RACHEL BUCHANAN:
Hello everyone and welcome to FSOpenLine. This is Freedom Scientific's live Q&A, and we have quite a good group here. I'm going to go through everyone's names. I hope I don't forget anyone. We have Ryan Jones, who is our VP. (Maybe you heard him the other night announce a certain winner of a certain contest that we will discuss more.) As well as Glen Gordon, Elizabeth Whitaker, Oleg Shevkun and Mohammed Laachir and Brett Lewis. Behind the curtain is Tina Martinez running the show. Thank you, Tina. And with those introductions out of the way, I think Glen and I are-
GLEN GORDON:
Poised.
RACHEL:
... poised to share a little more information with you. Boy, that didn't go...
GLEN:
That's what you get for live pseudo radio.
RACHEL:
Absolutely.
GLEN:
So we are just wrapping up Sharkvember and I've been thinking a little bit about this and really being excited because I feel like a month like this brings in the next circle of people, right? There's always the inner circle people who are really keyed in to our technology, know exactly what's going on, beta test things as soon as new features come out.
And then there are people in sort of outer circles that are interested, but they have more things impinging on their time, lots more going on, perhaps unrelated to technology. And so they don't always get the details. I guess I feel like Sharkvember where we're really putting such a focus on everything from power tips to webinars, to next big thing, it feels like maybe it brings more people in.
RACHEL:
Definitely. I mean, we had a series of events this month that were pretty unique for us. So we had a webinar with our friends across the pond, Sight and Sound in the UK. And so that gave us a new audience and to expose to all of the events of Sharkvember and just everything. Actually, as we get in more into this and talk about our finalists and maybe even talk a little bit about the winning submission, the person who submitted it kind of was hesitant. So maybe one of those people that wasn't super active in the past that we brought in, we encourage them to submit and, yeah, getting a little bit of a new audience from that.
GLEN:
Yeah, I was very surprised, for those of you who were at the summer shows, that even though things like Picture Smart were really taking much of the world by a storm, that was the first time some of those people saw those features. So it feels like the more ways we can approach things, the better off everyone will be.
RACHEL:
Absolutely. Some of our panelists here tonight have actually been really instrumental in pulling off particularly the Next Big Thing contest. In addition, we did a webinar with Dan Clark, which was a part of the month. These are just some fun events, usually covering topics that our users have requested. But getting back to the Next Big Thing contest, we have several of our judges here, including Mohammed was one of our first round judges, and then Brett and Oleg were part of our second round judging panel. What did you guys think of the event? What were your takeaways after Tuesday night? I know for some of you it was completely new.
BRETT LEWIS:
It was interesting to be one of the judges just because I'd been involved last year and I'd gotten to see the first round submissions and all that kind of stuff. But it was interesting to see the actual presentation and I know when someone called me afterward and they said, "Oh, come on. Wasn't the final decision already made?" And I said, "No." We went off in a separate room and argued vigorously and had all kinds of discussion about how things were going and who should win and it's a real life contest. And so I really liked seeing the involvement from our users. It was great. I mean, I really had fun participating.
RYAN JONES:
That's one of the things that was really important to us when we started this two years ago or last year actually. This was our second one. We've never and are not prescribing who will win. And I want to make sure our audience always understands that it's never rigged. It's completely live. It's completely up to the moment of things and that's really important to us.
MOHAMMED:
So I was a first round judge and I can tell you because I was there that Brett was not involved in the first round. There were a lot of very, very good submissions in that round that we had to pick and nobody, no one at all who was involved in picking the actual winner was in the first round. So Brett really didn't know what was going on at all.
RACHEL:
I protect those ideas quite a bit in between and don't share them with anyone. Even though some of the software developers are quite excited about seeing the submissions every year, especially if they participated last year, they would come to me and say like, "Oh, is it time? Can we see it yet?" And so I'm getting asked about it, but no, I do protect all of the submissions and only show them to very select people while the decision's being made. And then those final judges, I keep it secret from them at all costs till the end.
OLEG SHEVKUN:
I understand that question that Brett was asked. I actually had the same nagging thought in my mind probably it's decided somewhere already. But let me tell you, even among the judges, the final judges, we had different opinions and at the end of the presentations, we were in that breakout room for judges and we were discussing, "Hey, what does this mean? Are we doing this already? Do we have a feature that does it, or is there anything new?" One of the criteria was the wow factor. So was there a wow factor?.
RYAN:
Some of you guys listened to it last year even though a couple of you weren't judges last year. How do you think the submissions differed from last year? I noticed for me, for example, I think there was a lot around AI last year because it was kind of brand new to all of us and now I think this year people were really looking at... When I kind of looked across all the submissions, it was a lot more about solving problems, right? People were really digging in this year on identifying problems that they see, that they face on a daily basis and suggesting ideas on how to solve them. And that actually falls in line with how we operate as a company and how our software team operates.
So that was a neat thing to me to see this year. Last year, great ideas but there was a little bit more just kind of general awe about AI; and this year is a little bit more practically focused on how do we solve problems and some were about how can AI help us solve this problem, but it really kind of got back to practicalities of things.
MOHAMMED:
Well, absolutely, Ryan, and that's what I was also going to say is that even when AI was part of the solution, I think a lot of the problems that the submissions we're trying to solve were actual problems. So people started from a problem standpoint and then if AI was the best solution, they picked AI, which is the way it should be.
