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

[graham.hardy at gmail.com]

I do find that in recent versions of Word the traditional spell checker, normally accessed with F7, has become incredibly inefficient for everyday use. I haven't tried it recently, so I'm not sure if that is the use case you're referring to when you say there is a lag. There are a few alternatives. One is that, in JAWS, with the navigation quick key layer enabled with JAWSKey+Z, you can press M and Shift+M to move among the spelling errors in your document. I will say that, in large documents, I've known this command to take a few seconds to find the next or previous error, which I also find irritating. Again, you might be referring to this when you say there is a lag. When you use that command to find a spelling error, the cursor is positioned at the beginning of the word detected as an error and you can usually get spelling suggestions by pressing the Applications key. The last is a word shortcut, Alt+F7. I tend to like this as it is the quickest at finding the next error. When you use this method, you will land on a menu of suggestions with various other options. Again, this is similar to but less cluttered than the user interface in the F7 editor. The nice thing is that you can press Escape once you land on an error, whereupon you are back in the main document window with the text of the error selected.

I haven't investigated other word processors but you could try LibreOffice and see how that is.

By way of encouragement, shortly before writing the bar exam, I installed a JAWS update which caused JAWS to stop reading in Word except with a limited set of editing keys. I had not saved the installer for the previous build and couldn't get technical support to agree to give me access to an earlier version, so I, too, had to install and use LibreOffice. Needless to say I can understand the stress of that inefficiency in the process!

Graham

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindLaw <blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Maura Kutnyak via BlindLaw
Sent: Saturday, July 22, 2023 5:47 AM
To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
Cc: Maura Kutnyak <maurakutnyak at gmail.com>
Subject: [blindLaw] Terrible lag when using spellcheck in word with JAWS

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
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