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

Fri Nov 28 16:14:10 UTC 2014

I recently went through Windoweyes training, with the new beta on Windows 8. 
What I was most impressed with was the seamless responsiveness.  this had 
always been missing in my previous encounters with WindowEyes.  I would 
guess that maybe less than 5% of Jaws users will take advantage of Flexible 
Web.  Especially newer computer users. If WindowEyes can up it's game on 
Office support, then they are looking very competitive.  If all of these 
factors help to bring down prices, well that's all to the good.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Wayne Merritt via Trainer-talk
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2014 7:30 AM
To: David Goldfield ; List for teachers and trainers of adaptive technology
Subject: Re: [Trainer-talk] First Impressions of Window-Eyes 9.0 Beta 1

David,
Thanks for your initial write-up of the new Window-Eyes 9 beta. I have
been a long time JAWS user, since about 1999, and consider myself an
intermediate computer/web user. I was a little pleased to hear that
Widnow-Eyes doesn't appear to have a flexible Web like feature like
JAWS does. I think that while the Flexible Web has some uses in
certain circumstances, it is on the growing list of features that have
been added in recent years which can take someone away from the
importance of navigating a web page and working from the page itself.
Granted, many sites have become busier in the last few years,
especially news oriented sites. I still think that as much as someone
can navigate on the web page itself and not take anything away from
that page, that they are not short-changing themselves with
experiences outside of how a page actually looks. The quick navigation
keys can definitely help with a page's navigation, but when you throw
in things like Flexible Web, you are creating an alternate reality
from how the page looks, and run the risk of cutting out information
which may be important from that alternate reality. Put another way,
consider Research It from JAWS. A very useful feature to be sure, but
many of the things that you can look up within Research It, can be
easily searched for on a site like Google or Bing. I'm pretty sure you
can even put a tracking number for FedEx or UPS in Google and get
current shipping information. Hopefully this makes some sort of sense.

The other feature that I'm glad to see in Window Eyes is using the F8
key to start and stop a block of text selection. JAWS has a similar
sequence of commands to select a large area of text, but with JAWS, it
is a sequence of several keystrokes. Where with the F8 key, according
to the podcast demosntration I heard, you press it once to start and
again when you are at a stopping point. And then a dialog box pops up
with options to copy/cut the text to the clipboard; brilliant. If they
would take it one step further and allow you to use the clipboard
commands instead of going into a dialog that might be better, but I'm
not sure. The dialog will probably suit most people. At any rate, I
often use the multi-step selection methods with JAWS to select text in
Gmail messages on the web and on other web pages.

Best,
Wayne Merritt

On 11/26/14, David Goldfield via Trainer-talk <trainer-talk at nfbnet.org> 
wrote:
> 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.
>
> --
>
> --
>
>       David Goldfield,
> Assistive Technology specialist
> ---------
>
> Visit my Web site
> http://www.davidgoldfield.info
>
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