OLEG:
And also I was smiling in the process actually just hearing some of those suggestions. Now thinking of finalists, they pinpointed some of the issues, some of the pain points that we all have. So one of the ideas was about Settings center, improving how Settings Center works. Now we all know that the Settings Center is really powerful, but we also know that Settings Center, well, it requires a huge time to learn it. I mean, it's overloaded. Some of us may be saying, "More settings, please," while others are saying, "Well, isn't that enough?" So how do you tame the Settings Center? That was one of the questions. The other finalist was about JAWS Tandem and just using JAWS Tandem in educational environment and we know that needs attention. And also the winner… Again, I'm not saying what it is because I'm pretty sure somebody would like to do this, but it's basically trying to answer the questions, what do you do with a totally or partly inaccessible screen or interface? That was the finalist.
GLEN:
Can I jump in here and say in the interest of not giving it away, if you don't already know, if you've not heard the Next Big Thing broadcast, it'll be in the FSCast feed a week or so after this FSOpenLine is there so you can hear the whole episode.
RACHEL:
But I don't think we do need to keep it a secret, our winner as that's going to be posted all over social media. So I'm sorry if you didn't attend the show. And I do think it's worth a re-listen just because listening to the finalists explain their ideas was really interesting. And like Oleg said, they were really talking about solving real problems that we all face, but our winner was Robin Christopherson with Smart Screen Review. Now I'm going to hand this off and let some of the judges who were deep in this decision-making process talk about the feature in depth. But it was our winning submission, and so he walked away with that $1,000 Amazon gift card, which was nice, I'm sure. And then this is something that we are taking back to our team. We do take all of the software finalists ideas and consider these. We consider this really good validation when we're trying to decide on the roadmap, the future of our software. So this is going to be something we're looking at really closely. Does someone want to talk a little bit more about what Robin's idea was?
BRETT:
It's interesting because he highlighted some of the pain points that you often have with inaccessible screens and so on, but the one that he mentioned several times was pop-ups that appear on your screen that you can't Alt + Tab to or navigate too simply and helping you identify those. And I thought that was an interesting case. I mean, we all have been faced with inaccessible applications, and so we know that that's a problem. And so we've been thinking or I've been thinking more about some other use cases for things like this. Specifically if you're in a Zoom meeting for example and someone sharing their screen, would it be useful for you to do OCR on what they're showing? I mean, if they're showing a picture of a web page for example, is that a useful thing for you to be able to access? I mean, it's not quite the Smart Screen Review feature, but it is a case that I can see coming up in a lot of meetings.
If someone puts slides together and they put text in an image on a slide, how can you as a user consume that? There's Picture Smart. So we could for example, say if you're focused in a slide, maybe give me a Picture Smart description, but that's not quite getting all of the text either and all of the sort of text in relative positions to each other. So I thought the Smart Screen Review was really interesting, almost like an automatic character recognition of the screen but with much more sort of interactivity. And so thinking about this, you get this idea and particular pain point for him, but we've been thinking about some other pain points like this and trying to think of good ways to come up with solutions for them and hopefully we'll be successful.
OLEG:
You're mentioning a shared presentation in Zoom, and Mohammed is heading up a team that is developing something to address this and is bringing this up hopefully for the December update. And I stepped on Mohammed toes, which I'm pretty sure that's what he wanted to bring up, wasn't it, Mohammed?
MOHAMMED:
Well, I have steel toes. No worries, Brett. No worries. So yes, it was part of what I wanted to bring up. Another part is I used to be sighted, very low vision but sighted all the same. And I remember how easy it was to get to pop-ups just by moving the mouse and getting there and clicking things, and that's one of the things that really gets lost. You gain a lot, especially when you're low vision, when you start to use screen readers because you can be faster in many ways and more productive in many ways, but that's really one of the things that you used to lose when you went over to a screen reader. And I think that was one of the most compelling reasons why this thing won is because it makes something that sighted people do without even thinking about it, even low vision people will do without even thinking about it and makes it possible for a completely blind user or someone who relies completely on the screen reader. That's the stuff that you really want to get to. How do we level the playing field?
RACHEL:
All right. Well, we have to answer some questions. I'm going to start with Paul.
PAUL:
My question is actually simple, but possibly for the future. Fusion and ZoomText, when will there be a version that will work on the new Snapdragon Windows processors? I know JAWS will install but as far as I know, ZoomText and Fusion don't yet.
RYAN: Great question, Paul. So this is an area that our ZoomText team is actually working on right now. They started this project not too long ago, so they're working on adding in ARM support. They've got a good bit of it done. There's still a lot to do. So as you can imagine, you have to kind of rewrite a lot of the innards of ZoomText to support the new processors. But the work is underway. I don't know a date. It's not going to be in the December update for sure, but I would expect it to be one or two updates after that. So sometime in 2025 but not late 2025, I'm hopeful that it will be in the first couple of quarters of 2025. We'll know more in the next couple of months exactly when it will happen, but it is happening, and because we've already started it, we know it's going to get done. So that's a great question and we're really looking forward. The initial feedback is that ZoomText is super responsive and fast on these new Snapdragon and ARM processors. So our engineers that are working on this have already been remarking how much faster things are operating. So there's a lot of really good things that may be coming from those processors and getting ZoomText and Fusion ported over to work on those. So we're really excited about it.
