bullet or number. Let's see if there's a second line after a bullet point. Everything will work just fine.
OLEG: Yes, that's on the radar right now. It was reported just a few days ago, yeah.
CARL: I was just looking at the record.
GLEN: Maybe something changed in Office that suddenly caused this to stop working.
ALEX: I think so, too.
GLEN: Yeah, how long have you been seeing it?
ALEX: A couple of weeks, to be honest, maybe three weeks, around that, mm-hmm.
GLEN: So we had to jump through a variety of hoops to make that work to begin with. And there were a couple of assumptions we had to make to make it work. And it sounds like maybe those assumptions are not currently holding.
ALEX: That's interesting. And also, I notice in braille, then usually we should be able to know which type of bullet is selected. And we're not always seeing as well.
OLEG: That has also been reported. The funny thing about it is it seems to be system dependent. So you're trying it on two systems. One of our associates said, “Hey, I'm trying it on my home system, on a work system. It works on one and doesn't on the other.” So we're currently in the investigating stage on this one.
ALEX: I have honestly no system where it is working, and I have a bunch of computers.
OLEG: That helps, actually. It's nice to have a bug that's always reproducible than the one that's kind of off and on.
ALEX: Yeah.
GLEN: Well, thank you, Alex.
ALEX: You are welcome. Oh, and also one more thing about the bullets. Let's say we navigate using left and right arrow. The first character, if it's a capital letter, it won't be announced as is. The character right after the bullet.
GLEN: Wow.
RACHEL: And before Alex mentioned this, actually Richard put it in chat, the exact same thing.
OLEG: Oh, sorry, I missed it.
RACHEL: So that's just, I mean, I think you're not the only one experiencing it.
ALEX: Nope.
GLEN: Another one to attend to.
ALEX: Yeah.
GLEN: Well, thank you very much.
ALEX: You're welcome.
MATT: I was going to ask if it was a certain synthesizer that was doing it.
RACHEL: Richard says he's using it.
RICHARD: I'm using Eloquence, as well.
RACHEL: Okay. So they're both using Eloquence.
OLEG: All of them are doing this because what is happening, it says “bullet” and then the letter name. And because it's prefixing the letter with a bullet, it no longer sees it. We're saying “bullet” with each letter. That's what's happening.
GLEN: I think that's new. Isn't that new behavior?
OLEG: It is.
GLEN: Yeah. We're supposed to say “bullet” like if you do “say word” or “say line,” but we shouldn't say “bullet” with the first letter, I don't think. So thank you, Alex.
ALEX: You're welcome.
RACHEL: All right. Do we have time to take one more question?
GLEN: Let's do it.
RACHEL: Fadi, I did try to unmute you.
FADI: What if I like to use Eloquence with any of the Vocalizer voices, like English for Eloquence and Arabic for the Vocalizer at the same time? Would that be doable with JAWS?
GLEN: It's not doable now. We have talked on and off about trying to sort of do a master synthesizer that would combine a bunch of others. But, you know, our list of things to do is long, so it may be a while before we get there. But it's an interesting idea because sometimes people want to do exactly what you're suggesting, is use Eloquence in English. But Eloquence only has six languages if you want to use another one.
FADI: Yeah. So this is – so this is under the list. It’s on the waiting list, as I could understand; right?
GLEN: Yes.
FADI: Thank you so much.
RACHEL: Thank you to all of our queriers and to all of our special guests, and I wanted to just include this for the end here. Mandy had made a comment in the chat commenting on how excellent and wonderful our support team is. Just wanted to echo that before we closed out, Glen.
GLEN: Thanks to all of you. It was great having some additional voices. Nice having some first-time callers. It's always good to hear from you. Some great things for us to work on.
RACHEL: Mm-hmm.
MATT: What I love, Glen, if I could just share, I love seeing both the user community and all of the trainers who support our products because there's a lot of them who joined tonight who brought up things, and they're the front line for what we do. They're out there with the community, dealing with our customers every day, so thank you.
GLEN: Absolutely. And it was a high percentage of trainers tonight. So thank you all very much. We will be back again in February; right?
RACHEL: Yup.
GLEN: The fourth Thursday in February. We hope you'll all join us then. We will have a cast of characters, though none of us exactly know who those people will be. But we'll be back fourth Thursday in February. Thank you all very much for listening and for calling.