Adrian, Thanks for the feedback.
I hasten to add that the very nature, and length (in virtually all cases), of my tutoring involves by its very nature getting a user familiar with a very wide range of JAWS functions and comfort using them. What I was trying to get at earlier is that the nature of my clients needs is such that I would feel like a fool and dictator were I to walk in and take a "lesson plan" approach where I declare something along the lines of, "tonight we're going to work on web browsing," when their latest crisis du jour was with using JAWS with MS-Word. I follow the direction that the client's immediate needs take us for that session, but I do not limit myself to them if/when those needs have been addressed and the spontaneous teachable (and, I hasten to add, learnable for me) moments occur in each and every session such that a lot of territory gets covered. What's funny for me is that when I'm working with multiple clients during the same time frame it can become confusing not only in regard to what I've taught who, which we can resolve quickly, but also in regard to what I can actually pull up immediately in my mind regarding JAWS. It is, in many ways, a PITA that I am not an actual JAWS user because I can never establish the kind of fluency that a real user does. That being the case I also tell my clients that while I am always willing to re-cover any territory, I am relying on them to keep building on what we've already done and that I may have to ask them on many occasions, "What's the command to do action X again?," because it's dropped out of my commands in current circulation in my mind cycle. I'm constantly having to relearn things because all skills are "use it or lose it" and I just don't, and never will, need to use JAWS to the extent that it becomes "like breathing" for me. I also listen to JAWS with great regularity, and teach my clients to do the same, because that's very often the only way I and they can know "where JAWS is" at a given moment in time. I, however, have the option of ignoring JAWS during lessons where the individual is in the midst of performing the well-known things they do, which are always somewhere as a part of any lesson, and they don't. I also failed to make clear that when JAWS drives me crazy is when I'm trying to do something along the lines of technical support where I'm installing software, removing software, adding peripherals, etc., that the client will likely never do or want to do (if they express the interest then it is a teachable moment, and then the paradigm shifts). When I've got something that's tangential to the lesson, but essential nonetheless to their life in general, like installing a new printer, I either exit JAWS entirely or use INS+Spacebar, followed by S to hush him or her (I tend to refer to JAWS in the moment as him or her based on the voice the client uses) up. As to forms mode, I get that in the abstract but since JAWS drops into and out of forms mode automatically (at least by default), I had not realized that was happening. Mode, as a term, for me means that one must always be manually responsible for toggling the state to get in to or out of that mode. Private correspondence has allowed me to understand that my usual definition of how a mode works is how JAWS once worked, but that now the default is automatic, and that some prefer to turn that automatic feature off and go back to mode control being under their control. Brian