GLEN:
It's really pretty funny because a lot of people have said everything from these Snapdragon machines to Apple silicon are some of the fastest ways to run Windows, which is not what many of us would've expected, but yes, ARM is turning out to be a real, real good thing for Windows in terms of performance.
PAUL:
Thank you very much.
RACHEL:
Thank you, Paul. I'm going to ask someone we recently mentioned, Mr. David Kingsbury to come to ask his question now. David was one of our finalists Tuesday night.
DAVID:
Well, thanks so much for the other evening. I had a good time. I thought the other two ideas were really great and hope you can implement in one form or another all of them. Question I have tonight is to some extent occasioned by the discussion you just had related to Picture Smart. And one thing that I really liked about the latest iteration of Picture Smart is how it's sort of becoming smarter. For example, you're on a YouTube video and you just invoke the Picture Smart and hit enter, and it knows to first describe the video rather than all the other claptrap that's there on the YouTube screen. And I'm wondering if something similar could be done with Zoom, for example, when somebody shares their screen, and it's a PowerPoint if Picture Smart can be made smart enough to figure out that it's probably the screen share you want to see rather than all the video avatars of all the people and all that other busy stuff on the Zoom screen. So I'm wondering if something like that is in the works. And here's an ideal that would be great. I don't know if it's possible, but a problem I've had trying to find that when I do Picture Smart and if it's like a PowerPoint, by the time it gets the description, they're gone on to the next PowerPoint slide. If somehow that couldn't be made to automatically refresh so that as a new slide comes into the PowerPoint, that is described and you don't have to go through the whole invoke the Picture Smart again. I'm wondering if something like that would ultimately be possible.
MOHAMMED: So David, I'm going to do something that a software engineer and a product leader should never ever do, but I'm going to tell you that your first request is going to be released in December. So we're going to have exactly what you're describing in December, Insert + Space + P + Enter should recognize the Zoom screen share area and only give you information from the Zoom screen share area. That's something that we've been working on in the last couple of weeks and that is almost, I think, completely finished.
The second question is a very interesting one, and I will admit something that we actually have looked into but haven't done so far. I would think personally given how the two programs work that it would be easier in Teams because in Teams Microsoft has made the slide changes sort of accessible and so we know when the slide changes because JAWS already announces that. But that also means that in Teams it's actually less necessary to do this because you can already read along. For Zoom, there might be something that we can do, but there's definitely going to be a lot more research on that and it's something that we're thinking about, something that's on our minds, but it's not something that we have made any decision on when to do it and how to do it yet. But thank you, those are very good ideas.
GLEN:
So, Brett, haven't you and Joe Stephen been doing some experimentation with this as well, just to sort of whet appetites?
Brett:
We have. I mean, Mohammed's team has been doing Picture Smart, but we've looked into doing something similar with the character recognition. So, David, you mentioned YouTube for example. One of the things that happens in some YouTube videos for instance is there may be text that scrolls on the screen. I think Oleg, you sent me a nice YouTube example that was German translation in English below it and it was all embedded in the video itself and so you had no feedback about it.
So something like maybe similar to the Smart Screen Review stuff that updated and continually did OCR in the background for example might be really useful. It's just we have to make sure that that's always... I mean, you get a high quality result I guess. But yes, this is definitely something we've been investigating. We also like the all in one sort of idea. I think it's great. It's way less of a challenge to remember. Wait, was that P or F or C or W? What am I supposed to press? If you can make the OCR and Picture Smart both smart, I think that's a good thing and we've definitely been working on it. I think there will definitely be parts of this in December so you guys can try it out.
RACHEL:
All right, I'm going to ask Mr. Steve Cutway to unmute.
STEVE:
First of all, I was at the session Tuesday night, and you guys did a great job. And congratulations to Robin. As I was listening to his presentation though, I kept thinking, what's the difference between Smart Screen Review and continuous OCR, which you introduced in JAWS 2025. I think I begin as we talk tonight to understand that. So that's quite all right. I have a question that probably applies to Rachel and Liz with respect to Message Center, INSERT+SPACE SHIFT+M, are your quick tips and other messages, are they archived anywhere?
ELIZABETH WHITAKER:
So to answer your question, many of these tips were first on Facebook and we've continued writing these power tips and we are in the process of putting them up on our training page so that you will get them in Message Center each month. But of course they do go away when the next ones come in. But yes, these will be archived, and we will let you know, and that's going to happen very, very soon, before the beginning of 2025.
STEVE:
Well, thanks, Liz. I have a specific one I'm looking for, and it was the one that you did probably around the beginning of October and it was very succinct and it described how to set up a key to access sliders on YouTube videos and the like.
ELIZABETH:
Well, tell you what, if you want that tip along with any of the others, we have a document with all the tips. So anyone who would like those tips, send me an email to ewhitaker@vispero.com, and I'll be happy to send those to you.
STEVE:
You've got a deal, my friend. Thank you very much.
BRETT:
Can I add something? Actually, a tip that I learned earlier this week, and I thought this should be a tip too. Someone from Google pointed out to me that you can in the address bar type the @ sign, the Shift 2 followed by something like history or bookmark without spaces, and then put a space, and then you can search those. So ALT + D to get to the address bar and then you can just type in @history UKG, and go do your performance review or whatever.
