Hi all This is my first E-Mail to anybody for a very long time, so I must say it's good to be back.
In the hope of securing a teaching position in the not too distant future, it looks like I'm going to have to start learning the ins and outs of Jaws for Windows, as well as refreshing myself in the use of Microsoft Office application, especially Word. Lynne downloaded JFW13 a few days ago, along with NVDA211, but we haven't had the opportunity to try them out as yet. So, to my questions. 1. What's the latest version of Microsoft Office and where do we stand, please, in terms of accessibility with the aforementioned screen-readers, plus GW Micro's Window-Eyes? 2. Does Freedom Scientific sell online to overseas customers, or is it one of those dealership rackets still, as it was when I got my fingers severely burned with them in 2000 when they re-sold my serial number to another customer and also my SMA, and they flatly refused to honour it with a different S/N and SMA. 3. On the assumption that Freedom Scientific does indeed sell internationally online, do they operate any kind of monthly "Lease To Own" programme, similar to that which GW Micro offers? Currently my outright budget wouldn't stretch to the £1200 USD which Freedom seem to be asking for JFW Professional and that doesn't even cover remote access; shocking. Having spent most of the morning playing around with various aspects of Windows 7 Ultimate Sp1 and Window-Eyes, I'm sorry to have to say that I'm distinctly unimpressed with GW's latest offering. Having become somewhat accustomed to the lack of a "Browse Mode", I find it irksome to say the least when I have to keep continually pressing enter on edit boxes etc. before I can insert or modify data, and then having to re-enable browse mode to find out what a consecutive edit box's data should be. Pressing tab when outside of browse mode now yields only "Edit", and not the content descriptor field any longer. I also find Window-Eyes 7.5.2 unacceptably slow at times when it's loading web content. Indeed, sometimes I fid that it doesn't even finish loading at all, and I have to turn browse ode of and back on again to make it work. Actually that's a bug which has been around forever, but it's much much worse now. Many times I also see problems after entering my password in the log-on window when loading Window-Eyes. Windows itself contuse down the log-on chain at normal speed but the Window-Eyes task often freezes or responds very very slowly. Thus, it takes often up to five minutes to gain access to the desktop and even then I sometimes get "Not Responding" notices regarding the Window-Eyes main executable, or one of the dynamic libraries upon which it relies. I'm also finding GW Micro's so-called "Industry-Leading" technical support extremely poor. Often, they don't even respond at all and when they do, they don't usually provide adequate responses to questions. I have seen opinion expressed in a couple of places on the Internet that Window-Eyes's overall quality has been severely depleted since the so-called innovative and, again, industry-standard scripting mechanism was incorporated into the application. I share that opinion! Were it not for the fact that Window-Eyes 7.0 is not compatible with 64-bit operating systems, and were it not for the fact that it won't run under Windows 7 at all, I would seriously consider reverting. As it is. I'm going to have to really turn full circle, have a serous look at JFW and NVDA, and perhaps also System Access as well. I am aware that there has been some discussion pertaining to screen-readers on list recently, sponsored initially as I understand it by my wife. I have read through the ensuing thread and found some of the comment very interesting. However, the angle I am hoping to discuss is more a practical one, rather than a financial debate. I'm going to try JFW because for one thing, I just cannot figure out how you configure NVDA for Braille output; which I need. Any comment welcome, and did I say it earlier? It's great to be back, finally. Gordon ======================================= The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/techno-chat@techno-chat.net> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/techno-chat@techno-chat.net/maillist.xml> ---------------------------------------
