Introduction
“My contribution, I really think, focused in on how do we explain this and make it work?” (Eric Damery)
“We need to really look into how we can make it as simple as possible and as easy to learn as possible.”. (Roxana Fischer)
“It won't tell you to click on any icons or click on any menu items. It'll tell you how to get there through keystrokes.” (Mohammed Laachir)
On FSCast number 249.
OLEG SHEVKUN:
Hello, and welcome to FSCast for September 2024. I'm Oleg Shevkun. Fall is here, and with that, there's a waterfall of new product releases from Vispero. There are updates for our 2024 product line, including JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion. There is also the first public beta of our 2025 product line. I'm not going to walk you through each and every product feature and enhancement. Instead, let me point you to our website, FreedomScientific.com, where you can find more information. However, I would still like to focus on a couple of new things in our JAWS 2024 update, which is available to all 2024 license holders. You can just go to JAWS window and then check for updates on the help menu and that update will be downloaded and installed for you.
Remember last time we talked about Picture Smart AI, and we mentioned the new context-sensitive command, which is INSERT+SPACE P, followed by ENTER.
That command will take into account the current context and it'll perform Picture Smart on the element you're most likely interested in. So we've added some more logic and functionality to this command. If you're watching a YouTube video, INSERT+SPACE P ENTER will analyze and describe the current video frame. If you're viewing a PowerPoint presentation, that command will analyze and describe the current slide. And in fact, if you're in PowerPoint and not in an active presentation, this command will still describe the currently visible slide.
Another minor but pretty significant improvement is going to make life easier for all multilingual users. Suppose you're reading a web page or a document in another language and that language is supported by the currently active speech synthesizer, but JAWS still fails to switch to that language. So now you can force it to. To do that, you just press CONTROL+WINDOWS+L. This will display the list of currently available languages, so simply choose your desired language from that list and press enter. From now on, as long as that same window remains in focus, JAWS will use the language you specified, and it will ignore any and all automatic language switching requests.
There are also improvements in Google Sheets, as well as multiple other improvements on the Web. and for the early adopters among you, there is new and improved Java application support. You can activate that in the early adopter program dialog, and you can read more details about this and other changes on our FreedomScientific.com website.
Now moving on to another series of releases. We've just released the public beta versions of our 2025 products. That includes JAWS, ZoomText and Fusion. Now first of all, please don't be scared by this public beta designation. Granted, these are pre-release products. However, these beta versions have received and are still receiving a complete workout from our developers, internal testers, and private testers group.
Now, why do we call them betas then? Two things there. One of them is that the new features and improvements are still in active development, so we would like you to test them and report your findings to us. We would like to hear what works for you and what doesn't work. And when you download the beta, on that same download page, there's going to be the link to the feedback form, and we take that feedback very seriously. And the other reason why we call them public betas is that while the products are in beta, they do not require the 2025 license, so you may try them and decide if the upgrade is worthwhile.
And by the way, while we're at it: for many years, we used to roll out the majority of new features in our fall releases, but that has been different for a few years now. And in fact, in our 2024 versions, we've been releasing very significant updates throughout the year. That is of course our plan for the 2025 versions. We're currently planning two public betas followed by the official release, and then we're looking at several product updates throughout the 2025 product life cycle. In fact, there are features both in development and on the drawing board that will make it to a computer near you during this 2025 product cycle. So currently when you read our release notes for 2025 betas, please rest assured that there are definitely more good things to come.
And talking of things to come, the Next Big Thing Contest is in full swing. There's still time for you to find out more about our contest terms and send us your submission. The deadline for that is October 16th, but please do not delay, as time is running fast. All of our contest terms are on FreedomScientific.com/nextbigthing.
And also, we're gearing up for Sharkvember, and our training department has a full calendar of events lined up for you. To find out more, visit freedomscientific.com/training.
One of our associates who's been never featured on FSCast is Roxana Fischer, and Roxana started as our product manager for JAWS and ZoomText and Fusion, but now that role is a lot broader than that. And on this FSCast when we're talking about the new 2025 versions, I thought it's a nice idea to talk to Roxana to get to know her and to hear from her about what's happening with our products. Hello Roxana, and welcome to FSCast.
ROXANA FISCHER:
Hello, Oleg. Glad to be here.
OLEG:
You come from Germany, but you're based in the Netherlands, is that correct?
ROXANA:
Exactly. I started in Germany as a trainer, went actually to Florida in between, and now ended up in the Netherlands. Was quite a journey.