Rachel:
Nice. I did not know that either. All right. I'm asking Debbie to unmute.
DEBBIE:
My question is regarding Outlook, the old Outlook and using it with either Gmail or Exchange. And one of the things I've noticed is when you open an email now in Outlook through Gmail, because if it's in my Gmail account it doesn't automatically read the message, and that's of course like it used to be in the old days way back when. But it's fine. I often will just do the say all Insert + down arrow, but sometimes I have to refresh the screen, so there's a little bit of lag I find every now and then.
GLEN:
How old is the Outlook you're using? Are you using 365?
DEBBIE:
Yes, I'm using 365.
OLEG:
You probably just answered something I was researching today actually. I mean, a few hours ago we are having issues with some messages that will not open immediately or that will not read immediately. But the funny thing that is that on the machine that it was reproducible, it was retrieving it from a Gmail server. We are looking into those delays with Outlook, and if you have more information or specific messages you would care to share, send it to fscast@vispero.com, and that way Glen gets it as well.
MOHAMMED:
Debbie, I have one question. Maybe something you can try because what I sometimes see happening is that the cursor actually starts out at the bottom of the message because for some reason we or Outlook seem to remember that you read your previous message and so it moves the cursor when you open the new one.
DEBBIE:
Yep. Okay. I will be happy to try that.
MOHAMMED:
So if you do a SayLine first and see what it says, and then press Ctrl+HOME and do a SayLine again to see what it says. It might be that your cursor got moved.
GLEN:
Before you do the CTRL+HOME, arrow down and see if the message starts reading, and if it starts reading from the top. Because if that's the problem, that's a tangible thing we can investigate.
DEBBIE:
I can tell you that if I do a SayLine, nothing speaks.
GLEN:
Yes, but what happens when you arrow down? That will be the question.
Debbie:
I'm not getting speech there either, but let me do that again. I find the best thing to do the SayAll first. I found that's the most reliable. And if that isn't, then I do the screen refresh. But let me do all those things and I will write you, Oleg, and send you some messages.
GLEN:
Because I think the screen refresh is going to, as a side effect, take you to the top. So this kind of plays into Mohammed's theory.
DEBBIE:
Thank you very much guys.
RACHEL:
I am now going to ask Brian to unmute.
MITCHELL:
Hey, when can we see the new feature that won that contest?
GLEN:
After we develop it.
RACHEL:
It's going to take us a minute.
MITCHELL:
I got another question. How's the new Outlook that Microsoft made working with JAWS under Windows 11?
GLEN:
Are you talking about the new Outlook, the one that's more web-like?
MITCHELL:
Yeah, the one that's replacing the mail app that they made.
BRETT:
We’ve made a lot of progress working with it. The one issue that keeps me from switching right now to using it on a daily basis is focus does weird things when you receive a new message. So if you're in your inbox and you get a new message, focus kind of moves to the outer document and you go out of application mode and it's really disruptive. Microsoft has acknowledged this issue. I don't have an update on when it's going to be fixed. We made sure they knew about this last month sometime, probably about the middle of the month. So I'm looking forward to seeing that too. We definitely have made progress on the new Outlook. I think it is where we have to go and so any feedback you have on things that work for you, don't work for you would really be helpful.
MITCHELL:
I'm hesitant to go to it because I have an older version of Windows 11, not the latest one. Does that make a difference?
BRETT:
Obviously, we put in some fixes as things move forward and work better with Microsoft. Microsoft's making some changes too. The really nice thing about this version of Outlook though, and I think Microsoft has done a really good job of this, you can run both at the same time. Switching back and forth is virtually painless. If I want to run the new one, you just type in Outlook in your search window and you can arrow down until you see Outlook New, and you can run that one and then if you're tired of running that one, you just run the other one instead. And that works pretty well. I think they've done a really good job of being seamless about that. I really would like to see this focus problem resolved, and I keep checking my updates in the Microsoft Store, but I haven't seen it resolved yet, but I will check it again tomorrow actually.
RACHEL:
Thank you, Mitchell. Now I may have told you that I was trying to unmute Brian, and we got Mitch instead. So Brian, I apologize, and there you are.
BRIAN:
So I have a couple questions related to JAWS. In Windows Explorer, if you're on a file, you can hit the right or left arrow if you're in the details view and you can basically go through the files by whatever column you want. So I was wondering if it's possible to do that same thing in Outlook. If I have a list of messages and I know what subject the messages I want to look for, but whenever I arrow I have to listen through the person's name and some other stuff about attachments and then finally the subject. So does that make sense what I'm asking?
GLEN:
It does make sense. Explorer actually built in keyboard navigation to allow that and Outlook has not built that in. I'm pausing and maybe Oleg, you, or Brett or Mohammed, one of you knows it's possible to go into Outlook and reorganize columns and I want to make sure that I think JAWS honors that, doesn't it?
MOHAMMED:
I don't know about that, but there is a little trick you can use instead. The trick that I use whenever I need that is to go into table navigation. So that's Insert + Space followed by T and then you can right arrow until you get to the subject and you can down arrow and it will only read the subject. Now you'll hit a couple of columns that we don't speak in the normal view because they're not important. For example, when there are no reminders or something like that or the importance is not high, we don't speak it because it's not set in the normal view, but you have to arrow through the columns because the columns are still there. But eventually you'll get to the subject. I just tested it and you can move down that way.
