Keynote is my favorite synthesizer and I have gone through a ridiculous amount 
of work to keep using it.  I found a hardware one on ebay after searching for 
about a year and a half after I could no longer use my software keynote with 
JAWS in Windows XP.  Just proves you can find ANYTHING on ebay if you search 
enough!  I had to finagle the beta 32 bit keynote drivers from someone because 
they weren't released and put up on the humanware website for an extremely long 
time.  The humanware rep. I talked to at Closing the Gap was  basically a jerk 
to me when I asked about keynote drivers when XP first came out.  he told me no 
one liked keynote and I shouldn't either.  Dumb, this list proved him wrong, 
which I already knew since I had talked to many people who wanted keynote 
hardware synths to work with JAWS.  Fortunately I don't remember the guy's 
name, and he is the only Humanware Rep. I have met that was rude.
Then every time I have upgraded JAWS it has been hard to get a driver that 
would install to the new version.  It seems like that will be solved now with 
it becoming an option to use it with blue tooth in version 7, which is a big 
releaf to me.  Please, please, Pleas don't stop supporting keynote!  If you 
ever think about it Humanware, then you should release the software version to 
the open source community so that people who care can work on making it 
available. :-)
I assume the driver now on the website is now for any version of JAWS?  I 
didn't find it before I went through a strange procedure of uninstalling JAWS 
6, making a directory listing of the files in the directory just after 
reinstalling JAWS 6, then installing the drivers for the keynote in JAWS 
version 6, and finally comparing the directory listing again to see what had 
changed.  I also made a backup of my JAWS directories so I could see what 
changed in the file that changed. After all that I was able to install the 
drivers in JAWS version 7 by hand.  Only at that point did I start using JAWS 
7, because my sound crackles horribly with eloquence and I don't much like it 
anyway.  Yes, I know about the supposed fix for the crackle but it doesn't work 
for my computer for no known reason.

Now if only I could use my braille note or hardware keynote in Kurzweil I would 
be a very happy person.  Is there any chance Humanware and Kurzweil Educational 
Systems could discuss that possibility?  I wonder if the same driver that works 
in JAWS would work for Kurzweil if someone just knew how to get it installed 
and Kurzweil informed of it's existence by editing some configuration file.

I also find it very odd that the keynote doesn't seem to recognize accented and 
other extended characters when used with JAWS.  I am certain that this is a 
driver issue and not a hardware issue.  In fact when one keynote synthesizer 
malfunctioned it would only yell "C cidilla" which it certainly did not get 
told to say by the computer, so I think it knows about those characters, but 
isn't being fed them by JAWS, which is very annoying.  I am sure that my PCMCIA 
and software keynotes handled words with accented characters beautifully, and I 
miss that.

Okay, so I am a little insane about my synthesizers. <grin>

Eloquence manages to mispronounce my last name even when given a phonetic 
spelling, so it is also not welcome on my computers for that reason.  I don't 
want to feel like barfing every time I hear my last name. :-)

Sarah Van Oosterwijck
Assistive Technology Trainer
http://home.earthlink.net/~netentity
___
To leave the BrailleNote list, send a blank message to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To view the list archives or change your preferences, visit
http://list.humanware.com/mailman/listinfo/braillenote

Reply via email to