[nfbcs] A useful trick

[Steve Jacobson]

Jim,

In my experience it doesn't generally cause a problem to run two screen readers, especially if you are running as one of them Narrator or NVDA which are 
less invasive.  In fact, I have run narrator before to see what was going on when I lost speach with Window-Eyes to see the error that was generated.  I 
have even accidentally run both Window-Eyes and Narrator together and they both worked fine, except of course that I had two different voices telling me 
the same thing in slightly different ways.  Of course if one looses speech because of a sound card issue, this won't work.  This was less possible before the 
display chaining implementation that most screen readers use now with their display drivers under Windows XP.  I don't think that NVDA or Narrator use 
display or mirror drivers at all, though, which makes them good candidates to get one out of a jam.  Obviously, if one can shut down and restart their screen 
reader, that's going to be the best solution.  In my mind, though, bringing up a second screen reader and thereby doing a normal shutdown is a far better 
approach than forcing a shutdown.  There probably could be problems running two screen readers before Windows XP, I'm not sure of that, and there might 
also be a problem if both screen readers used the same synthesizer, so there are probably cases when one could run into problems.  Still, it is a strategy that 
works sometimes.

On Fri, 14 Jan 2011 07:00:07 -0800, Jim Barbour wrote:

>Hey Steve,

>I suspect it causes much unhappiness if two screen readers
>are running at the same time, so either way you'd need to make sure
>that JAWS was shut down before trying to bring up either NVDA or
>another JAWS session.

>Take Care,

>Jim

>On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 08:46:47AM -0600, Steve Jacobson wrote:
>> The difference I see is that if you have lost speech on a screen reader such as JFW, you don't know if it is still running or not.  The shortcut key 
generally 
>> won't do a thing if JFW has gone silent but is still running.  I'm not sure, though, if there is an advantage to this over putting NVDA on the computer and 
>> assigning a shortcut to it.
>> 
>> Best regards,
>> 
>> Steve Jacobson
>> 
>> On Fri, 14 Jan 2011 05:31:04 -0800, Jim Barbour wrote:
>> 
>> >Hey Tracy,
>> 
>> >How is this different than simply assigning a shortcut key to JAWS so
>> >you can restart JAWS from the keyboard when it craps out?
>> 
>> >Thanks,
>> 
>> >Jim
>> 
>> >On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 08:24:39AM -0500, Tracy Carcione wrote:
>> >> Lately, Jaws has been getting stuck or shutting down unexpectedly, leaving
>> >> me with no idea what's happening.  But, following instructions on the NVDA
>> >> website, I put NVDA on a flash drive with autolauncher.  When Jaws craps
>> >> out, I plug in my NVDA drive, and in a few seconds I have speech again and
>> >> can figure out what the problem is.  I'm finding it very handy, and
>> >> thought I'd share.
>> >> Tracy
>> >> 
>> >> 
>> >> 
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>> 
>> 
>> 
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