GLEN:
Mohammed, do you know if you hit the bottom? In other words, will it scroll the screen, or will it only show you read down as far as the last row on the screen?
MOHAMMED:
We'll have to test that. I don't know that.
BRIAN:
I'll test that tomorrow. I didn't realize that the message list was being presented as a table. That's pretty cool.
MOHAMMED:
Microsoft does this very interesting thing they call list tables, and they are lists and tables at the same time, and they use them in a bunch of places, and this is one of them.
BRIAN:
Okay, that's a good workaround. I'll try that tomorrow at work. My next question is in the old Teams, before we switched to the new one that Microsoft pushed about a month or two ago, it was really easy for me to tell when I had new messages. So if I step away from my desk or go on lunch or whatever and come back, I could just bring up the system tray icon list JAWSKEY+F11, and I could see if I had missed messages in Teams. And now I can't see that, and I've got to go through this whole process to bring up the message list to see if anything is unread. And I was just wondering if there was anything that could be done about that.
MOHAMMED:
What I can tell you is, in Teams, if you press Ctrl + 1, you've got a view that's called activities. And in activities, Teams actually tries to gather all the things that you've missed. So you should see anything pop up in a list that you've missed and go through them one by one, and then you can press Enter to answer.
BRIAN:
Yeah, and that's what I thought. And Microsoft made a change where they changed the system tray icon text so it doesn't update if you have new messages anymore.
Visually, it changes but not the text. So it'd be nice if they would change that back.
MOHAMMED:
Another trick that you might be able to use, Brian, is to press Windows + N to go to Windows notifications and then arrow down through the notifications and see if you have any from Teams. Now that does not guarantee actually that you get the same because there might be notifications that we're coming in while you were still at the computer but still those are notifications as well. And when anything happens in Teams, you typically get a notification, so that might work. I'm not sure if it will because Teams has two ways of doing notifications. It can do it through Windows, but it can also do its own little thing. Depending on what you have set that might or might not work, but the activities window will pretty much always work.
BRIAN:
Okay.
OLEG:
And also coming back to the first question about Outlook messages, yes, they do scroll, and that's beautiful. That's been a discovery for me actually today.
BRIAN:
Great. Okay.
GLEN:
And one additional detail about Teams. They have a new combined view and it mostly works, but at the moment there's a bug that may be of interest, which is when you're arrowing through the list of conversations where previously you would see and hear the most recent message in each conversation as you move through the list of conversations, in this new combined view it says who the conversation was with, but it doesn't read that last message, which to me is sort of a showstopper. So you may want to hold off on enabling that new view for a while if you get offered it in the near term. We have let our Teams contact know. So I'm sure it will be resolved but not yet.
BRIAN:
Yeah, that's good to know. I haven't turned that on. One thing I have found is when I arrow through the message list, sometimes the focus will skip entries. So what's actually being read is not actually what has focus, and I have to do JAWSKEY+TAB to get it to read what actually has focus. And I know this has happened whenever I arrow down and JAWS doesn't say anything, and I have to press the arrow again and then that's how I know it skipped an entry and that's not consistent. I can't get that [inaudible 00:35:03].
GLEN:
Do you have any rhyme or reason to when it happens? We've had a Microsoft contact who's reported that as well and I don't think we have seen this much internally, but maybe I've just not been talking to the right people.
BRIAN:
I have not found a pattern. It seems to be random. The only way that I know it's happened is like I said, when I arrow down and I don't hear anything and then if I arrow again, that's how I know that I'm out of sync on the thing that has focused was what actually spoke. So yeah, that's all I know on that. And since we talked about tables a minute ago, I wanted to let you know, if I'm using JAWS through RDP session, the keyboard command, the Ctrl + Alt and up and down does not work in a table. The only way I can get tables to work is to go to the table layer and go navigate that way. But then that causes an issue if I'm have to navigate away from the web page and then back, it takes you out of the table layer, you lose your place and all that. But it does seem that that keystroke doesn't pass through to RDP remote JAWS.
GLEN:
I have a weird feeling that Ctrl + Alt, up and down may be RDP keys. Is that possible like scrolling the RDP window or something?
RYAN:
Yeah, I believe it is, Glenn. I've seen this in the past and I think that is correct.
GLEN:
There is a way to put RDP into full screen mode. Maybe, Ryan, since you're batting a thousand here, you happen to know what that combination is.
Ryan:
This has been like three years since I've dealt with that. But yes, I believe that if you put it in full screen mode, then the keys did pass through properly. Brian, I think you could probably Google search this and find it.
BRIAN:
Yeah. I might see if I can reassign the keystroke. And I think it is RDP intercepting it because when I turn on the keyboard help and press the keystroke, I don't get the help description for it, so I know JAWS isn't receiving it.
GLEN:
Yeah, I would try full screen mode.
MOHAMMED:
Alternatively, Brian, if you don't want to do a Google search, a little trick you might also be able to use is JAWSKEY+X on a web page, and what that will do is it will start smart navigation. And what smart navigation is able to do is actually detect whether you're in a table and then automatically go into sort of a table layer, and you can move by a table cell by row or by column. One of the drawbacks of that is that you use the arrow keys, and so you can no longer move by character or word. You have to turn off smart navigation for that. But it might also be a bit of a quicker keystroke than the INSERT+SPACE+T to go into the table layer, the smart nav, INSERT+X.
