[blindlaw] Update on Jaws and Track Changes

Angela Matney amatney at loeb.com
Wed Dec 19 18:35:59 UTC 2018


I wanted to supplement this thread with an example from this afternoon. I've been tasked with reviewing certain edits to an agreement between our client and a vendor located in Germany. The document contains both English and German text, and the bulk of it is presented as a table in MS Word with three columns (numbering, English text, and German text) and 242 rows. I used the JAWS command to list revisions. JAWS seemed to process this for a few seconds, but ultimately, both JAWS and MS-Word crashed and had to restart. 

I used the "reject all changes" and "accept all changes" commands in Word to produce versions with and without the edits. Unfortunately, I have trouble with the most recent iteration of our document comparison software, even though its output is accessible. I sent these two documents to my assistant, who will prepare a blackline for me that does not make use of track-changes. (I could also have asked her to reject and accept the changes to produce the baseline documents, but I chose to do that part of it myself.)

While I don't typically deal with documents that have text in more than one language, or documents that are almost completely in tabular format, this is not the first time, and it won't be the last. Reliable support for track-changes in complex documents would be a game-changer for me.

Angie


-----Original Message-----
From: Laura Wolk <laura.wolk at gmail.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2018 10:44 AM
To: Angela Matney <amatney at loeb.com>
Cc: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>; slabarre at labarrelaw.com; tim at timeldermusic.com
Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Update on Jaws and Track Changes

This email originated from outside of Loeb's Network.

OK, this is great.

Scott, let me know if you have trouble following all of this if you
are planning to outline in the letter our various issues with Jaws.
As I see it, the problem is that Jaws ostensibly provides two ways of
obtaining track change info.  Both are woefully inaccurate and
inadequate.  It'd be fine with me if they scrapped one or the other
method, so long as **one**  of them worked reliably.

Rahul, I'd love it if you could generate a document, as I have a very
busy few weeks coming up (which, incidentally, will involve many, many
trackchanges. Ha!). If you are done with finals, perhaps you could
generate a doc and then angie and I could test it as well to see what
we come up with.  It'd be great if someone with Office 365 could hop
on this as well, so that FS can't respond by saying "we're putting all
our efforts into making Office 365 work properly, and it's too bad for
the rest of you."

Angie, perhaps under a different thread heading, you could let us know
how you use comparison software as a work-around to some of this.  I
have access to workshare compare, for instance, and if you have ways
of using that to alleviate some of this headache, I'd love to hear
them.  And perhaps in the short-term, we could ask for that program as
an accommodation (yes, yes, I know this isn't ideal, but we also must
get our work done).

Lastly, Rahul, I'll write you off-list about your PDF issues so that I
can be in touch with FS.

Thanks, everyone! This is the teamwork I love so much that the NFB
provides. Anyone else with input, please voice your opinions.

Laura



On 12/19/18, Angela Matney <amatney at loeb.com> wrote:
> 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
> Los Angeles | New York | Chicago | Nashville | Washington, DC | San
> Francisco | Beijing | Hong Kong | www.loeb.com
>
> -----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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