JAWS FOR WINDOWS 7 FEATURES
AND BENEFITS
Presenter(s)
Eric
Damery
Freedom Scientific, Inc.
Day Phone: 727—803—8000
Email:
Presenter
#2
Glen Gordon
Freedom Scientific, Inc.
St. Petersburg
Day Phone: 727—803—8000
Email:
During
the past year, we have developed several new benefits for screen reading that
advance the JAWS technology ever further. During this session, the Product
Manager and Chief Technical Officer will be on hand to demonstrate and describe
these innovations and also discuss the some of the on going work for the
future, including the plans for
The
key areas of interest we would like to focus on include but are not limited to
the following:
1. JAWS now provides the ability to access Tables in HTML and PDF but retain
the Screen Layout of the table being reviewed. Until JAWS 7, all screen readers
using MSAA or object model to view tables have only offered a single column
view of tables. This means that the screen reader would view each cell as a
single line and failed to provide speech and Braille users the opportunity to
properly see the relationship of each cell to the others in the current row. In
addition, JAWS is now the first product to allow users a simple way to select
and copy non contiguous items from any application including HTML in IE and
Help Systems. This can even be done in tables so you can selectively take parts
of a table while retaining the row and column structure.
2.
Since introducing the concept of Navigation Quick Keys for HTML several years
ago,
SJAWS lead the way for all users of Screen Readers to have new and easy to
remember ways of quickly navigating Web content and Help Files. JAWS is now
bringing these techniques to Word Processing and PDF files. We will demonstrate
and describe this exciting and simple way to easily navigate and review
documents using the same techniques.
3.
Beginning with JAWS 7, Freedom Scientific has developed new techniques that
help authors of Excel Spread Sheets design and develop spread sheets which are
accessible by JAWS out of the box. Now, any user of JAWS no matter what their
skill level and without making any adjustments in JAWS itself, can navigate all
the regions in all of the worksheets and JAWS will automatically report the
column and row headings without the user making any adjustments. This opens the
world of Excel to novice users of screen readers for the first time and begins
to establish standards that many organizations are beginning to adopt in their
quest for creating accessible documents.
4.
Also for Excel, we will demonstrate a new technique that lets JAWS users define
certain cells or blocks of cells that are of particular importance for them
specifically. Having done this, the user can now retrieve this information as a
summary view in the future giving them faster access to just the information
they are interested in with the touch of a single keystroke. In the same way a
sighted user focuses right in on information, the JAWS user can now as well.
5.
Finally, we will demonstrate the latest and greatest access to very exciting
applications including MSN Messenger 7.5 and Skype. These programs are
capturing the interest of thousands of users and JAWS is offering some very
interesting improvements that make these not only usable, but simple at the
same time.
Go to previous article
Go to next article
Return to 2006 Table of Contents