BRIAN:
Good to know. I did not know that keystroke. All right.
RACHEL:
Thank you, Brian. Ben, I'm going to ask you to unmute.
BEN:
So I have three things. I know about most, if not all advantages for structured mode. And I use that, and I see why that is the default.
But especially when I switch to smart navigation, I would love to be able to see as many elements on my braille display as can fit at any given moment. I know that the status cells will only reflect as to one control at a time, and for that reason I think it would be good to allow the user to change the setting so that one press of a cursor routing button would not activate a button link or anything like that. It would just place focus there, and then you could press that very same one a subsequent time if you wanted to activate it. When you press up and down arrow with smart navigation on, I have it set to controls and tables, and it's nice to hear as many items as are on a line be spoken with one up or down press.
GLEN:
So I'm ashamed to say I didn't realize that in this mode a single click actually activates it. Oleg, do you as probably our resident braille expert have thoughts on this?
OLEG:
The only thought I have is this is one item that needs to be researched first thing tomorrow.
BEN:
It would be fantastic, especially with multiline support. Okay, probably the easiest one to cover, the new unified keyboard processing, I think it might be called, it sounds fantastic, but I am curious about something. So I have made many keyboard shortcuts for myself over the years. And I usually set them up with modifier keys, such as ALT, SHIFT, CTRL, CAPSLOCK. So with the new unified keyboard processing, I have to lift my left hand off of those modifier keys very often. It's not as seamless. It's not as smooth as butter like it was before the unified keyboard processing was an option. Is that going to change, or is that just something I have to get used to if I choose to enable that new unified thing?
GLEN:
It might change if we fully understand what you're experiencing. Our goal is not to make the new experience a jarring one for people. Would you be willing to write up sort of an example? So someone who's not an active JAWS user but is an active JAWS developer who's working mostly on the unified keyboard will understand the process you go through and that he'll be able to experience it. I think that would certainly make it easier for us to try to attack it.
BEN:
Oh, sure. Yeah, I'd be very willing to write about that. And then my third thing is maybe the least important, but it sure would be convenient. When I'm using a very cluttered app like, I don't know, HandBrake or if I'm on a really long web page for a restaurant menu, any scenario like those, I would love to have something imitating the item chooser.
GLEN:
It is something that we've been talking about internally, having that same kind of search as the Apple devices have. It's not directly on the roadmap with a specific date, but it is one of those things that I think could be productivity enhancing as you're indicating. So thank you for all of those.
OLEG:
And also to add to this: with those applications that have numerous items, we cannot do the search as you requested at this point, but one technique there is to try Touch Cursor. I mean, it's been in the product for 10 years or so, but Touch Cursor actually allows you to navigate two things that otherwise would be hard or impossible to get to with keyboard.
BEN:
Oh, I agree. I used to do Z, the quick keys enabled once the touch cursor is activated and then I would press Z to go to the status bar and the ripped progress was right there. It was so cool.
Glen:
Yeah, so the Touch Cursor is slightly different. We need to rebrand it to something like Object Navigation or something, because it's much closer to that than touch. We added it the same time we added our touch screen support and unfortunately had got that very unpleasant name. Thank you very much.
BEN:
Yeah. Thank you.
RACHEL:
Thank you again. All right, Douglas, I'm going to ask you to unmute.
DOUGLAS:
I had a couple questions. I know I've said this before, and I've also spoken with Dell about this numerous times, but they try and say it's on the screen readers, but it sometimes lags or goes kind of like a super-slow gargle.
GLEN:
And you're experiencing it with all of the products?
DOUGLAS:
Yeah, yeah.
GLEN:
You're experiencing that same thing where-
DOUGLAS:
Sometimes when I'm just doing stuff on the home page or, sorry, the main windows.
GLEN:
I really wonder what you have running in the background. Are you running an antivirus program that's not Windows Defender?
DOUGLAS:
No, it is Windows. That's the only one I have on there.
GLEN:
This is not a generic Dell problem. And so at least I don't think it... Oh, power plan. What power plan do you have picked?
DOUGLAS:
Power plan. I don't follow.
GLEN:
No. Anyone remember exactly how to get to it where you can say what kind of power settings you want? You want to optimize for speed, you want to optimize for saving battery.
RACHEL:
Energy saver. To get there, you can just type in power in the search bar.
DOUGLAS:
Okay. It's for a desktop computer that it's on.
GLEN:
I can only tell you this story that may prove apocryphal for you. I had gone in and I was investigating something for someone else, and I inadvertently changed my power plan to battery saver, and then I spent the subsequent four or five hours trying to figure out why my machine was so slow. So that may not be your problem, but it is something to potentially look at. How recent a Dell machine is it?
DOUGLAS:
2021 I got it, but I've noticed it with other Dell computers, where JAWS speech suddenly gets REALLY, REALLY slow.
GLEN:
And it doesn't happen on demand, right?
DOUGLAS:
No. But when it does happen, it kind of lags, like hangs, and then sometimes I have to restart it.