OLEG:
As a trainer, you mean access technology trainer?
ROXANA:
Exactly. I was training people on JAWS and ZoomText and different braille displays back in Germany, especially for people in the work environment.
OLEG:
And you're fully sighted, right?
ROXANA:
I'm fully sighted, exactly. I'm sometimes wearing glasses because my eyesight is getting worse, but I would still consider me fully sighted.
OLEG:
How does your trainer experience help you with product management?
ROXANA:
Oh, quite a lot. For four years I was really sitting together with someone in the work environment and assisting doing the work that they need to perform, so that usually looked like the blind or low vision person was sitting in front of a PC and I was just sitting on the side and providing guidance on how to navigate, which keystrokes to use, and that really gives you insights in the challenges that sometimes occur, like inaccessible applications, especially if they are not as commonly used like an Office product, or just getting adjusted to a new operating system.
OLEG:
One thing I think we often overlook as testers or developers is the overall broadness of our user base. We think in terms of advanced users, and it looks like you are bringing a totally different experience to the table, the experience of beginner users or intermediate users. Does that help you to get a broader view and ask more questions about feature development and if so, how?
ROXANA:
Yeah, we have really skilled people in-house. Our beta group is really skilled. However, often you also face a situation where someone already had a job and loses eyesight over time and then needs to adjust to switching from a mouse to a keyboard, and that is a really steep learning experience. And yeah, we are sometimes not aware of it. We are working so close with the product itself, so we know way more about the thought process that goes into each feature than the user will know when it is released, so we need to really look into how we can make it as simple as possible and as easy to learn as possible.
OLEG:
You just mentioned user experience, or UX for short, and it was my understanding that it's also part of your background, a study in UX. Is that correct? Can you tell us more about that?
ROXANA:
Exactly. Let me just zoom in a bit on my history. Like I said, I started as a trainer for JAWS and ZoomText in Germany, and afterwards transitioned to being more of a JAWS scripter, because we had so many small applications that were not accessible. So I learned the JAWS scripting, and then afterwards actually switched to doing my master’s degree in human-computer interaction. That's more commonly known as UX. And via this UX focus, I went to Freedom Scientific to work as a UX researcher in the first place.
OLEG:
It seems like there's something I don't understand here. I've seen a couple of UX specialists in my life, not very many, but a couple. They were running around with those mockup printouts or mock screens. "Okay, how would that design look to you? What do we think about it?" That type of approach would not work for UX prototyping with blind or visually impaired people. Did you have to relearn, or am I just too narrow in my understanding and there are other approaches that are just as popular?
ROXANA:
Yeah, that was actually a bit of a realization for me as well. I wanted to do this human-computer interaction thing to also get more insights into accessibility, but even though I chose the university with the longest UX experience, accessibility was just handled in one lecture, so in one hour where they mentioned, "Yeah, there is something like ARIA,". But they really focused on what you already said, those mock-ups or visual designs, other creative thinking methods that are really on card sorting, and adapting that is quite a challenge, and there's even not much research on it. So when I did my master’s with Freedom Scientific, I actually had to relook into, "Okay, how can I adjust every method to really work for the blind community?" as well. There's not a really good representation, so the easiest to really program it or you can try to at least have a table where you're thinking about the correct label and the correct type that you're going to use and maybe the tab order, but that's still simplified. So yeah, this is a big challenge in UX, and even if you're studying it, you're not learning how to deal with it.
OLEG:
So in your two years of working with Vispero as a product manager, I understand you started with the Fusion Suite, what else do you manage now? What other products do you oversee?
ROXANA:
Recently I also got JAWS Inspect and JAWS Kiosk for Windows onboard, and JAWS Inspect is a product that is mostly distributed in the US right now that helps developers or quality managers or anyone who does a report on accessibility to get the insights how JAWS reads it out. Because if you just install JAWS, for a lot of sighted people, it's often challenging to learn how to listen to the feedback instead of seeing it-
OLEG:
Absolutely.
ROXANA:
... or teaching them how to navigate the web. So JAWS Inspect takes these aspects and provides a better view on the speech output on how some alerts from websites are handled, but also can provide you a complete overview of a website showing you where a label is missing or their element type will be announced different by JAWS. So you get a good first impression how JAWS handles a certain situation more towards sighted people or reporting in general.
OLEG:
And moving on to JAWS for Kiosk, that's a product that was introduced some time ago and we had a demo of that on FSCast. Can you tell us more about this product?
