Hi all, One has to be a bit generous with beta software, of course: it's intended to be tested and was never meant to be perfect. However, JAWS betas in general seem to be quite polished already. At least in my case, this has totally changed with this beta of JAWS 11.
Incredible focus problems make browsing the web, installing applications, and accessing programs to be so troublesome that frankly I usually give up and revert to JAWS 10. Frequently, JAWS 11 completely loses control of the keyboard, passing everything right through to my applications as if JAWS were unloaded. This means, for example, that silencing speech, requesting to hear the current line, and so forth, would not work. This has absolutely never happened to me with any other versions of JAWS. Personalized settings aren't properly erased, even when you purge the contents of your JAWS settings folder. And when you get right down to it: Research It is a stripped down version of the Windows sidebar; currently, in fact, it can only search through sources such as Wikipedia and Wictionary, which are absolutely never accepted in an academic context anyway. Word Index is "cool", but it's not a screen reader feature and there are widely available freeware packages that do exactly the same thing. The Gmail support has stopped working entirely. And while there are a few enhancements under the hood, they're not the incredible screen reading breakthroughs that were rolled out in versions such as 3.31 (the virtual cursor), 4.5 (quick navigation keys), 5.0 (place markers) or 9.0 (a new Word engine and better access to rich edit controls on web pages). I am incredibly faithful to JAWS and love it immensely, but after a year's development, frankly, I expected a little better. Let's definitely not rant: I'm looking for constructive comments by others. Has JAWS 11 been performing up to JAWS' usual standard? (If not, be sure to report everything to the FS test department.) Do you see yourselves using the new features found in JAWS 11? Am I alone in having mixed emotions over this beta? cheers, Grant For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