MOHAMMED:
So I very occasionally see something like this with a Lenovo machine I have. Not enough to raise any alarms. But now that I hear it from you, we might want to raise an alarm. So my speech will sort of go a little bit garbled, but it will clear up after a couple seconds.
DOUGLAS:
Yeah, clears up, but then it will happen again.
MOHAMMED:
One of the things that is interesting to me at least is, does it also happen when you have headphones connected?
DOUGLAS:
Yes.
MOHAMMED:
Yeah, to me too. Okay.
DOUGLAS:
And another thing I was going to mention on is, I guess the kiosks are really accessible there with your Freedom Scientific or whatever the software that's used on them, but I haven't really noticed that here in Ontario, Canada.
GLEN:
We don't have much control over who rolls out what, when. I can tell you that we are doing more and more not only with regular Windows kiosks like on the McDonald's machines but more and more places are running kiosks on Android. And so although we don't have an Android screen reader full-fledged, we do have sort of a mini screen reader for Android that works with many kiosks. So gradually they're getting rolled out in more and more places. Well, thank you very much. And if you ever come up with a predictable way of getting Dell to misperform, let us know and we might be able to do some diagnostics.
RACHEL:
Thank you, Douglas.
Douglas:
Thank you.
Rachel:
So we're going to ask the next person on our list, which is Victod, to unmute.
VICTOD:
My question is on the use of a spin box. I have trouble with it. It's kind of awkward and doesn't work all the way all the time and takes an effort just to go through that single box. Is there a way to simplify that?
OLEG:
Are you having problems on a particular website or just across the board?
VICTOD:
Well, the one I deal with particularly is with a Schwab account.
RACHEL:
I see it sometimes in on travel sites. But go ahead.
RYAN:
What happens when you press up or down arrow when you focus on it, you press enter, you make sure Forms Mode is on?
VICTOD:
Sometimes when I hit enter, it travels away from the spin box altogether. It rarely ever opens the other box. And if I move the arrows up and down, it could add one, two, three, four, or five. But when you're trying to buy or sell shares and say in the hundreds, the arrow keys are not good enough.
GLEN:
Have you ever tried toggling off the virtual cursor during the time that you're in the spin box, and does that make it any better? So toggling it off with JAWSKEY+Z, deal with your spin box, get the number where you want it, and then turn the virtual cursor on. This isn't necessarily the final answer, but it might be a good diagnostic. And knowing if the virtual cursor being off makes the spin box work better might help us better understand the problem.
MOHAMMED:
A couple more tricks with the spin box. This doesn't work always, but it does work sometimes, where you can use page up and page down to move by bigger steps, then add more all at once. And another trick is spin box is often actually an edit spin box. So not only can you use the arrow keys to go up and down or in some cases page up or page down, but you can also type in there.
VICTOD:
No, it does not allow me to do that unfortunately.
Mohammed:
Okay. Well, then maybe page up, page down will help you at least move faster.
VICTOD:
Okay. And otherwise turning the virtual cursor off using INSERT+Z?
GLEN:
Yeah. I don't guarantee that that will help, but the fact that you said you're being moved out of the field, that might be prevented by toggling it off. Do you know what Forms Mode you're set to? Are you set to automatic or semi-automatic or off?
VICTOD:
It is automatic.
GLEN:
You might try semi-automatic. The main distinction for me is that when I'm arrowing up and down, I don't suddenly get thrown into an edit field, but I can always tab and get into Forms Mode that way. And I actually like it better and it may help with this spin box problem.
OLEG:
Another tip to add to this: to adjust the spin box, simply press and hold one of the arrow keys for some time, and then release that key. While you are holding it, the spin box value should have adjusted by a larger increment. In fact, when you release the arrow key, JAWS should tell you the new value. With practice, you can find out how long you must hold the key to get the adjustment you require.
GLEN:
And if you ever find a spin box that's not behind some kind of paid service that's misbehaving for you, if you write to me or any of us here, I'm ggordon@vispero.com, if you find an example that we could actually play along at home with, that would be helpful as well.
VICTOD:
Okay, thank you.
Rachel:
We're going to ask Graham to unmute.
GRAHAM:
I have a couple of questions about the Virtual Cursor. I'll start by saying that I'm a person who really likes to navigate by paragraph, so whatever reason it just works for my head quite well. So I really like going through any kind of a virtual document using CTRL + down arrow, CTRL + up arrow, and I get the information I like that way. But I've noticed that there's some issues with the logic by which JAWS determines where a new paragraph starts, and sometimes it really doesn't seem to be associated with a logical division break or line break as I'd expect. The worst example that I can think of is that if you're in an email messaging Outlook and you at the part of say the next header of a reply or a forward and there are a whole bunch of email addresses, it'll have individual links for the email addresses themselves followed by a greater than semicolon.
And that greater than semicolon seems to act as a delimiter to start a new paragraph even though it really isn't a new paragraph. So instead of scrolling through what could probably be one paragraph, you may end up having to press it 20 or 30 times just to get to the text of the message. And another example would be, let's say you have something that says more information can be found in section one and the one is on a new line with a period after it. In print, it doesn't actually start a new paragraph, but in JAWS when you press that E, it'll always show up as a new paragraph. There's even a paragraph symbol that seems to be used in a lot of legal texts and whenever it comes upon that symbol, it also will start a new paragraph. So that's the first question.