ROXANA:
JAWS for Kiosk is also a really interesting product. We started that in the US but it will also reach other areas of the globe soon. That is for some Kiosk systems like the self-service kiosks that you see at McDonald's, for example, for ordering food, that are currently not accessible. However, we are working with some of these companies together to get JAWS on there to provide a screen reader experience so that you can also use them to order food or other items, so that's also a really interesting project.
OLEG:
Roxana, you've been telling me about Vispero products and all of that is nice and good, but rumor has it that you are continuing your education and doing another master program. Is that correct?
ROXANA:
Yeah, I'm doing currently my second master at Freedom Scientific. Like I said, I did my UX research for my master thesis at Freedom Scientific on the Voice Assistant. But whenever I want a role or get a role, I also want to know the technical background of it. So therefore, I actually started a master of business administration here in Rotterdam as well as in Cologne. I have to travel between both locations and on Friday evenings and Saturdays, I have lectures.
OLEG:
That's pretty cool. So both working and studying, doing your masters, that must be a really exciting life.
ROXANA:
Yeah, it's great. I love it because all the strategy thinking or the insights into marketing are really valuable.
OLEG:
Let's go back to talking about Vispero products. JAWS, Fusion, and ZoomText 2025 public betas are out. Could you please talk about some of their new features or some of the directions where those products are now going?
ROXANA:
One of the main ones I will leave to my colleagues, that is FS Companion. and I'm quite excited about that, because it tackles one of the major issues that you often see, not just learning JAWS, but also learning the whole Windows system. But more on that one actually later, as well as the automatic language detection for JAWS, where you don't need to rely on a website providing the text, but you also have the option to let JAWS detect the language instead.
For ZoomText, in the recent year, or one and a half years by now, we invested a lot in really working on the underlying technology of ZoomText to get better performance. We worked on multiple parts of it. I'm not diving too much into the individual parts, but this is a critical area for a lot of our customers, especially with running Fusion but also with ZoomText, to make the performance as good as possible, also relevant for JAWS. And all of that will soon come together to also support our next project. I cannot tell too much of it, but all these technology improvements that we are making allow us also to tackle the next project for ZoomText. But more on that will come soon.
OLEG:
Thank you Roxana, and we look forward to hearing more from you in next episodes.
ROXANA:
Thank you for having me.
OLEG:
So as promised, we're here in our virtual studio with Mohammed Laachir, and I'm saying “As promised” because a couple of months ago Mohammed said, "I'll be back," or something to that effect. And lo and behold, Mohammed Laachir is back. Hello and welcome back to FSCast.
MOHAMMED:
Can't get rid of me, Oleg, and I'm very happy to be here again.
OLEG:
Actually, it's nice to have you back with us because there are some features that your team has been working on and that are going to be available now, and by the time you're listening to this, they are available in JAWS 2025 public beta. And we wanted to introduce two of those features today, right?
MOHAMMED:
Yeah. So let's start with the first problem that we actually want to solve for people. And that problem is that sometimes you have this thing that you want to do and you forgot how to do it because you're not doing it very often. You're doing it every month or every two months, or you've never done it and you want to know how to do it now because you need it. In that case, you have to ring up someone who knows how to do this or you have to send an email to your trainer, wait for an answer to come back, or you have to go Googling around to find how to do certain things, and then you'll find instructions, but they're all geared towards sighted people. So it's like, "Click this icon and then click that icon and then it's done," and you're like, "Well great, I can't do it still." So these are issues that you run into all the time.
OLEG:
Well actually to be fair, Mohammed, you can just browse JAWS documentation or you can use JAWS command search and you can get some of that information.
MOHAMMED:
Yes. But the key word is you browse, you search, so it takes a little bit of time to get that information. And this feature that we just built goes beyond only JAWS documentation and JAWS command search. This is much, much deeper. And so we are here today to introduce FS Companion. FS Companion is a virtual assistant that will help you get things done by explaining to you how things work. So let's say you want to send a new email in Outlook, and since you've always been a Thunderbird user and you don't really quickly and intuitively understand how Outlook works, but you have to use it in your new workplace. Well then, you can ask the FS Companion, "How do I send a new email message in Outlook?" And lo and behold, it will give you an answer, and it won't give you just JAWS keystrokes. It will also give you Outlook keystrokes and it won't tell you to click on any icons or click on any new menu items. It will tell you how to get there through keystrokes. And that is the feature that we've built. So it goes way deeper than just JAWS, although it will very happily answer JAWS questions as well.
