[blindLaw] Terrible lag when using spellcheck in word with JAWS

[Maura Kutnyak]

Hi folks,

Has anyone else encountered a lag in spellcheck when using jaws? I find that the editor pain is generally a bit finicky but recently, it’s gotten infuriatingly slow. This is especially upsetting for me with the bar exam next week.

Does anyone know of a software fix that won’t interfere with my ability to use the materials provided by the New York board? Everything they’re giving me is formatted in word. But perhaps there is a different text editing program I could use for composing answers and editing, where the spellcheck feature is much more simple?

I’m not happy to be thinking about these issues right now. I in advertently fell down this rabbit hole when my husband performed some updates that Dell proposed on my laptop, which essentially broke it. So now I’ve had to transfer to a different device where the lag actually crashed jaws once. 

Now, a brief rant, why exactly do blind people have to source  their own helpdesk/assemble a ragtag team of IT experts, to troubleshoot these types of things? Shouldn’t the assistive tech be carefully designed so that it works with ubiquitous software such as the office sweet?  Or is it the hardware that I should be railing against?

Finally, I’ve already tinkered with NVDA a bit, and it seems to lag less, but it still does slow down over time.

Thanks very much for any time or brain Power you have to share.

Warmly,

Maura