[blindlaw] Update on Jaws and Track Changes

Angela Matney amatney at loeb.com
Wed Dec 19 15:18:46 UTC 2018


Laura,

I have had similar experiences. JAWS often reads both the original and revised text and fails to announce some revisions. I have problems with it reliably announcing comments as well. I'm able to use our document comparison software as a work-around some of the time, but there are many situations where being able to use track-changes would be helpful, and our software doesn't help with the comments issue.

Frankly, I wish that JAWS would not try to "interpret" track-changes to the extent it does. I think I could be more efficient if it would just read changes in the font, attribute and color and let me figure things out. We can produce documents like this with our document management software. When JAWS tells me that something is blue and double-underlined, for example, I recognize it as an insertion. 

If you would like some help generating a file with lots of revisions, or if you'd like me to test something you generate, let me know. 

Angie


Angela Matney, CIPP/US
Attorney at Law
Admitted only in Virginia

901 New York Avenue NW, Suite 300 East | Washington, DC 20001
Direct Dial: 202.618.5038 | Fax: 202.403.3407 | E-mail: amatney at loeb.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: BlindLaw <blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Laura Wolk via BlindLaw
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2018 8:13 AM
To: slabarre at labarrelaw.com
Cc: Laura Wolk <laura.wolk at gmail.com>; tim at timeldermusic.com; Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Update on Jaws and Track Changes

This email originated from outside of Loeb's Network.

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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