Steve, I have used Lotus Notes for a long time although I have not gotten into the guts of it as much as have others, but am glad to help.
The first thing to try is to change the program that your shortcut to Logus Notes is executing. It probably is executing "NOTES.EXE". This program is very flaky with Window-Eyes and I suspect with JFW as well but didn't try it. Instead of NOTES.EXE, run NLNOTES.EXE and you should get controls that are more common windows controls. Make sure you have the factory sets installed as they do help some. Lotus Notes uses an unusual but I think nice way to provide keyboard access to buttons on its toolbar. If you hold down the ALT key, Window-Eyes will speak a number and each button that is available pressing that number with the ALT key will press that button. You may need to do that to get to your mailbox for the first time. You can set your mailbox up as your startup screen eventually but I will have to see how to do that, but your employer should also know. I have two computers running Notes 8.0 and one running 8.5 and I think it is just a little different. When you have a message list, you can press ENTER to open messages and they will generally open in Browse Mode. Pressing ESCAPE closes the message as does, I believe, CONTROL-W. Notes and Window-Eyes do a pretty good job of reporting message status such as "Unread," "forwarded" etc. on the message list. I don't find that the help system works very well, though, but have not really experimented with it. The F6 key will allow you to move between various panes and get you to the folders and views list, for example. You can arrow to another folder/view and press ENTER and you'll be back in the list for that folder or view. There are many things that are not quite what one would think of as standard. For example, I have found no way to get to the OK buttons in some dialogs without just tabbing through them, and this sometimes means going through multiple pages. Still, as I read about all the problems people have with Outlook, There are a couple of annoying bugs that I think GW Micro will likely look ag eventually. Every line in browse mode will say "Read-only Edit and this has discouraged some. I've learned to tune it out mostly. Sometimes focus on the message list is messed up and you have to ALT-TAB away and then back and it corrects itself. This seems to be something specific to Notes and Window-Eyes and it was not always the case. I can't help think that I am in many ways lucky to be using Notes rather than Outlook. If the same effort were put into Lotus Notes that has been put into Outlook by screen reader developers, it would likely be superior. Still, I understand that isn't practical as there are so many fewer Lotus Notes users. I just don't seem to see the crashes, the losses of speech, the "program not responding" messages with Lotus Notes that I read with Outlook. In the long run, I'm not sure you'll find using Lotus Notes as bad as some say it is. If you have questions, I'll try to answer them. Best regards, Steve Jacobson On Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:51:30 -0700, Steve Holmes wrote: >Well, I just had a nightmaire at the office yesterday <smile>. I see >we use Lotus Notes 8.5.something at IBM and frankly, the default >accessibility proved to be a disaster. >I never paid any attention to Notes related messages in the past >because I never had to put up with the application and I heard so much >bad press about it. >Are there any quick references or notes on how to get WE to work >better with this? I installed the Lotus Notes set files that comes >with WE 7.5 but it doesn't appear to be associated. I know it has >been workable with WE in the past but I've lost track of how current >versions of Notes does with WE these days. >Can anyone catch me up to speed here? In the meantime, I'll look >through any past archives or knowledge base aarticles on the subject. >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. >GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage >your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv. 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. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
