[stylist] Reading with JAWS and track changes

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

Allison,

I was a creative writing major so I pretty much wrote for four years
straight! Smile. In my program, my writing profs didn't use to track
changes, to my knowledge. With me, they inserted comments and
corrections directly in the text in an electronic copy. They used
asterisks or parantheses to note their comments. They also left comments
at the end of a manuscript as well. My classmates did the same thing for
me so they could comment and point out specific spots.

I asked profs in other classes, like lit and English, to do the same
thing with papers. It worked.

Then I took some journalism classes such as public relations writing and
public relations: working with the media, and the profs used track
changes to make comments. I had the same problem as you so requested
they not comment this way. They either followed the format mentioned
above, or in one case, the prof spent the time to go through things in
person. If you can't access comments a certain way, it's a reasonable
accommodation to request it be done differently. If you want to be the
best student possible, you need to access comments. To my knowledge, not
much can be done to make this accessible, but I'm no JAWS expert either.

Good luck.

Sincerely,
Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter
Read my blog at:
http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/
 
"History is not what happened; history is what was written down."
The Expected One- Kathleen McGowan

Message: 17
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:12:40 -0500
From: Allison Nastoff <anastoff at wi.rr.com>
To: Writer's Division Mailing List <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] Critiquing and editing with JAWS
Message-ID: <20.05.25941.54E7C9E4 at hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed

Speaking of JAWS, I have a question about reading with JAWS.  A 
lot of my professors insert comments using "track changer", I 
think it's called, but after some very confusing attempts to read 
their comments that ended with me just printing the essay out and 
asking a sighted person to read them, I try and remember to ask 
professors every year to just put all their comments at the end 
of a file or in the body of an e-mail message.  Does anyone else 
find track changer confusing, or is it just me? If it's not just 
me, is there a mode or somethst you can set where JAWS can read 
it in a less confusing way?
Allison Nastoff