With the passing of another year comes another major update to the JAWS screen access program. When I use the term “major update,” I mean simply that the new version sports an increment to the major version number (the number to the left of the decimal point). I don’t mean that the new features included in this update constitute major enhancements to the software. This is important because Freedom Scientific’s upgrade plan calls for JAWS users to buck-up in order to stay current when a major update is released. This can be pretty annoying when the so-called “major update” is one in number only. In order to see why I think this is the case with JAWS 8.0, lets take a look at the new features it offers.

RealSpeak and Other SAPI 5 synthesizers

Given that Freedom Scientific’s news release for JAWS 8.0 is entitled “Say It All with JAWS 8.0 and RealSpeak Solo”, it’s arguable that this is their flagship enhancement to the software, but how pathetic is that? JAWS already includes the Eloquence software synthesizer, as well as support for a number of hardware synthesizers. If you’ve found these offerings to be intolerable or you have a favorite SAPI 5 synthesizer you’ve been wanting to use with JAWS, you might see this feature as one that commands your money, but I don’t think most people will. Even less exciting is the fact that the more human-like voice of RealSpeak comes at a significant cost in responsiveness. In all fairness, Freedom Scientific recognizes this, and the default use of any SAPI 5 synthesizer is as an extra voice that is only activated during “Say all” mode, but is having a somewhat higher quality voice for long passages of text really worth your money? I doubt it.

Virtualize Current Control

Since version 4.5, JAWS has included a feature called “Virtualize Window” that allows the text of a window to be copied to the clipboard, where it can be pasted into another application. It’s a useful feature. In JAWS 8.0 this functionality has been specialized to allow for the virtualization of a single control within a window. If the use of your application’s select and delete commands to get rid of unnecessary text represents a major bottleneck for you, add one to your list of reasons to upgrade.

New Media Commands for FSReader

JAWS includes a number of ways to access its tutorial documentation, everything from audio CDs to mp3s to the new daisy talking books. new media navigation commands have been added to the FSReader demo program used to read the Daisy books. CTRL+P pauses/plays the audio in the currently open book and CTRL+comma and CTRL+period rewind and fast-forward the book respectively. The interesting and most emphasized thing about these commands is that they can be used from within another application as long as FSReader is running. If you still make use of the training material, your chosen method of access to that material is the Daisy talking books, and you aren’t worried about the fact that these functions will highjack any commands in your application associated with the above key combinations, this one’s for you. While we’re on the subject of the DAISY books, Freedom Scientific also lists, as one of its updates, that the books have been updated to reflect the changes in JAWS 8.0. It’s comforting to know that the documentation is, in fact, in sync with the latest version of the software. What a great idea; I’m going to suggest we start doing this with program updates at work.

Other Features

JAWS 8.0 includes a number of other additions that I didn’t think needed to be given their own sections. These include: a find history, which maintains a list of the last 20 text strings searched for using JAWS find; text attribute and color skim reading, which allows the skim reading feature to be executed based on text color and other attributes, as well as to view occurrences of particular colors and attributes in text; SAPI 5 “Say All” voice aliasing, which allows for the association of a SAPI 5 voice with a window, web page, document, or dialog box; Generalized Dialect, which prevents JAWS from switching to a web page’s specified language if it has the same general dialect as the currently active language; Spell Alphanumeric Data, which allows you to specify that JAWS spell strings of characters included in alphanumeric strings; Smart Word Reading, which insures that compound words, dates, times, telephone numbers, ETC are read as one word if they are seen as such by the application; the ability to temporarily turn off custom labels; a startup wizard, which, I guess, provides a centralized location for startup options, such as starting JAWS when your computer starts. Some or all of these features could certainly be useful to you, but even taken together, are these features really something worth paying for?

Application Enhancements

Even if you did find that the features discussed previously weren’t enough to make you want to pay for the new JAWS version, there is one addition that might render everything else irrelevant and cause you to fork over that credit card number with out another thought: application compatibility. This is, in fact, the reason for my last two JAWS upgrades, including this one. There’s nothing quite like the experience of loading an application, only to be met with no response from JAWS or with a terse message like “blank. For newer users unfamiliar with this, let me warn you that the unpleasantness of this kind of event can be enough to make you upgrade without thinking about it. JAWS includes several enhancements to its compatibility with programs like Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, AIM, ETC. It also includes enhancements to make it work better with new features of the internet. I’m not going to list these features here; look at the “what’s new” section of Freedom Scientific’s JAWS web pages if you’re interested.

Features for Technical Support

JAWS also includes a couple of features to assist technical support personnel in diagnosing and fixing your problems. How many times have you heard a technical support person say “if only we had a memory dump; we could easily fix this problem.” Thanks to the new Memory Dump feature of JAWS 8.0 this will be a thing of the past. JAWS 8.0 also includes a feature that allows application-specific scripts to be disabled. This can help technical support isolate problems.

Conclusion

For the record, let me state plainly that I find JAWS to be an indispensable part of my life. Without it, I would probably not be able to hold a job as a computer programmer or enjoy the use of computers as a hobby. I do, however, think that Freedom Scientific might be a little out of control with it’s release of major software updates; we’ve seen three of these in the past three years. If Freedom Scientific is struggling and simply needs the extra money to continue operating, they should just be straight-up about it. I would be the first to make a donation.

Well, it’s finally time. After several years of rumors and threats, it looks like the closure of the government facility where I work is imminent. One of my coworkers, who has been there for over ten years, once commented to me that operations at this facility have been comparable to beating a dead horse for some time, and it looks like we’re finally going to acknowledge that.

unfortunately, this hasn’t meant the end of the rumor mill, which continues to churn out a stream of unfounded crap. Most of this seems to be produced by people suffering from what another coworker refers to as the “tavern syndrome”, an ailment characterized by a need to spread emotionally charged misinformation in order to get attention.

One of the more prevalent ideas in the rumor arena is that the organization that will be closing the site will be able to get whatever they want from the state in terms of environmental freedom, thus making the closure quicker and our employee life spans much shorter. Everyone in our organization who has any experience with the state says there is no way this could happen, yet this idea persists, nurtured by the conjectures of people with little or no experience working with the state. More disturbing to me than the shaky foundations of these people’s conclusions, though, is their motivation for excepting conclusions that are obviously bias in favor of them losing their jobs More quickly.

I suppose we could argue that the organization tasked with closing the site has some kind of secret weapon or set of tactics that will be affective in getting what they want from the state, but I haven’t heard anything to indicate this is probable, and the people I’ve talked with who have been in meetings where the state and the closure organization have been present say the closure organization is shocked and nervus about the level of environmental vigilance the state will require. Once again, I don’t understand why people would choose to be bias in favor of an idea that would result in the accelerated loss of their jobs.