[blindlaw] Update on Jaws and Track Changes

Rahul Bajaj rahul.bajaj1038 at gmail.com
Wed Dec 19 14:58:21 UTC 2018


Hi Everyone,

1. First of all, let me say how glad I am that this issue is getting
the much-needed attention that it deserves. Until a few months ago,
Freedom Scientific simply refused to acknowledge that the sporadic
functioning of the virtual viewer for accessing a list of revisions
was an issue which they could address. It was only after some of us
reached out to them that we were able to move past the point where
JAWS would simply say that there were no revisions in a document when
the number of revisions exceeded 100. So I am confident that we will
be able to get all outstanding issues resolved if we are able to make
good the claim that the inaccessibility of track changes impacts a
critical mass of blind people.

2. I echo the challenges that Laura voiced in using footnotes - the
general sluggishness of JAWS, coupled with the fact that it is very
difficult to edit them or to ascertain their number.
3. One significant issue which I have been grappling with for the last
3-4 months is the inaccessibility of PDF documents with JAWS - when
used with Adobe Reader, JAWS throws you back by many pages if you try
going up a line and doesn't enable you to read a document in a
para-wise fashion. All that you can realistically do, except for using
the OCR feature or converting the document into Word, is to use the
say-all command or navigate the document line-by-line, both of which
are highly inefficient ways to read a document. I reached out to
Vispero about this, and they attributed the problem to Adobe. I have
been communicating with Adobe accessibility team for the last month,
but they haven't really taken this issue seriously, as it appears that
not many people have reported the issue. So I wholeheartedly agree
with Laura when she says that we need to act collectively on these
issues, if we want to be taken seriously.

I am happy to help in whatever way I can, including by way of
supplying a sample document with many revisions in it.

Best,
Rahul







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On 19/12/2018, Laura Wolk via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> Scott,
>
> I appreciate this so much.  Please let me know if you'd like any
> assistance.  Regarding what to put in the letter, do other people also
> have the experience, as I do, that Jaws will read both the original
> and edited text when you're reading through a document?  This didn't
> used to happen to me, but now it does.  I'm using Office 2016, Windows
> 10, and hte latest version of Jaws.  Additionally, I find that Jaws
> doesn't always announce "revision" when it detects track changes.  Can
> others confirm?  This has the end result that relying on the file's
> contents rather than the generated list also does not give the user
> accurate information unless he engages in rather cumbersome
> character-by-character analysis.
>
> For the record, I did a bit more poking around on my file.  I tried
> hitting ctrl+end as Rahul suggested, and that actually turned out
> fewer revisions.  The list also only went to page 9 of a 25-page
> document.  It gave me 154 revisions, when there were probably closer
> to 400, and of course, as always, absolutely no info from footnotes.
>
> If no one else is able to assist, I will attempt to generate a file
> with a few hundred track changes for FS to work with.  Perhaps this
> could accompany the NABL letter.
>
> Laura
>
> On 12/18/18, Scott C. LaBarre <slabarre at labarrelaw.com> wrote:
>> Hello everyone, I've been following this thread with great interest and I
>> am
>> going to work on a letter from the National Association of Blind Lawyers
>> to
>> VFO about this issue and will likely also write MicroSoft.  Let me also
>> take
>> this moment to wish all of you the very best  of this holiday season.
>>
>> Best,
>> Scott
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: BlindLaw <blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Tim Elder via
>> BlindLaw
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2018 5:01 PM
>> To: 'Laura Wolk' <laura.wolk at gmail.com>
>> Cc: tim at timeldermusic.com; 'Blind Law Mailing List' <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
>> Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Update on Jaws and Track Changes
>>
>> Understood.  I forwarded this to a contact at Microsoft to see if they
>> could
>> do anything while we wait on whatever the developer of JAWS is calling
>> itself these days.  I've also been slowly learning NVDA to diversify my
>> technology tools.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Laura Wolk <laura.wolk at gmail.com>
>> Sent: Monday, December 17, 2018 6:25 PM
>> To: tim at timeldermusic.com
>> Cc: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
>> Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Update on Jaws and Track Changes
>>
>> Nope. Not an option. And though 2010 didn't crash nearly as much as the
>> newer versions, it still couldn't handle documents with more than a
>> hundred
>> or so revisions. Which, you know, is basically every round of editing a
>> brief or large filing of any kind. Using 2010 was my work-around for 6
>> years. But I'm really getting fed up. It'd be great if we all colectively
>> could put pressure on Jaws to actually give us the tools we need to
>> succeed
>> and be on equal footing with our peers.
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>>> On Dec 17, 2018, at 8:05 PM, <tim at timeldermusic.com>
>> <tim at timeldermusic.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Track changes in newly created Word documents still work reliably in
>> Office 2010 if using an older machine for this kind of task is an option.
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Laura Wolk <laura.wolk at gmail.com>
>>> Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2018 11:22 AM
>>> To: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
>>> Subject: [blindlaw] Update on Jaws and Track Changes
>>>
>>> I'm providing an update to this topic, as it generated a lot of
>>> traffic
>> and I'd love to spare another lawyer the risk of relying on this $1,000
>> disappointment to his professional detriment.
>>>
>>> Jaws still does not announce the correct number of revisions.
>>> Instead, after taking up to 30 or 45 seconds sometimes, it will
>>> announce a
>> much larger number that still isn't always accurate.  This is actually
>> worse
>> than when it simply said there were no revisions to display, since we all
>> knew that was incorrect.  now it gives the false sense of security that
>> you
>> have, in fact, looked at every revision when there could be a hundred
>> more
>> that are not displaying that you haven't reviewed.  note that though this
>> isn't a terrible inconvenience when you are integrating all changes into
>> one
>> draft from only one document, it is a huge problem if you are receiving
>> multiple streams of edits from multiple sources that you are trying to
>> accept/reject and then compile into one final draft.  So be forewarned,
>> Jaws
>> is sstill failing abysmally at providing us with the elementary tools
>> needed
>> in 2018 to maintain "Job access."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>>
>
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