The suggestions provided here are based on my experience of using a windows XP system. I have never used Vista. When I bought my new PC I paid an extra £120 to have Vista removed and XP Pro installed. Similarly I un-installed Office 2007 and re-installed Office 2003. I have never had cause to regret these steps as my XP has been as solid as a rock and works fine. All the software and hardware indeed works fine. Recently I investigated buying the revolutionary EyePal Scanner and read that Vista still could not support this as well as XP. I read with sympathy the frustrations of those grappling with Vista and cannot offer much advice here.
Even for XP users there is a health warning here. These techniques have worked for me and others but computers come in a bewildering array of configurations and can defy logic. What works fine on one system will inexplicably not work on another seemingly identical setup. With that understanding I provide advice here. Nothing should go wrong with your PC but I cannot guarantee anything. None of the steps I describe below have harmed any PC setup as far as I know but in the end the only real way of avoiding risk to a PC is to do nothing at all to its configuration and setup. If you take this approach you will simply have to live with annoyances and inefficiencies.
It
is quite annoying for a screen reader user when their ISP edits their
installation of Internet Explorer to advertise their name. This may say
something like Internet Explorer provided by
Wannadoo. Sometimes the advert
is installed by your hardware manufacturer. This means every time IE loads you
hear the title of the page then Internet Explorer followed by the advert. As I
use the Internet all day for work and study the last thing I want to hear on
every page that loads is this advert.
If
like me you want to remove this annoying advert, open the command
Prompt
and type the following:
rundll32
iedkcs32.dll, Clear
If
this does not work try copying and pasting the line to eliminate typing errors.
This
should clear the advert and reduce the stress of work just a tiny fraction.
For
optimal navigation with a screen reader you should always have your folders set
to either list or detailed view. This will simply allow you to navigate down
all the files in a folder in a logical order. One of the frustrating things
though is that a crucial part of the Windows environment is the Desktop. This
is always set to icon view and is consequently confusing to navigate if you do
not have sight.
The
answer to this problem is to set a shortcut to the Desktop on the actual
Desktop. You might think that Windows will not allow you to do this but you
can. Simply follow these steps.
1.
Press Windows key plus E to open the Explorer window.
Press
home to navigate to the Desktop in Explorer view and press space to make sure
you have the Desktop folder selected.
Press
Control plus C to copy this folder.
Press
alt plus F4 to close the Explorer window.
Press
Windows key plus D to go to the desktop.
Press
F5 to make sure that no icon is selected.
Press
the application key or shift F10 to open a context menu.
From
this menu press paste shortcut, this will create a shortcut to the Desktop on
the desktop.
Navigate
to this shortcut and press alt plus enter to enter the properties of this
shortcut.
In
the short cut key press Control plus alt plus D to set this as a shortcut key.
(If you have this assigned to another program then you will have to select
another key combination.
Tab
down to the combo box on window type and make shore that this is set to
maximised.
Press
OK to close.
Now
pressing control plus alt plus D at any time should open a fully accessible
version of the Desktop which you can navigate easily.
A
slightly freaky consequence of this is that you will find the desktop in this
folder also. Clicking on this will take
you into another version of the desktop where again there is a shortcut to the
desktop. You can click your way deeper into a circular investigation of the
Desktop ad infinitum. It is a bit like sighted people looking at 2 mirrors
facing each other. The mirror images stretch away into infinity.
Of
course you will have to have the icons set to either list or detail view for
this to work. Set this option under the view menu.
One
of the great aspects of the windows system is the plug and play nature of USB
devices. Sometimes this goes wrong though and Windows will become confused
about devices. It may decide that it will not recognise the hardware.
If
you have this problem, first of all try the hardware in another USB port.
If
this does not solve the problem try the hardware in another PC to check if this
is really a hardware failure.
If
the device is recognised OK in another PC you may have to reset your USB driver
in order for this to be recognised properly.
To
do this
Unplug
all your USB devices with the exception of your keyboard and mouse if you use
one.
Go
to Control Panel and then open the System applet.
Pres
control tab until you hear hardware.
Press
tab until you hear Device Manager. Press space to open this.
Press
tab once to go into a tree view of devices.
You
need to cursor down until you hear Universal Serial Bus controllers.
Press
the right cursor key to open this view.
You
now need to find the core USB driver for your PC. This may be named after your
processor. On my PC this driver is called
Intel(R)
82801G (ICH7 Family) USB Universal Host
Highlight
this line and press the delete key.
Confirm
that you want to delete the driver. Windows will immediately start to
re-install it.
After
a few seconds Windows will recognise your keyboard and mouse.
Exit
device manager and restart your windows.
After
windows have completely reloaded start to plug in your USB devices one by one. As
you would have cleared the windows database of devices there is a chance that
any problems will now disappear as windows re-constructs it USB device
database.
If
this does not work and your hardware is not faulty then I am afraid a system
restore or windows re-install is indicated.
We
all nowadays plug a variety of storage devices into windows. This may be a USB
Pen, an external hard drive, mp3 player or even an external CD/DVD drive. The
drive letter allocated to a device can therefore change. This can be very
inconvenient for a number of tasks that you may have set to automatically run
expecting a device to be on a particular drive letter. This may be a scheduled
backup for example.
