[stylist] JAWS and Our Craft

Fri Mar 14 23:48:13 UTC 2014

Yeah! Happy pi day!
Donna

-----Original Message-----
From: stylist [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Homme, James
Sent: Friday, March 14, 2014 7:57 AM
To: Writer's Division Mailing List
Subject: Re: [stylist] JAWS and Our Craft

Hi Bill,
I've never used anything but a screen reader, but I benefit from listening
to what I write. I've read that writers should read their stuff aloud to
catch mistakes. Screen readers miss things like to, 2, and too, though. I
used to get caught on that by my manager. Now, I think, if you run grammar
check with spell check, Word tries to catch some of those issues.

Lately, two settings have helped me in the JAWS world. Right now, I am
forgetting where this is in older versions of JAWS. I would press INSERT+V
and look for capitalization, and look for something that says "Caps indicate
on." One of the choices has to do with line. I would set it to that choice.
This helps me catch capitalization errors as I read with DownArrow, line by
line. The second setting is to pick a different sound scheme. You can
temporarily do that with ALT+INSERT+S. According to my memory, the one I
pick is Classic Attributes. That tells me just the font characteristics,
such as bold, italic, and strike through. When I set that, JAWS tells me if
I make a mistake, such as leaving bold on too long and unintentionally
making something italic that I meant to make normal. Then I set it back the
way it was after I'm done editing, because in Word, JAWS keeps the scheme
the same when you close and open Word.

Oh my goodness. The date is 3.14, and someone brought in pie. I just totally
lost what I was going to say next.

Oh, OK. Here it is. If you follow the directions in the document I sent
about using styles, I would separately use INSERT+V to turn style names on
as you review for formatting. I like to do that separately, because if you
have style names and attributes on together, JAWS reads the attributes that
the styles create. For example, the Heading 1 style is bold. I don't care if
it is bold or whatever, so I would rather concentrate on the body of the
text when I turn attributes on, and on section titles and so on when I look
for formatting errors.

In Word, one of the styles is named "Bold," and another is named "Italic,"
so that might be confusing. You would just have to check your settings.

I can see that I need to organize these thoughts better. Sorry for rambling
so much.

Jim
This next thing might sound a little prejudice. Programmers suck at writing.
I'm proud that I have gone from hardly being able to string sentences
together to hopefully being somewhat clear. I hang around this group, hoping
that some of the good writing stuff rubs off. I'll never write novels, and
maybe I'll play with poetry a little, or get the courage to make a short
story, but I think I can write directions OK.

-----Original Message-----
From: stylist [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of William L
Houts
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2014 9:17 PM
To: Writer's Division Mailing List
Subject: [stylist] JAWS and Our Craft

Glancing over some recent messages concerning screen readers and writing, I
thought I'd pony up some experience of my own.  In general, my experience
with Jaws as I carry on with my second novel has been spectacular,
especially when considering that blindness itself is, to put it mildly,
somewhat sub-optimal.  I wrote my first novel using JAWS with the Eloquence
synthesizer  (I'm one of that screen reader's older customers --my serial
number is only five figures long).  And as I prepare to plunge into the last
third of my current book, I'm seeing that my writing has actually improved.
And I think that might be because writing with a screen reader forces the
writer to pay attention to each and every word in a sentence, and make
editorial decisions based on rock solid standards about things like run-on
sentences and the use of ten dollar words where two dollars would serve the
purpose just as admirably.  Also, nowadays I have no patience for adverbs
which clutter up my prose line.  Noun, verb phrase period, that's the way
many of my sentences go.  Well, no, actually that's a bit of a lie.  I write
a comparatively poetic prose line, but it's rooted, I think, in elementary
grammar, the exception being when I think a semicolon and dependent clause
might be called for.

Anyway, I'd like to  know how other folks look at their writing from a
technical perspective, and whether they feel that writing with a screen
reader has helped or harmed their craft.  Any takers?

--Bill

--
"Let's drink a toast now to who we really are."

           --Jane Siberry

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