GLEN:
So I want to take a slight detour on the Outlook topic. It's not actually a direct solution, but I want to call up an oldie but a goodie. I think it was one of the first features that Mohammed worked on, which is navigating through email threads. Mohammed, you want to just mention that briefly?
MOHAMMED:
Oh, yeah. I did a lot of work for that primarily to get it working in many, many languages, even more languages than we support with JAWS natively. I remember trolling through Greek emails and making my Outlook and Gmail Greek in order to send myself emails. Anyway, what you can do, Graham, is press the End key and it will take you right past any of that thing that you're trying to get past with Ctrl + Enter all at once. And the interesting part about this is it won't read the whole thing. So what it'll read is the person who sent you the email and the date that you got the email or the time that the email was sent, and that will actually get rid of all the redundant information that's in there that you probably have in the entire email thread like the CCs, which probably did not change and the two fields that probably did not change and the subject field that probably did not change. So it's a very quick way to move between emails and get the information that you want.
GRAHAM:
Yeah, I think I already did know about that, but I was just using that as an example for why it irritates me so much.
GLEN:
So not to belabor these. Is there a way you can send us some examples of where this is misbehaving? I think that's going to be the quickest way to Nirvana.
GRAHAM:
We definitely could do that.
GLEN:
Send it to me. I'll serve as switchboard. I'm ggordon@vispero.com. These are things that probably aren't difficult fixes, but the hard part is sort of identifying the problem, and it sounds like you've spent a lot of time identifying those, and so I don't want to lose that.
GRAHAM:
All right, I appreciate that. The other thing that I've been really irritated by lately, and this is just think a trend that the internet's taken is there really seems to be a lot more dynamic content these days and sometimes, especially when it comes to websites that show frames. The worst is I think videos that are embedded. It really does seem to affect the cursor position as JAWS sees it. So when you're navigating around a web page, you press the paragraph down button again and it reads the same paragraph because in the amount of time that you've been reading, it's jumped up. And of course we all know there's the option to turn off automatic refreshing, which you could do, but sometimes it doesn't even seem to be dynamic content and I just can't figure out what's doing it. You can actually end up getting into this state where every couple of seconds the cursor just jumping everywhere even if the page doesn't seem to be refreshing at all. I really don't understand why that happens, but I was wondering if there's some way you could keep track of the element or the text somehow so that when the page changes, it would be a little bit more seamless.
GLEN:
In theory, we try to do that. And clearly, based on your experience, we're not always succeeding. Are others of you seeing this? I'm not seeing this specific problem.
MOHAMMED:
I'm seeing a bit of this in, for example, a website like The Verge that has tech news. They have this weird little widget that they put in the middle of their articles that seems to jump around with more stories and what I've actually done in order to get rid of it and it largely solved the problem for me on that specific website is hide that widget using Flexible Wweb.
GRAHAM:
I've tried things like that too, and sometimes it makes it a little bit better, but it doesn't seem to solve it fully. I could always send you a couple of examples of long articles in say Wikipedia, where it really does seem to happen and it doesn't seem traceable to any widgets.
GLEN:
That would be great. One thing if you could try and let us know is, if you open the browser fresh and just go to that page, do you see the problem? Or does it require sort of a little bit of setup where other stuff's remaining open? I want to make sure that whatever you send us we're likely to be able to replicate. So thank you very much.
Graham:
Of course. Thanks for listening.
RACHEL:
Thanks for the questions for everyone. And I do hate to say this, but we are going to just take one more question if we didn't get to you, I'm sorry, but you can always email us. We've given a few different email addresses here, and I just want to repeat some of them. But training@vispero.com is always a great place if you have questions. And then we forward those emails between ourselves. So if you email me, rbuchanan@vispero.com or ewhitaker@vispero.com, we can also get your message to the right people. So with that said, I am going to try to unmute Danielle.
DANIELLE:
Nice talking with all of you guys. I called in July with an issue with JAWS 2024 with sound card not working with some of the sounds with JAWS and it's been fixed with JAWS 2025.
GLEN:
Wow. Excellent.
DANIELLE:
And another thing, if we can make it so Picture Smart, when it brings up, if it can start automatically start reading rather than have to do down arrow so it can be faster, that would be much appreciated.
MOHAMMED:
Thank you, Danielle. We'll certainly take that into consideration.
DANIELLE:
And I use it even to get the Jeopardy scores when I'm watching Jeopardy, since they don't do the audio description on the regular syndicated one.
GLEN:
Oh, that's kind of cool. So you're watching Jeopardy online and then...
DANIELLE:
I watch it on my computer because I have the Cox Contour that I use and I do it on my computer and I can get the scores and even read the clues. So Picture Smart has been a huge help, and even helping out college students. I'm helping out college student right now with school, so I'm helping him with that and Picture Smart has been a huge help for that too.
GLEN:
Well, that's a perfect way to end. Thank you, Danielle.
DANIELLE:
You're welcome.
RACHEL:
Yes, thank you for following up and telling us about your July call. This has been a good show and a great way, I hate to say it and I'm also a little happy to say it but to end Sharkvember as we move into the holiday week next week. So thank you for joining us.
RYAN:
Take care everyone.
MOHAMMED:
Take care everyone. Bye-bye.
GLEN:
Bye.