[Trainer-talk] First Impressions of Window-Eyes 9.0 Beta 1

[David Goldfield]

As I had a bit more time today than I originally anticipated, I decided
to go to http://www.gwmicro.com/beta and give the new Window-Eyes beta a
little test spin.
The Web site contains a lot of info about what's been added and changed
and has a few cautionary notes. First, you need to have Window-Eyes 8.0
or later installed for this upgrade to successfully install. Second, it
does not officially support Windows XP. Interestingly, they don't say
that XP support was removed, only that it wasn't tested for XP.
Apparently, it may install and run on XP but, as it hasn't been tested,
they warn that people who choose to run it on XP do so at their own
risk. The installation was straightforward, although it did not update
all of the built-in set files and some of them were reported as being
out of date but I was able to go into the Factory settings from the
Window-Eyes file menu and reinstall the ones reported as being outdated.
If you're used to WE8.x, the 9.x control panel is identical. While I'd
like to see a search feature as we have in the JAWS settings center and
quick settings dialogs, I really like the Window-Eyes control panel. I
like the treeview interface and how items can individually be set to be
either global or application specific. I'm not saying that it's a better
interface than JAWS but it's different and I happen to like this
particular implementation.
What I really took a look at was their beefed-up Web support. While I
did find a few bugs, which I've already begun reporting, it's definitely
a vast improvement over the previous version and is, if you'll forgive
my saying so, very JAWS-like. I don't normally like to place one screen
reader above all others as a type of gold standard but I have to give
JAWS credit where it's due. While NVDA is very similar to JAWS in many
respects, JAWS has done quite a bit to perfect Web access as much as a
screen reader can do such a thing. While NVDA and JAWS have virtually
the same navigation commands, no pun intended, JAWS does take things to
a higher level with features like PlaceMarkers, Flexible Web and the
ability to wrap navigation by being able to press a key and wrap back
from the bottom up, such as pressing the letter H at the bottom of a
page to move to the first heading at the top.
Window-Eyes 9.0 Beta 1 now has the same type of navigation wrapping. It
presents messages about where you're located more efficiently than it
did in 8.x and, as I said, feels very JAWS-like. I think Window-Eyes
users are going to enjoy these new capabilities.
There are some negatives to report but bear in mind that this is a beta,
meaning that it's still not a final release. Sadly, and somewhat
surprisingly, one of the big JAWS-like features, placemarkers, has been
removed. As I don't use placemarkers this wouldn't particularly bother
me but Window-Eyes users who used this feature may be a bit
disappointed. My guess is that its removal is due to how Window-Eyes now
accesses the Web, which is very different from previous versions but
this is merely a guess. Window-Eyes doesn't place the Web page in a
static buffer; they say that you're arrowing through the Web page
practically in real time, even if something in the page changes. They've
added the ability to use the f8 key to block text to copy it to the
clipboard. While this is quite nice, it is not possible to use the shift
key and navigation keys to highlight or select text on a Web page as you
can with Word and as you could in previous Window-Eyes versions. I
actually wish they'd expand this by allowing you to block text in any
text editable area, negating the need to use the familiar but clunky
method of using shift with navigation commands.
I really didn't have time to test the other features but other features
there are, including Quickbooks support, improved Skype support,
preliminary support for Windows 10, improved Outlook support and many
other bug fixes and improvements from the 8.x branch. I think that
Window-Eyes users will like what's been added and I'm looking forward to
hearing comments from them as more people use this new version.

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      David Goldfield,
Assistive Technology specialist
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