To
reassign Drive letters you need to have administration rights on your PC.
Providing you have this then go to Control Panel and select Administrative
Tools.
You
now need to cursor down to computer management and press enter.
You
should cursor down now until you hear Disk Management.
Tab
across into the list of drives and select the one you want to change the letter
for.
Press
alt plus A to open the Actions menu.
Cursor
down until you hears all tasks.
From
the All Tasks sub menu select change drive letter.
In
this dialogue box you can nominate a different drive letter by cursoring down
through a combo box which will provide a list of available drives.
Press
ok to exit this.
You
can only change one drive letter at a time so if you are trying to swap 2 drive
letters you will have to run this multiple time to get the desired
results. To swap drive letters you will
have to assign a temporary drive letter like X to one drive to free up this
drive letter to assign to the other drive. You can only assign drive letters
which are not being actually used.
This
tip was provided to me by Stephen Griffith of the RNIB. I provide it here as it
has transformed the usefulness of my copy of the Outlook calendar. The problem
with Outlook and Jaws is that although you can browse by date through the
scheduler it will only read the date and not the day the date falls on. Sighted
users can see the relevant day at the top this can be very inconvenient when
trying to set up appointments when you have no real idea what day they are
falling on.
I
reproduce the advice given to me below.
David,
Here
are three suggestions:
1.
Reading the day is upset by having the Task Pad on the screen, so make sure it
is turned off - it's in the View menu.
2.
On some PCs, the following change to a Windows setting allows JAWS to read the
day.
Open
the Start Menu, go into the Settings submenu and choose Control Panel.
Press
R to jump to "Regional and Language Options", and press Enter to open
a dialogue.
Tab
to a "Standard and formats Customize" button and press Enter to open
a further dialogue box.
Control
+ Tab to the Date page, and then Tab to the Long date format and change it to:
<dddd, dd MMMM yyyy>
Both
the number of characters and their case are important in the format, so make
sure it's right!
Once
you have typed this in, you can Tab to the OK button and press it, then Tab to
another OK button and press it, and then close the Control Panel. You might
need to stop and start Outlook before the change takes effect. Now when you
move from day to day with LeftArrow and RightArrow, JAWS should give you the
day name as well as the date.
Beware
that this change can cause JAWS' behaviour in reading out day and date
information to deteriorate even further, so you may have to undo the setting
change to get it back.
3.
Remember that when you press Control + G, it gives the first three letters of the
day along with the date of the current day. So for your example, you could go
to the calendar, press Control + G and type in
11/2/08
Enter to jump to the day you're interested in, then press Control + G again to
get the day information and press Escape to get rid of the dialogue once you
have it.
Steve
This
tip is provided in the Low Cost Assistive technology page but it is so
important for people using OCR to scan and read I reproduce this here also.
If
you have a copy of Microsoft Office you may not realise that you have an
extremely high performing OCR engine. Before I started my Masters degree I
decided I wanted to invest in the best scanner and OCR software available. I
bought a fantastic scanner from Trade
Scanners which although costing over £600 has proved to be absolutely
invaluable. I phoned Trade Scanners to
ask them to sell me their best OCR product, fully expecting to spend a few more
hundred pounds. The guy on the help desk knew my circumstances, hesitated and
then confessed that none of the commercial products could outperform the OCR
which came with Microsoft Office. They did not normally reveal this as they had
software at £600 they could sell me but I think he saw me as a special case and
he felt too guilty to take advantage and complete this sale.
He
was absolutely right. I have subsequently used a number of OCR products
including Kurzweil, Omnipage and Textbridge. None of these approach the
performance of Microsoft Document Imaging for basic OCR. Only Omnipage
outperforms the Microsoft product in one respect. Omnipage is the best software
I have found for the scanning of tables. I now normally use a support worker to
separately scan tables. Using Omnipage
is better than Kurzweil at scanning tables and cost about £20 on EBay as
opposed to the £600 of Kurzweil.
Basically if you get offered Kurzweil free, as part of a DSA or Access
to Work assessment then OK. Otherwise do not waste your money.
You
will find Microsoft Document Scanning buried under the Tools menu of Microsoft
Office in the start Menu. There is a little setting up you should do before you
start scanning. I recommend that you go into scanner options and check the tick
box which says use scanner driver. If, like mine, your scanner is duplex then
let this be sorted out by the native scanner driver and ignore any tick boxes
in the Microsoft settings which refer to the source paper being double sided.
After
this simply press scan and let it do the business. After scanning this
document, Microsoft Document Imaging will open a tiff file of your scan. You
simply go to the Tools menu and select the send text to word option. A dialogue
box will open asking you if you want to send all pages. Press enter to confirm
this and Word will open with your scanned text. I have wasted time scanning
with Kurzweil on various settings only having to resort to returning to this
software to make my books readable. The only annoying thing about this program
is that it creates an htm document in Word. I normally convert this by saving
as a rich text file as my Victor Reader Stream can read these directly. As Jaws
also has problems reading certain fonts I normally convert the entire document
to Arial 12 font as well. However this is quickly done. Jaws also reads better
in normal as opposed to web layout.