OLEG:
So essentially, it's an AI model which is trained on what, JAWS documentation, JAWS materials, FSCast?
MOHAMMED:
It's trained on everything that we put out as well as on some publicly available information about Microsoft Office, about Windows, and about browsing the web. And so it'll synthesize all that information for you. You can ask it questions and it will go find the answer for you and give you the answer in a matter of seconds.
OLEG:
And you said it's FS Companion, so while originally it may be only for JAWS, my understanding is that it's going to be viable for other products as well, so you would be able to ask ZoomText questions eventually. Is that understanding correct?
MOHAMMED:
Absolutely. So, it's currently only available in English. That will change, obviously. We will support many more languages as time progresses. And it only supports JAWS at the moment and that too will change. We will support ZoomText and Fusion in time, as well.
OLEG:
So while we're at it, let's bring up FS Companion I will press insert J for JAWS window...
JAWS:
JAWS professional
OLEG:
... alt H for help menu...
JAWS:
ALT H, help menu. Command search INSERT+SPACE, J, C.
OLEG:
Then we could either up arrow or down arrow to reach the web resources item, but I'm just going to press R to bring it up.
JAWS:
R, JAWS headquarters, J.
OLEG:
And the second item on that submenu is...
JAWS:
FS Companion, C.
OLEG:
FS Companion. So let's press enter.
JAWS:
Enter, menu bar, opening new tab, loading page, leaving menus, loading complete. FS Companion, Microsoft Edge. FS Companion, Microsoft Edge page. FS Companion, type your question here, edit, blank. Hello there. I'm excited to help you learn more about JAWS. Here are some things to know about our conversation. Bullet. You can use the H, SHIFT+H, TAB, SHIFT+TAB and UP DOWN ARROW keys to navigate between messages. Bullet. Use the new conversation button to start a conversation about a new topic. To get started, just type your question in the chat box below.
MOHAMMED:
All right, Oleg, so we just heard the opening statement indeed, and they told you how to handle the assistant. Let's now ask it a very simple question. So let's start with, "How can I move to the next heading on a webpage?"
OLEG:
Oh, that's very obvious. Well, let's do it anyway.
MOHAMMED:
It is.
JAWS:
H-O-W-C-A-N-I-M-O-V-E-T-O-T-H-E-N-E-X-T-H-E-A-D-I-N-G-O-N-A-W-E-B-P-A-G-E question. Enter. How can I move to the next heading on a web page? To move to the next heading on a web page using JAWS, you can use the quick navigation keystroke, H. Here's how. One, press the H key to move to the next heading on the page. Two, if you want to move to the previous heading, press shift plus H. These commands help you quickly navigate through headings, making it easier to find the information you need on a webpage.
MOHAMMED:
And here you see a command that almost everybody knows of course, because you use it a lot when you're browsing the web, but it can tell you this if you forgot about it, and it can tell you about all the quick navigation keys, so if there is one that you've forgotten about, it will tell you how to move to the next one, to the previous one, and it gives you all the information in a neat list that you can follow in order to get done what you need to get done.
OLEG:
You know, Mohammed, I realize our listeners can and will experience and explore this feature on their own, but quite frankly, this example was way too simple.
MOHAMMED:
Yeah, so let's get back to my previous one, my previous example where I said you're a Thunderbird user, you don't know anything about Outlook, and now your workplace is demanding that you use Outlook. How do you send an actual email in Outlook? So let's try to ask that.
OLEG:
Okay. "How do I send an email in Outlook?"
MOHAMMED:
Yeah.
JAWS:
H-O-W-D-O-I-S-E-N-D-A-N-E-M-A-I-L-I-N-O-U-T-L-O-O-K question. Enter. To send an email in Microsoft Outlook using JAWS, follow these steps. One, create a new email. White bullet. Press CONTROL+N to open a new email window. You will hear, "New mail." Two, enter recipient. White bullet. The focus will be on the To field. Type the recipient's email address. Outlook will offer suggestions as you type. Use the down arrow key to navigate through suggestions and press enter to select one. Three, at CC optional.
White bullet. Press the tab key once to move to the CC field if you want to send a copy to someone else. Type the email address and use the down arrow key to navigate suggestions, pressing enter to select. Four, enter subject. White bullet. Press the tab key again to move to the subject field. Type the subject of your email. Five, compose message. White bullet. Press the tab key once more to move to the message body field. Type your message here. Six, send email. White bullet. Press control plus enter to send the email. These steps should help you create and send an email using Outlook with JAWS. If you need further assistance, feel free to ask.
