I finally, sort of, made the switch to WE 7.01. I immediately started thinking about ways to make my work faster, more efficient, and more productive by using scripts. I had actually become rather good with JAWS scripts. After plowing through a tutorial on Visual Basic and the Window-Eyes Help system on scripts, I'm beginning to doubt whether scripting will make me more productive -- at least if I have to write the scripts myself. I went to Script Central and found some nice scripts. I particularly like the "Append to Clipboard" script. There were lots of cute scripts, but not all that many productivity-enhancing scripts. Of course, this could all be a function of the way I work, but II'm guessing there are others out there who wuld rather do their jobs than learn VB Script and wuld even pay for productivity-enhancing scripts. Here are a few examples: Jump to Element in Word: WE already provides a nice facility for jumping to the next revision (in track changes), the next bookmark, the next comment, and so-on. Why not a function to jump to the next heading or the next table? Word itself offers this functiion, sort of, in the "Go To" menu, but it is decidedly awkward. I shouldn't think a script would be that hard to write.
Style Picker: Most of us who learned word processing with WordPerfect (or earlier programs) still rely on direct formatting, even though every Word trainer decries this practice, encouraging us to use styles. There are some handy styles built into Word, and I have created Word templates with many, many fore. The Word short-cut key is control-shift-S. That, of course, conflicts with the "read status" command in Window-Eyes. Even when using the bypass key and following it with the control-shift-S command, what one gets is not a list box of styles in alphabetical order that one can scroll down or jump to with a key. Instead, one has to press Alt-O (for format) go to "styles." Even then, the listing is decidedly uncooperative, not readily responding to letter jump commands. Then, when one has applied the style, the nasty task pain remains on the screen. That can drive you nuts until you realize what's going on and close it. I would pay for a style picker script that let me press a key, scroll down a list of scripts or jump to the "lists" with the letter "l", and allowed me, by pressing ENTER, to apply the script, close the dialog box, and get rid of the task pain. "Or" searching in Word OK, I may be getting more ambitious here, but I'll bet I've had 100 instances in the last 30 days where I would have loved to have found the next occurrence of one word or another, e.g., "compensation" or "remuneration," to give you the last instance or, even more complex, either a DeltaView "insert" style or a DeltaView "delete" style. Yes, one can search for formatting, styles, and even special characters (like charrage return) in Word. Word, however, insists on searching for one item at a time. That seems primitive, and perhaps my gripe is with Microsoft, but I would pay serious bucks for a script that would search for alternate terms in Word. Macro Stuff I find that 90% of the script functionality (beyond those mentioned above) are really almost macro-like. Yet, simply simulating a tab key press, an up arrow, a carrage return, and the like, within a script, seem to be mysteries. I couldn't find them at all in the Window-Eyes object model, and I'm 50 pages into this VB tutorial and still haven't found what I should think would be the most useful things one could do with a script. I have a somewhat proprietary applicatiion where information is displayed in a phantom list view and reclassing doesn't help. A script which, for example, let me press Alt-down arrow as a hotkey (I can do that part of the script) and have it press the down arrow key, route the mouce to the cursor, turn speech off, jump 2 clips to the right, turn speech back on, and then read the next clip should be an easy script. It would be immeasurably valuable, but, well, it is presently beyond me. So, maybe I'll just go back to being a lawyer. 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. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message.
