Become solely an actual Jaws user. Use Jaws without sight for your own
computer requirements, and you will become a fine teacher of the system. Eric
Damery, who sells for Freedom Scientific, is sighted. He did this. He
astonishes sighted observers. When he demonstrates the workings of each
upgrade to the operating system at trade shows and such. When I was a child
past 60 years ago, our teachers read and wrote Braille with their fingers,
rather than with their eyes. As did we. They were taught these skills
blindfolded.
----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Vogel
To: [email protected]
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2015 3:02 PM
Subject: Re: Are there any NVDA (or WindowEyes) and JAWS "dual users" or
people who've used both here?
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