OLEG:
What I see for now, Mohammed, is that the option may be helpful, and in most cases it is helpful, but you still need to think and analyze the response that you get from it. You cannot just blindly trust what AI is saying. But then, I guess you can also give us feedback on whether it was a good answer or a bad answer.
MOHAMMED:
That is entirely correct. So if you now press NUMPADPLUS to get the virtual cursor, or CAPSLOCK SEMICOLON in laptop layout, and you press up arrow...
JAWS:
Virtual PC. Type your question here. Response completed in 4.30 seconds.
OLEG:
That's fast.
JAWS:
Feedback button.
MOHAMMED:
Yeah.
OLEG:
Feedback.
MOHAMMED:
And there you go. Press ENTER on that.
OLEG:
We have a feedback button. And we can let the developers at Vispero know whether we're getting good responses or bad responses, and we can even explain what kind of responses would be expected. Let's actually see what happens.
MOHAMMED:
Yeah. Let's press enter.
JAWS:
Enter. Provide response feedback dialog. By providing feedback on this response, you can help us make future responses better. Provide response feedback heading level two.
MOHAMMED:
So press DOWNARROW a couple of times.
JAWS:
By providing feedback on this res… group, start rating. Positive radio button, not checked. Negative radio button group and rating. Feedback.
OLEG:
So you get a multi-line edit here. Very cool!
MOHAMMED:
Exactly.
OLEG:
Anything else about this feature that we haven't covered that you would like users to be aware of?
MOHAMMED:
Well, this is the gist of the feature. It can give you answers about a wide range of questions pertaining to Microsoft Office, Windows, web browsing, and JAWS itself of course, and it will use the documentation that we talked about, and so you can ask it all sorts of things.
OLEG:
Yeah, actually I've had very good results with this feature even when doing JAWS scripting, so apparently it knows about JAWS scripting, and I'm asking a question, "How do I write a script that does such and such?" and it will give me information and actually, it will even give me snippets of script code which do need adjustment. That's not always ideal. Again, you have to think, you have to analyze. But they do give you the path to follow and that's the most helpful part of all.
So Mohammed, how about the other feature that you wanted to bring to our attention today?
MOHAMMED:
Oh yeah, so another problem, and this one is near and dear to my heart because I'm multilingual and I think Oleg, you have the same issue, where there is a way for people who are writing certain pieces of text to tell a screen reader that a text is in a certain language. So let's say I'm writing a web page. I'm writing it in German. I want my screen reader to also read it in German. Well, there is a way for me to tell the screen reader that this is German text, and the screen reader will read that, and it will say, "This is German text, I'm going to use my German voice because that makes much more sense than my English voice," so I don't get mangled speech. The problem though is that sighted developers, and not always only sighted developers, but sometimes when somebody throws something together very quickly, you might make a mistake in that language tagging, which is what we call this. And you'll get English text that's read in a German voice or you'll get German text that's read in an English voice. It's all very hard to understand. And this happens all too often. In fact, it happens so often that a lot of international users turn off our tag-based language detection. They say, "Don't switch. Whatever the tag is of the web page, I really do not want you to switch because it's wrong so often, and then I can't hear what the web page is saying."
It happens very often. And here in fact in the Netherlands, tag-based language switching is turned off by default because it's wrong so often that it's not even funny anymore. So what we've built is a new feature with another AI model and this one is on-device, so it's not somewhere in the cloud, we don't send your text anywhere, but it just stays on your machine mostly for privacy reasons and also for speed as well. So everything stays on your device, and this language model, which is fairly small, runs on your device as well and it'll predict all the text that JAWS says. So let's say JAWS goes into a web page and reads it and the tag is German, but the text is English. This feature will look at the text, determine that it is English, so it'll know that the tag is wrong and it will switch for you to the English voice.
OLEG:
Very cool. So by default in our public beta, this feature is turned on so that more people could play with this and see how it works for them. But to turn this on or off, we go to Settings Center. And I press JAWSKEY+6 for the Settings Center.
JAWS:
JAWS window. JAWS Settings Center dialog. Search box, edit. CONTROL+E.
OLEG:
And I can change that for default or I can change it per application...
JAWS:
JAWS Settings Center. Default, all applications. DOWNARROW, G...
OLEG:
And I just search for language.
JAWS:
10 search results. List box. Detect keyboard language checked. Language processing. Detect language based on AI predictions. Language processing, text processing.
