Sam, while I agree that loss of speech is a pain, I'm not at all convinced that it's always something the screen reader developer can do much about. Any time my WE stops speaking, it's the type of situation you described. Invariably, that is caused by another application. This has not happened to me more often with the beta cycle than previously.
There are two things that a user can do about the situation. One is to have a batch file or script (not a script built into WE) set up to kill WE if it stops talking. Since I learned through this List about that option, almost all situations have been resolved by running my AutoHotkey script. It turns what would have been a reboot into a minor delay. The second thing is to install another screen reader such as NVDA. It costs nothing and is easy to fire up if WE hangs. The Task Manager can then be used to sort out issues. I mention my kill_we AutoHotkey script because it can add some elegance to the killing process. When I press the hot key, the script calls a sound file with my droning voice asking, "Do you want to kill Window-Eyes, yes or no?" That's helpful if I hit the key by mistake! If I hit "n" or do nothing, the script does nothing. In summary then, all praise to the screen reader developers for quarantining it as much as possible from the multitude of issues that may give it the speed wobbles. But quick and quite simple solutions are literally at the user's fingertips for most situations when things go wrong. While it may be argued that these solutions could or should be built into the product, having the fix completely separate is more likely to be effective when problems arise. Andrew From: Sam bushman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, 12 September 2008 10:31 To: [email protected] Subject: WE 7 Beta 3 issues and priorities Hi all, Is it possible to get a beta 3 priorities list together? I like it when we find bugs report them they are duplicated and fixed for the next version. But, we need to start to focus on the most important issues / a priority list if you will. In other words ... many of us are reporting the same things over and over. I agree they are problems but, GW has basically said they aren't working on msaa stuff. So, email, web browsers pdf files (any thing that uses msaa is not the focus). It doesn't matter if we agree that is the proper order ... that is what is set for fix / release. I personally would have rerote the msaa / browse mode stuff way before I would have added power point / itunes and scripting. But, GW has the list of what they think best and we need to trust them and be part of the solution for the next release ... isn't that what we agree to when we use / run the beta. Now please don't email the list debating with the above and the pros and cons of this are. I am not trying to speak for GW and am just repeating what I personally think they said and ment. Personally the loss of speech is the biggest issue for me. I lost speach yesterday ... couldn't get it back for the life of me. I had a sighted daughter say that we was running and she clicked around and the computer was working perfectly. She didn't know why the speach was not happening but, I had her click on the system tray icon for WE and exit the program. It exited cleanly and I just pressed ctrl-alt-w and we came back to life. No errors of any kind and when I tried to send an error report WE said there were no errors to report. The sad part about this is I was not able to get GW any info to help resolve this (huge!) loss of speach issue. Since we would like WE to be rock solid and would love to have speech as reliable as the screen output ... I am hoping all of us can come up with a way to duplicate and help GW resolve this main issue. Any ideas on this? If GW could give us a list of things we should try and do in order when we loose speech we may get them more info that would be helpful. Currently I know that the story I just told about loss of speech above doesn't help them at all. But, If I know exactly what they are looking for and what they want me to do in order and reported solid step by step info ... they could get to the bottom of this. Any ideas are welcome. Any one else think the loss of speech issue is bar none the biggest issue for us? Thanks for listening. Sam bushman If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. 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