Hi I don't get what you mean by "Learn to troubleshoot later". As it happens, I'm an experienced system administrator and network design engineer. I've been "loaned" this dongle for 3 weeks. You talk about getting the school to give me a working installation. That isn't a possibility. For one thing, this actually has nothing whatsoever to do with the school I hope to be employed in. For another, the staff are all on holiday until at least the end of August.
So basically, I'm going to have to look at other options. But each day this problem persists is a day wasted. Most of the time, I use VoiceOver on the Mac here and yes, I agree that GW Micro's implementation of web browsing is pretty dreadful, to be honest. Why do they have to strip the page down and load it into a vertical sheet? Why do they have to have you press enter on any input control field in order to activate and interact with it? I'm all for the wysiwyg approach and, although not perfect yet by any means, I use VoiceOver, and am happy to do so. Jaws is undoubtedly faster than Window-Eyes which, even now, has some ridiculously old code in it. It's bloated, to be honest, and that's why it's so very much slower in terms of responsiveness than either nVDA or Jaws. But I totally agree with Martin that Freedom Scientific's installer is dreadful. Jaws is only the number one screen-reader in the Windows world because they had the edge in terms of marketing back in the early days and most authorities and agencies just can't be bothered to change things. But I have already been given a mandate, on the assumption that I get this job, to start moving the visually impaired department in this academy over towards other products on other platforms. So we shall see. Gordon On 5 Aug 2012, at 16:18, Øyvind Lode - Forums <[email protected]> wrote: Well put! I've installed JAWS several times without problems. But you Gordon don't have the time for JAWS troubleshooting right now. Contact the school to get a working installation up and running so you can learn how to use JAWS first and then learn how to troubleshoot at a later stage. As I said I've never ran into any problems installing JAWS so I'm not sure what's going on on your machine. I'm a happy JAWS user but no FS fan boy for sure. I tried Window-Eyes briefly back in 2007 when I no longer could use magnification to work efficiently. I must say that I found Window-Eyes web browsing and how it handled Internet to be a joke when I got my hands on a computer running JAWS 8. I've been a JAWS-user since then. I guess that have improved now though but I have not used Window-Eyes since I briefly tested it out back in 2007. Yesterday I said I would love to use NVDA and I actually installed it to try it out again. Yeah my HumanWare Brailliant BI 40 had built in support but the Braille support in NVDA is still in the stone age compared to JAWS. I opened a Cygwin terminal/console and logged in to one of my Linux servers and were quite happy. But I quickly discovered that I couldn't pan/scroll the Braille display with NVDA. So NVDA is still useless for me but speech worked fine in the console though. So I'm still a JAWS-user and it's time to renew my SMA again since my current SMA only allows me to run JAWS 13. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Martin G. McCormick Sent: 5. august 2012 15:54 To: Techno-Chat ... Technology Enthusiasm! Subject: Re: Jaws Installer, absolutely pathetic! The question at the top of the list that begs answering is How, on Earth, does Mr. John Q. Public or Ms. Jane Q. Public who happens to also be blind, independently get JAWS installed on a Windows system? I am talking, now, like the teacher I might have been back when I was studying for that profession in the late seventies. One of my very respected instructors had spent several years in the country of Thailand and had helped them set up their electrical worker training program and also had been instrumental in writing a national electrical code for Thailand. What my advisor was surprised about was the fact that there was a major electrical supply house literally right across the street from the vocational school where they tought the electrical trades. There was absolutely no professional contact or networking between the people who worked in the electrical business and the school. They didn't even know each other's names. The point he was making was that you are time and money ahead to network with local resources as they are familiar with the area you are training for. You are having trouble getting a working JAWS installation. There is probably somebody at some place in the UK who can do this in their sleep and does it every day for agencies or clients in the UK who are blind. What if, for example, the school system uses one of their servers to image all the JAWS work stations in a computer lab or similar place? They might let you bring your computer there and image it along with the rest. Freedom Scientific has what they call site licenses where they do these sorts of things for students. The lab instructors, here, don't know JAWS from Adam, but they image computers from a master server and can blow a JAWS installation from cold metal in minutes. You, the student, just walk in and they tell you where the JAWS work station is and you log in. Oklahoma State University has a site license from Freedom Scientific and I bet there is a similar setup in school systems or rehabilitation agencies in the UK. Since you are pressed for time, I wouldn't sweat the details. Since a job is on the line, I'd at least get started with a known good system. You will soon be showing them things they didn't know but first, let's get a working system. 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