OLEG:
That's the new one, detecting language based on AI predictions, right?
MOHAMMED:
Correct. And so you can press space bar to cycle among these settings.
JAWS:
Space. Off. Four of four.
OLEG:
Off. That's something that's familiar.
JAWS:
Space. Based on markup of document and web page. One of four.
OLEG:
Yeah, that's the one that doesn't work for many people.
JAWS:
Space. Based on text, Vocalizer Expressive only. Two of four.
OLEG:
And this one that works for only a few people.
JAWS:
Space. Based on AI predictions. Three of four.
OLEG:
I will just press ESCAPE -
JAWS:
ESCAPE.
OLEG:
... to get out of it because that's not something I want to change. So can I just go to a web page and see how it works?
MOHAMMED:
Absolutely.
OLEG:
Okay. There is a German school for the blind named blista in Marburg. So let me go to the blista web page.
JAWS:
H-T-T-P colon slash slash W-W-W period B-L-I-S-T-A period D-E. Enter. Opening new tab. Loading page. Untitled and one more page, personal Microsoft Edge.
JAWS:
Aktuelles | blista, Microsoft Edge. Loading complete. 11 regions, 22 headings, and 109 links. 20 smart glance highlights.
(Transcriber’s Note: at this point, JAWS is reading the text mainly in German. However, it is switching to English for some of the service messages; and at one time, it is switching to Swedish for a single word.)
OLEG:
So Mohammed, let's stop for a moment. What did you hear in this recording that caught your attention?
MOHAMMED:
So what I heard in this recording that caught my attention is that it switched in some places where it should not have. When you build AI features, AI can sometimes make mistakes, although it should be pretty good in most circumstances. And the only way you can filter out these mistakes is trying to find out where it often goes wrong and improving as time goes by, teaching it new ways of detecting certain things, of detecting languages or looking at pictures, so that it's wrong less often. But the only way you can try to make it better is by using it, and so that's what we want to encourage people to do.
OLEG:
Currently, as we mentioned earlier, you can set it up on a per-application basis. For example, you know that you would like that switching in the browsers, but you would not like that in Microsoft Word. Or you would like the AI-based language switching in browsers, while in Microsoft Word you would like tag-based switching or whatever. These are available to you. It's a field for experimentation, a field to try new things out.
Mohammed, how has that affected you personally? You are not just a product owner, but you're also a user, and you started with a problem that was near and dear to your heart. Have you found that your life is now easier?
MOHAMMED:
Yes. So with this one, especially with prose, because it does best with prose, this feature is spectacular. I use it in Outlook all the time because I have a mishmash of different people that talk to me in different languages, and having JAWS detect the languages, even if it's not a hundred percent correct, it is definitely more correct than it ever was with the tag-based one. And so I love the feature just for that. On the web I use it as well, and granted I use it in a lot more places than I would if I was just a user, because I want to test it and I want to find all the issues that exist with it. I think we have gotten rid of the worst ones, but the more people use it, the more we'll know.
OLEG:
And again, your feedback is essential. We are now in public beta, and the more we find out about your experiences, the better that and other features will eventually become. So please let us know what you thought about it. Thank you, Mohammed. And we look forward to how this public beta is received.
MOHAMMED:
Thank you, Oleg, for having me again.
OLEG:
It is September FSCast, and on our September episodes we used to hear the voice of one particular individual. That voice was not there for the last couple of years, and now, Eric Damery, welcome back to the show.
ERIC DAMERY:
Hello, Oleg. It's great to be back on the show after a couple of years of being away.
OLEG:
What have those couple of years been? Are you having a break from business and all the business of taking care of product and the company and so on?
ERIC:
I am, and I'm just a little over two years into retirement. I had thought about retirement for quite some time before I did, but just thought it was the time to do it and I wanted to take up some other passions that I've had in my life like spending time with the family and golfing. Pauline and I have three kids. Between us, we each have three so we've got the Brady Bunch here, and they're scattered around now. So we travel and the kids run from 18 up to 38, so there's plenty of activities. So we now have two grandchildren. So just enjoying life, not working.
OLEG:
I want to ask you somewhat of a personal question. Do you still have JAWS dreams, or did you have them before? These are dreams where you see JAWS or hear the words, "JAWS for Windows ready," and you wake up to those words. Is that something you had before? Is that something that stopped? If so, how long does it take for something like that to stop?
