Jamie Pauls
Vispero, the company that now owns Freedom Scientific has released the latest version of their JAWS screen reading software for Windows. As has been the case for many years now, JAWS 2023 was released toward the end of October after a public beta cycle that anyone could participate in. There are always significant features of each release, with other important features that, nevertheless, may receive less publicity.
Perhaps the most notable addition to JAWS 2023 is a feature simply called Smart Glance. The impetus for this feature is the fact that web page developers often use text or background colors as well as different fonts to highlight areas of interest on a page. A sighted user’s eyes are drawn to this content, but the page developers may not use headings or other elements traditionally recognized by screen readers. Thus, the blind user may need to hunt for this information, or they may not even be aware that the material is present on the page at all. So how does it work? Let’s visit the home page of The American Foundation for the Blind to find out.
When I load AFB’s home page into Microsoft Edge, in addition to the number of headings and links on the page I am now told that there are two Smart Glance highlights. To get to the first highlighted area, I simply press the letter Y. I hear the line “AFB's third Access and Engagement research report examines the continued negative impact of systemic and COVID-19-specific issues on the education of students …” While this is not the entire sentence, I can simply press the down arrow key to finish reading. I can then navigate to links of interest related to that topic. The second Smart Glance simply gives me the copyright date of the website. The AccessWorld home page has six smart glance highlights. Pressing Y takes me to the following:
- Breadcrumb
- are published monthly in AccessWorld®: Technology and People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired.
- Your organization can change the way the world sees blindness
- Most of our funding comes from individuals, not corporate sponsors. Your support is vital!
- Connect with our accessibility consulting team.
- © Copyright 2020 American Foundation for the Blind
As can be seen from the example above, not everything highlighted is of importance to the reader, but some content truly is. Often phone numbers are other contact information will appears as a Smart Glance highlight. Pressing Shift-Y moves back through these elements, and Insert+Control+y brings up a list of Smart Glance highlights available on the page. How JAWS detects Smart Glance highlights can be adjusted in the JAWS Settings Center. You can also make these adjustments by pressing Insert+V while on a web page. You can have JAWS play a sound when encountering a Smart Glance highlight, or disable the feature altogether if you don’t care about it.
In June of this year, JAWS introduced a Notification History feature. Pressing Insert+Spacebar followed by the letter N opens a history of the notifications you have received over the past 24 hours. It is possible to create rules that will change how notifications are announced. You can change the way JAWS speaks notifications, have a sound played when a notification appears, or simply mute some notifications altogether. As of JAWS 2023, you can now press JAWS+Spacebar followed by Control+N to mute “toast” notifications. This rather odd-sounding name for notifications may leave you scratching your head until you realize that one of the notifications you can toggle on or off with this keystroke is the announcement of messages that are read from Microsoft Outlook. I might toggle this feature on when I am in a Zoom conference so I can concentrate on my meeting, and turn it back on when I am done. Notifications from Outlook, using my above example, will still appear in my notification history.
If you are a Dell computer user who has needed to disable Wave Max Audio because of memory usage problems related to the text to speech voice you were using, these issues have been resolved.
An enhancement that may seem small to many is the ability to authorize JAWS on your system without requiring administrative privileges. If this is important to you, it may not seem like such a trivial feature.
For some time now, Jaws has implemented a Smart Navigation feature that allows for moving around in Web-based applications by using arrow keys alone rather than in conjunction with other keys. One very practical application of this feature is in navigating tables on the web. Rather than needing to hold down the Alt and Control keys while moving around tables with arrow keys, it is possible using Smart Navigation to simply use arrow keys to navigate the table. Once you are out of the table, arrow keys work as expected. In JAWS 2023, it is now possible to enable Smart Navigation for tables only, causing arrow keys to behave as expected everywhere else. I played with this feature a bit, but personally prefer arrow keys to behave as expected all the time. For me, it is worth the extra effort of holding down Alt and Control while navigating tables to keep this behavior as it has always been. You may feel differently, so feel free to play with this new feature.
Support for ARM64 is now provided in JAWS 2023. The JAWS installer will recognize whether your device has an ARM processor. The Microsoft Surface Pro X is an example of such a device. ARM support for ZoomText and Fusion will come later. Windows 11 is the only version of the operating system that is supported, and you can only use Freedom Sientific’s Focus Braille displays at this time.
There are other features still under development and apps that are not currently supported. If this topic is of interest to you, you should check out the What’s New in JAWS document for more information.
Annual licenses for JAWS start at $95. You can learn more or purchase here.
As with every new release of a screen reader, there are features that will appeal to some users more than others. It is rare to find a release that has no appeal at all, so be sure to check out JAWS 2023. Also, visit the Webinars page to hear demonstrations on how to use JAWS for Windows.
The Bottom Line
I always make every effort to keep my screen readers up-to-date. If no other feature were of interest to me at all, I find Smart Glance highlights to be an interesting enhancement that I find myself using more and more. It is easy not to try out new features simply because one is comfortable with the old way of doing things, and I try to avoid this trap when possible. I also enjoy the annual home license option for JAWS, rather than paying for a software maintenance agreement. Both options are still available, so pick the option that best suits you. Finally, I really appreciate the work the Freedom Scientific team has done on their regularly-released webinars. Even if you use screen readers other than JAWS, you will find topics such as using Google Docs and Sheets of great value.
Feel free to leave us a comment on your most-used feature of JAWS 2023.
This article is made possible in part by generous funding from the James H. and Alice Teubert Charitable Trust, Huntington, West Virginia.
