[gui-talk] JAWS and MAGic running on a network

[Susan Kelly]

I am a county public defender.  Virtually all of the agencies and departments in our county are on the same overriding network, which supplies access to all of our work programs.  Certain group security policies, while in no way technically necessary to the function of the network, are nevertheless applied county-wide and will not be adjusted for any user, for any reason.  Many of these group policies are affecting the performance of my accessibility software (JAWS and MAGic) to the point that certain programs (mainly Word and to a lesser degree, Outlook) are unusable, stalling and crashing on a regular basis.  When they do run, Word in particular is behaving very strangely.  Other programs, such as the internet, are also subject to the same random error that causes the crashes.  The accessibility programs also stop and re-start themselves with frightening regularity.  Nothing is wrong with those programs, which have been individually tested and re-loaded on numerous occasions.  The computer runs normally if those programs are turned off, but of course, someone else has to do that testing as I am unable to do anything other than type (none too accurately without JAWS) if they are turned off.  Finally, I have none of these issues when I am running the same documents and programs on either my own personal laptop or my own personal iPad.

Does anyone have any ideas that we can offer the IT folks who are running the latest investigation into this mess?