ERIC:
Well, it did slow down and I don't really think about work too often. Maybe once every month or two, I'll have some reoccurring dreams about the business and about what we were doing. But in the time when I was working, it was very consuming. It was all-consuming. You spent all day thinking about and focused on the responsibility that you had with the product, not only the responsibility for the company and the staff, but the responsibility for all of the consumers out there.
And there's thousands of people that wake up every day and turn on their computer and expect to hear JAWS for Windows communicating with their word processing and email and spreadsheets and whatever. And that was always a worry, that we would do something wrong. Either the authorization would not work correctly or there would be system crashes because we released something improperly and sent it out. And yeah, that was very, very nerve-racking back in the day, and I woke up many a night not being able to sleep thinking about it.
OLEG:
Well, in just a few months, we're going to be marking the 30th anniversary of JAWS and you came to work for Henter-Joyce, which was the company at that time, in early 1994 in the year leading up to JAWS' release. What was it like then?
ERIC:
First of all, it was a small company, so in January '94 when I joined there were nine of us, and that included Ted and Mel Henter who were the owners of the company. So the company name back then was HJ, which stood for Henter-Joyce, and Joyce was a gentleman named Bill Joyce who was actually a customer of Ted's. He was visually impaired and they used to water ski together, but Ted also was helping him on a computer and Bill Joyce's family had some money, so they decided to go into this business together where Ted would do the technical side and Bill would contribute the finance side. After a couple of years, Bill wanted to get away from the business, personal things were coming into his life, and Ted's parents helped him and Mel purchase the company from Bill. So they bought it out and the rest is history. They went on and the development for JAWS for Windows got started in late '93 and it was a real struggle trying to get it out the door.
OLEG:
Who was doing the development at that time? So Ted and somebody else?
ERIC:
Ted was dabbling somewhat, but Ted knew that it wasn't going to get done with him doing it. And so he had a couple of different people before my time that he worked with in the DOS side and thinking about the Windows side. But Chuck Oppermann was the real first Windows developer he had. Chuck ultimately ended up going to Microsoft in 1994, and Glenn Gordon came on board. Glenn was a customer of Ted's so they had known each other for a number of years already. Glenn came in full-time in 1994. He took over the development and helped us to get it out the door.
OLEG:
When did you first see JAWS, and when did you first introduce, or present, the latest version? I've been a customer of yours for quite a while, and I remember those cassettes and later CDs where Eric Damery was sharing about the new features and so on. So that first version when you were sharing about the new features, was that 1.0 or was it 0.1 or what would that be?
ERIC:
Well, I don't remember what the version number would've been, but the first big hurdle that we had to do was get through the summer conventions of 1994, and Ted and Chuck Oppermann took the JAWS for Windows that was in development to Detroit for the NFB convention. They tended to be much more technically savvy on the NFB side, and so Ted went there and sent me to ACB in Chicago at the Palmer House that summer, and that was my first trade show and showing the product for the first time. So I had started to see it leading up to the trade show, but there wasn't much to look at. You could get the menu system to talk, you could get the Windows 3.11 start menu to talk. We didn't even have a start key on the keyboard, now that I think of it. I called it a start menu. It wasn't really a start menu, but you did a control escape to open the menu and we could get that to read and then we could type some text in Notepad. And that was about the extent of what we could do, and you'd have to watch yourself, because if you did the wrong thing, it could crash pretty easily.
OLEG:
I'll tell you what is amazing about it. So a product that is not ready being demonstrated to a convention of blind people by a sighted guy who has been in the business for just six months... how could you all be that daring?
ERIC:
Well, like I said, that's why he sent me to ACB. Now, that was the only NFB convention that I ever missed. So I went to every NFB convention starting in 1995 through the last one, where I actually retired at the NFB Convention. And that was 2022, I guess.
OLEG:
A bit of a secret: you were spotted at the NFB convention this year as well.
ERIC:
That's right. I went back, it was in Orlando and my wife, who still works with the company, was going to go over and I encouraged it because I wanted to go back and say hello to some folks, so we spent a couple days there over the 4th of July. But back to using the product there in 1994 when it wasn't working well, you reminded me about the training tapes. That was critical because the difficulty I think consumers had was not that they couldn't figure out how to type text or use a screen reader to navigate text and so forth. They needed to understand Windows and the layout of Windows. And so our training tapes were really focused around teaching people how to use the Windows operating system and those applications. And Ted and I did those first recordings in 1994. Probably didn't start them until September or October that year, but we had to get them done for the initial release of the software in January. And I remember we spent a week in the recording studio and recorded absolutely nothing, because every time we were trying to do things, we found problems. And we were talking to the developers, and Ted was writing scripts, or macros as we called them back then, and we were just trying to make things work right. So I think we came away from that first week maybe with an hour's worth of recordings that we could use. But we learned a lot, he and I did. And the people that listened to those tapes in those early days realized that we were learning it with them. And I think that helped people to know it's OK to get stuck and get frustrated, and you would. We all did. But those tapes were really important and I was glad to see them continue. And Dan Clark did a fabulous job with the tapes over the years, I think. Consumers always loved listening to that stuff.
