Jaws updated... and much more

00:33 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from November the 5th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley, great to have you with us listening through Vision Australia Radio associated stations of the Radio Reading Network or perhaps the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you need to do is search for the two words talking tech and [?Dan] can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast. Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast. 

With me, Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damien McMorrow. Hey, Damo. 

S2

Hi, Stephen. 

S1

Damo, it's been a big week for software upgrades - particularly in the screen reader and screen enhancement area. Before we go into the details of what's been released, let's perhaps explain what a screen reader is and what screen enhancement is.

01:38 S2

Yeah, sure. So screen readers are really designed to give you access to your computer through synthetic speech output. But also if you have a refreshable Braille display connected, it'll give you the same sort of access through Braille. So for people who are totally blind, like you and I, or people who have either very low vision or suffer from a lot of vision fatigue, they will often use a screen reader as their primary means of access. For those people who have some hearing loss as well, they may rely more on the Braille output side of things rather than the speech output. 

Screen enhancement, on the other hand, is more of a visual enhancement. So for people who have some usable vision, a lot of people think that it's just magnification, but it goes a lot further than that. There are things like high contrast mouse pointers and cursors. You can change the screen contrast. So for example, if your vision works in such a way that having everything as white on black or black on white works best for you, then you can adjust those sorts of things as well as the text size. A lot of screen enhancement tools also provide some speech so that you can use it for reading emails, long documents, that kind of thing so that you can give your vision a break. 

And then of course, there are products like Supernova Magnifier, Screen Reader or Zoomtext Fusion, which actually include a full screen reader and all of the screen enhancement tools. So they are often used if someone is transitioning from being perhaps predominantly a magnification user, a screen enhancement user to becoming more of a screen reader user as their vision deteriorates or depending on the day. You know, people's vision can change day to day, and if you're having a bad day visually and your eyes just aren't cooperating, you may rely more on your screen reader component in that instance. Whereas if you're having a good day and you want to do things visually, or you're dealing with a lot of graphs, or you're looking at photos or things like that, you would rely more on the screen enhancement side of things.

03:57 S1

So let's talk about Vespero, still quite often referred to as Freedom Scientific. They have the Jaws product, the Zoomtext product, and the fusion product. And they're 2025 upgrades came out last week.

04:14 S2

They did last Thursday. Australian time. The big new feature in jaws is a thing called PFS companion. It's essentially an AI tool that allows you to ask questions, particularly around Jaws usage, Microsoft Windows usage, and use of office applications. So you could, for example, type in How do I change the volume in Jaws? How do I have Jaws read the column headers in Excel, something like that. And it will analyse a number of different resources - training resources, documentation, help files, all of those kinds of things - and produce a nice step by step guide for you on how to do the thing that you're trying to do.

05:02 S1

I asked it recently to tell me how to delete a block of rows in a Microsoft word table. It told me exactly as an access trainer - and a shout out to Ken Baker, who used to do this for us, would tell you there are five steps step one, step two, step three, etc. It's fantastic.

05:24 S2

Yeah, it really is. And there are a couple of different ways of accessing it too. You can access it from the device that's running Jaws. You can go your Jaws key and Space followed by F1. Or you can actually if you want to look something up on your phone because you're not near the computer or you don't want to change focus, you can in any web browser - go to FS Companion I and access it from your phone or another computer or something like that.

05:53 S1

So it's a matter of fact. What I've done is put the shortcut to FS Companion I on my desktop. It's very easy to go to it that way at any time.

06:03 S2

Yeah. That's a that's a really good idea. There are also, as is often the case, a number of other enhancements. So there are some improvements in office applications. There's also some improvements with the new Outlook. And this is a little bit confusing Microsoft have done away with or are in the process of doing away with the old Windows Mail windows calendar, and they've amalgamated all of those into a new version of Outlook, which will eventually permeate through office 365 and so on as well. But for the moment, I think they're calling the office 365 version Outlook Classic. So there are some improvements there because a lot of people were finding the new outlook quite difficult to deal with. 

The other big one is some improvements in ePub files. So a lot of electronic books and so on come out in the ePub format. And there's a whole range of new navigation features for ePub documents. And this is just sort of the beginning. They do incrementally release updates throughout the cycle during the year. So usually between sort of October and July. So I think that we will continue to see some more enhancements throughout the the 2025 cycle.

07:22 S1

Any comments about Fusion and Zoomtext?

07:26 S2

Yes. So most of the improvements in Zoomtext are sort of under-the-hood improvements, if you like. They have made some changes to things like the dual monitor behavior. It used to put a sort of an artificial boundary, so that you knew when you'd changed from one monitor to another. That's now defaults to being off so that you can span your desktop across multiple monitors. They have also improved the sort of font smoothing and that type of thing in office applications. So yes, there are some improvements, there's some improved start up times and general performance improvements and those kinds of things. And again, I think we'll probably see a number of improvements throughout the the cycle with Zoomtext. 

