[Blindmath] SPSS 19 and Windows 7 64 Bit Operating System

Tue Nov 22 21:26:40 UTC 2011

Hello,

First, let me thank Tim for his kind words re the R resources.

Second, I think it is past time that we held Freedom Scientific to account
for their failures with SPSS. I'm struggling to remember exactly when I
communicated with FS re SPSS access but its probably about ten years ago. At
that time I needed to do a particular analysis that was not available in
many other statistical software options. Ultimately, I had to write my own
code to get the job done without sighted assistance.

The problem I had was that the scripts that had been bundled with jaws, but
written by someone at the RNIB, were stale on the following release of SPSS.
FS accepted no responsibility as they were third party scripts. I now
suspect those scripts are an almost forgotten component of the access that
is now reaching mythical proportions.

I do know that some people have managed to get SPSS and jaws to work
together, but from what I've gathered this has depended on the combination
of the jaws version, the SPSS version, and the ability to get the access
bridge functioning.

It doesn't help that the search for SPSS on the FS home page leads the
unsuspecting into a false hope. The first item on the search list has a
bunch of questions and answers, and the ones that offend me the most are
"Q. Can I use SPSS with JAWS? A. Yes, many users are working with SPSS with
JAWS. However, even with the extensive work that has gone into the JAWS
scripts, there are areas that are difficult, and these are discussed below. 

Q. What versions of SPSS could I use? A. These notes cover version 10 and
11. "

Well first of all, as the subject line of this thread suggests the pages on
the FS site are antiquated to say the least. In my view they should be
replaced by a more recent assessment of  the interaction of jaws and SPSS. I
have just sent feedback to FS from the page quoted above. It was a simple
exercise and I recommend others send a message to FS too.

To FS's credit, they do note that the page is for the two versions of SPSS
only and give a date for the information (2002). I think the consumer has an
obligation to realise that there is likely a deal of change between versions
11 and 19.

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Tim in 't Veld
Sent: Wednesday, 23 November 2011 4:37 a.m.
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] SPSS 19 and Windows 7 64 Bit Operating System

Ian,
I  faced this situation back in august / September and you can find the
discussion about it in the list archives.
To summarize: no it's not worth trying to get this to work. I wasted many
hours, trying many SPSS versions on different Windows versions, and never
got significant speech output with either Jaws or NVDA. According to the
documentation SPSS is accessible with Jaws, but even the most optimistic
reports I've seen talk of severely limited functionality. In my experience,
there's no significant functionality even though I'm sure I had the access
bridge configured properly.

In my course I ended up letting my fellow team members do SPSS (it was only
a small part of a research methods course). If you're doing a statistics
course, go with R. This works well and there's the following excellent
manual for it:
http://r-resources.massey.ac.nz <http://r-resources.massey.ac.nz> (heading
"LURN for blind R users")

It is a shame that IBM claims that SPSS is accessible with Jaws, this is
simply not true and this claim causes blind students to waste a lot of time
trying to get something to work which in reality can't work. I feel we
should try to get IBM's attention to this issue through some collective
initiative.

Good luck,
Tim

On 11/22/2011 3:44 PM, Ian Perrault wrote:
> Hi
> I've heard from some people that SPSS 19 works with JAWS on a 64-bit
operating system, and I've heard that some don't. I currently have SPSS 19
installed, and JAWS just freezes. Is it even worth going through installing
and configuring the Java Access bridge, or does it not even work when that's
done? Hopefully IBM will contact Freedom Scientiffic for ideas to make the
program accessible, and I told the customer service person from IBM that
idea so hopefully they follow through. At my graduate school they require
SPSS and I'm actually taking some time off until they make SPSS 100 percent
accessible.
> Ian
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