OLEG:
And it was pretty informal too, especially in those early days. When you released, you sent out what, several thousand of CDs? It was not that easy to just say in a week or two weeks, "Hey, an update, an auto update will download." So when you released, it would be for the next year or the next half year.
ERIC:
That is an important point because we didn't have the internet at the time. We didn't have a way to update people's computers. If we sent something out that was bad and they got it, there was a big issue. Now, you asked how was the decision made? The decision was made solely by Ted. Ted at the time was answering a lot of support calls, talking to a lot of customers, and he had a lot of friends in this industry that would call him up and they would say, "Ted, we got to have something. We're going to lose our job. Our companies have gone to Windows. They can't keep us running in DOS. We have to get started." So he had a tremendous amount of pressure on himself, as did Glenn I'm sure, too. Glenn certainly wouldn't want to put something out that wasn't ready yet. But Ted just knew that timing was everything, and he knew he wasn't going to stop. He knew he would get there, but he had to get some other people using it. So they made that decision in January of 1995. The product was not very stable, but the customers who got it, they loved it. We didn't get complaints because it was crashing. We got suggestions of how to make it better.
OLEG:
Talking of your own contribution to this market, how do you see it?
ERIC:
When I came into the company, I had been in the military. I worked in a bottling industry. I did a little bit of sales, and I did a lot of warehousing things, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had a business degree, but I saw myself more of a salesman or really somebody that explained things and taught things. And that's what I did in the military is I trained a lot of the guys on radar systems that we used. I worked in the HAWK missile system, and so I was actually a trainer for the new people that would come into our battery. And so when I got going with this and they wanted me to go out and sell, I told Ted, I said, "Well, I'm going to have to learn this before I can go sell it."
And so that's what led me to taking the computer home and teaching myself how to use a computer without looking at it. I figured if I was going to be able to get other people to be able to do this, I'd have to be able to show them that it could be done. And in those early days, I was demonstrating the software to sighted people more than blind people, because it was sighted people that were going to be making buying decisions for those blind people. They were at state agencies and so forth. Now, at every presentation I would always try and encourage end users to be there. And that was helpful, because the sighted people that were in the room that were going to be making the decisions, they would see the lights come on for the blind individuals who were listening to the explanation and listening to the demonstration of the software. And you could tell the excitement with users, because they knew that this was going to really be a solution that they could use, and so that really helped us make those choices. My contribution, I really think, focused in on how do we explain this and make it work? And I actually dabbled in a little bit of macro writing or script writing in their early days to make some things work that I knew I would need to demonstrate to people, things like the Cardfile program in Windows 3.11. I wrote some real simple scripts to be able to make that seem to read really well. Now, they never got included in the software, or not the ones I wrote, but Ted, Glenn, and the other engineers took my concept and turned it into a really functioning product, and making some of those products work, like Cardfile and Calculator, getting those things to really work well helped people understand what the possibilities would be.
OLEG:
Well, thank you Eric, and I'm sure we're going to hear from you next year as well, as we get ready to celebrate the 30th anniversary of JAWS here on FSCast in our training events on FSOpenLine and elsewhere. Just keep tuned in to FreedomScientific.com and keep track of what's going on, and I'm pretty sure we'll be able to talk again. And thank you for being on FSCast.
ERIC:
Thank you, Oleg, and congratulations on taking over for Glenn on the FSCast. I was really happy to hear that.
OLEG:
Well, I don't know about you, but somehow in recording this episode, I'm reminded of those early day tutorials that Eric was talking about. For one thing, they had a time limit, which was set by the length of the cassette tape. We are not using cassette tapes any longer, but we do have a time limit and it's approaching real fast, so we've got to say goodbye for now. We look forward to your emails, which you're more than welcome to send to FSCast@vispero.com. And until next month, I'm Oleg Shevkun on behalf of the entire team here at Vispero wishing you all the best.