Hi Nicol, Personally I advise all my customers to unload Jaws or Window Eyes when playing games for a variety of reasons. First, games like Montezuma's Return are very system resource intensive. At any given time there is several sounds being played, mixed, and loaded and unloaded in real time which uses quite a bit of processor and memory resources. In addition there are internal clocks, called timers, running which draw upon your processor to perform hundreds of calculations and enemy AI decisions at or near the same time. The last thing you want when playing a game is for another program to be eating into your computers speed and memory resources when all that is going on. Screen readers as a rule tend to be resource intensive applications in themselves. That is why when you load a large program or do a very resource intensive task Jaws or Window Eyes will be silent or unresponsive until the major process finishes. There is not enough CPU output or memory to run both applications at the same time so Jaws or Window Eyes tend to get called only after the app has finished doing whatever it was doing. I could get into various technical details on this, but I won't for your sanity's sake. Second, APIs suchas DirectX were designed from the get-go to basically acquire and control your computers hardware independantly from the Windows event cue. What this means in average human speak is that DirectX actually acquires total control of your sound card, keyboard, joystick, vidio card, etc unless the developer specifically passes flags to let other sound events, mouse events, keyboard events, through to the device. Otherwise other apps can't use the device until DirectX releases hardware control back to the Windows event cue. That is why Window Eyes and especially Jaws can encounter issues running at the same time as a game running DirectX DirectInput. Jaws might recieve an input call from the keyboard to do something, and your game app will recieve the same call to do something else and since both are trying to recieve control from the keyboard both actions are carried out, or it causes the keyboard to symply lock altogether. The only way to avoid this is to unload the screen reader, put it to sleep, or the developer has to add some other special keyboard handling in the game to let the Windows keyboard events through when the game does not have focus on the screen. Although weather or not you unload your screen reader or put it into some sleep mode is your choice I do think for the two reasons above it is more than compelling reasons not to get into the habit of running both at the same time if you can help it.
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