Obviously with fusion being an amalgam of both products, you will get the Jaws improvements and the Zoomtext improvements. So you'll get things like PFS Companion if you're a Fusion user as well.

08:28 S1

If you're a regular user, you just need to go to the Help and check for updates, and you'll find out that these are available and you can download them. And off you go.

08:38 S2

That's right, that's right. And it's always a fairly seamless process. It generally brings all of your settings and things across. The only thing, if you do use any additional Jaws scripts, you may need to reinstall those. So if you use something like Lisa from Arjun Consulting or any of the other sort of freely available jaws scripts that are out there, you may need to reinstall those.

08:59 S1

So that was the Freedom Scientific or Vespero package of products. Jaws Fusion and Zoomtext upgrades came out last week. And let's talk about our own Aussie product, which is very popular around the world. From NV Access, NVDA.

09:19 S2

Yes. So they have this week released version 2020 - 4.4. So this is an incremental update and it is one that they recommend that everyone updates to. They have made some fairly significant improvements in access through Braille - particularly, things like word comments and those sorts of things. The ability to configure... you know, showing the things like font changes, style changes in Braille as well as using speech. So you can sort of configure those independently now, and the usual massive array of bug fixes and improvements. So definitely worth doing that. 

And if you are an NVDA user and you benefit from the product, it's also a nice thing to donate when you can as well. Because they are a Not For Profit. Their aim has always been to make the product free, but they do rely on grants and donations to keep developing it. So if you are a regular user of NVDA and you find it helpful, I would encourage you to donate and give our friends over here in Australia a bit of a helping hand.

10:32 S1

Yes, they've made terrific headway over the years there on many, many machines around the world. A busy week for Apple again.

10:41 S2

Yes. So we had the update of the Mac operating system, Sequoia to version 15.1. And we also saw an update to the iOS operating system for iPhones and iPads to 18.1. Now, unfortunately, here in Oz, we don't get Apple intelligence yet unless you set your region, I think to us. But we do get a couple of nice features, including the ability to record phone calls. If you're dealing with a business and you think they're going to give you, you know, perhaps a reservation number, or you want to have a record of the fact that you've registered a complaint or something like that. 

This is quite a handy feature. And I, we were talking about this off-air, weren't we, Stephen? That really given that every time you call a business, they tell you that your call may be recorded for coaching purposes. You should therefore feel comfortable to have the right to also record a call if you need to for note-taking or records purposes.

11:45 S1

And when you start the record process, there's an announcement so that everyone on the call can hear that it is being done.

11:50 S2

So that's right. The other thing that this feature offers is the ability to have a text summary generated - where it'll capture sort of the the essence of the phone call and provide you a summary of the salient points in text format. So that might be quite helpful as well. If you're conducting business over the phone and you... discuss a number of things. It saves you having to try and note, take or do that weird thing where you hold the phone against your shoulder and try and type. So... that's quite a useful feature as well.

12:22 S1

Any other things About 18.1? 

12:25 S2

For those that do decide to experiment with the Apple Intelligence feature, there are currently some accessibility issues with that in that if you have it, generate summaries of emails and those sorts of things, they aren't accessible with VoiceOver. So at the moment, the workaround is to copy that out into another document to make it accessible, which is certainly not ideal. And it is disappointing that at launch we don't have full access to this. I have had a couple of funny bugs with 18.1 with Braille screen input. That's where you type Braille on the screen, but I haven't worked out if that's just my particular setup or whether it's happening for other people. But a couple of people that I've asked haven't experienced it, so maybe I'm just lucky.

13:12 S1

So that's updates for iOS. Also for the operating system, for the watch, for the iPad and Sequoia, the Mac operating system.

13:22 S2

It's been a big week for Apple.

13:23 S1

This is a great place to go to to find out what's being discussed in the blindness community around Apple accessibility.

13:31 S2

It really is. And I was really pleased that it is now being supported by Be My Eyes. There was a concern that it might disappear when its founder, his health deteriorated and he needed to step back from it. It's really great that be my eyes have picked this up and are supporting the sort of ongoing development of content, but it's a great resource for you if you want to check out things like what's new in a particular version, what bugs they've found, that kind of thing. There are podcasts, there are demonstrations, there are forum posts where people can ask questions. So it really is a good resource for those of us who use Apple products extensively.

14:15 S1

The demo podcasts are fantastic, aren't they?

14:18 S2

They really are. Yes. Yeah.

14:19 S1

appleadvice.com ... Before we go, a reminder of where you can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program, all you need to do is go to VA radio.org/talking tech. VA radio.org/talking tech. 

14:38 S2

To write to the program you can email me, Damo - Damo dot McMorrow - m c m o r r o w - at Vision Australia dot org. And I really appreciate the feedback and the comments from those who have emailed me, so thank you very much.

14:54 S1

damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org ... This has been Talking Tech, with me has been Vision Australia's national Access technology manager Damo McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.