The
final powerful feature of this software is that you can use it as a virtual
printer to make readable documents that are other wise completely inaccessible.
For example a graphics based Adobe PDF document. I first realised the power of
this feature when using Adobe Reader full version software. Acrobat detected
that there was no text in the document I was trying to open as it was a scanned
graphics file. It offered to run OCR on it but still reported after the OCR run
that it could not detect any text. Frustrated I went to the print menu and
changed the printer to be used from my physical printer to the virtual
Microsoft Document Imaging printer. This saved my pdf document as a tiff file.
I then closed Acrobat and opened the tiff file I had saved in Microsoft
Document Imaging. I sent the text to Word in the normal way and to my delight a
perfect version of the previously inaccessible document was opened for me to
read in Word.
Kurzweil
has a similar feature but again in my experience is not as good as the native
office product.
This
tip was provided to me by no less a person than Eric Damery, one of the
leading lights of Freedom Scientific. You may well have heard him in the
Freedom Scientific podcasts Eric confirmed that actually running demos of
higher versions of Jaws benefitted those running older versions of Jaws.
David,
You
have upgraded your XP to the latest SP3 and you have upgraded
FireFox
to the latest version 3 it sounds like. The only thing you have
Not
upgraded is JAWS. If you install JAWS 10, you will find it working
Much
better in the latest FireFox. Not just reading the text in the
Edits,
but other areas as well. I also suggest you try IE 7 with JAWS 10
Installed.
You will even find that your JAWS 8 version works better in
IE
once JAWS 10 has been installed since the shared components are
Updated.
This
is one of the benefits of JAWS, you can install newer versions and
Run
them as a demo in order to test and see the improvements and
Differences.
Hopefully you'll see the benefit and purchase the upgrades.
Regards,
Eric
Damery
Freedom
Scientific
Excel
is not the easiest program to use if you are visually impaired.
However
there are a number of shortcut keystrokes which make life easier. Here are some
which I find most useful.
Pressing
Control plus semi colon will insert today’s date in the current cell.
Pressing
alt plus the + sign will perform an auto sum which will try to add a column of
figures above it. I think it also works for rows of numbers to the left or the
right of a cell.
Pressing
control plus shift plus 4 will convert any number in a highlighted cell into
the default currency. Shift 4 is of course the $ sign. This may help you
remember this key as you are effectively pressing control plus $.
Use
the autoformat menu to make sure that your spreadsheets look OK for a sighted
reader.
If
you are using Jaws there is a useful modification to the control plus a command
this command will select a spreadsheet table rather than all the cells in a spreadsheet. This is
useful if you want to quickly select a table for auto format.
It
is easy for a person without sight to get lost in a spreadsheet and you can
spend a long time cursoring through cells which simply say quote blank. There
are some special commands in Jaws which improve matters but one technique will
help anybody, irrespective of screen reader.
Save any spreadsheet you want to read as single page web page format.
You can then open this in your internet browser; you will find the spreadsheet
much easier to read with a screen reader here.
Your normal navigation keys for reading tables will also make it much
easier to read. My advice is that after creating a spreadsheet you should save
a final version of your spreadsheet as a web document so that you can proof
read this easily.
Jaws
can be set up to provide proof reading feedback. In the configuration manager of
Jaws under set options and then speech and sound manager select the proof
reading scheme. You want the scheme with says something like Proof Reading with
font and colour attributes.
Unfortunately this is a slightly cumbersome alteration to Jaws configuration
and the fact that you are repeatedly delving into the configuration manager
increases the risk that you may inadvertently alter some main setting. There is
normally no quick way of making this change though. However what I have done is
install a demo version of Jaws 9 on my PC which will work for 40 minutes. I
have this demo configured to work with the proof reading scheme. To get jaws in
proof reading mode then I simply exit Jaws with insert plus F4. As I have
renamed Jaws 9 on my desktop to 9 Jaws all I have to do is press windows key D
to go to the desktop, press 9 and then enter and I have a version of Jaws
configured to proof read documents. In theory you could have a number of Jaws
versions, even if only in demo mode which allow a collection of quick start
configurations. This approach may be possible with Windows Eyes. - I am not
sure. This approach does not really work with NVDA as the software normally
only like’s one installation. There is also less option to configure uniquely
NVDA settings.
You
can make Powerpoint presentations semi accessible by saving them in outline
format. Within PowerPoint you should go to the file menu and select save as.
Press tab once to select the file type to save. Press o until you hear outline.
This will save the file in a structured rtf document. This file can then be
opened by any WordProcessor and the text contents read with appropriate
headings. As described in the software productivity page you can also use the
Ed Sharp text editor to open text versions of Powerpoint files directly.
Remember
any text which is graphically represented will not be delivered for reading
with a screen reader using this method.
If you have a very inaccessible Powerpoint Presentation I would suggest
you first of all make a basic Outline version to use in Word. You can then use
the Microsoft Document Imaging virtual scan as described above to try and grab
the more inaccessible bits to add into the outline file.
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