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

Wed Nov 23 15:52:43 UTC 2011

The Access Bridge is a wonderful example of how not to do accessibility.
The latest version of Access Bridge is more or less impossible for normal
humans to install.  It does not have an installation routine, and one needs
to Google to find instructions on how to install it.  Unfortunately the
installation instructions are incorrect, because they ask one to put some
files into a folder that does not exist.  At least not on my computer.  So I
don't have Access Bridge installed and therefore cannot use any Swing java
programs, including Open Office.  What a mess.

Since Sun was sold, nobody seems to take enough ownership of Access Bridge
to make it work.  So blame Oracle while we are fixing blame for things.

John Gardner

-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Steve Jacobson
Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 8:09 PM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] SPSS 19 and Windows 7 64 Bit Operating System

While I don't disagree with you that Freedom Scientifics web pages are out
of date, IBM bears some responsibility for 
having a pattern of placing a lot of the burden of accessibility on the
screen readers, and a number of entities are 
responsible for glossing over all of the problems that have existed for the
past ten years at least with making Java apps 
work through the Access bridge.  

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:26:40 +1300, Jonathan Godfrey wrote:

>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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