----- Original Message -----

From: Sieghard Weitzel

To: main@jfw.groups.io

Sent: Friday, September 06, 2019 11:01 AM

Subject: Re: access and jaws

Hi Glen,

 

I fail to grasp why you expect Vispero to support versions of Office which have long been unsupported with their latest Jaws version? They have their hands full keeping up with all the changes which Microsoft made in Windows 10 and newer versions of Office with respect to screenreader access and trying to support something like Office 2000 would be an entirely inappropriate waste of their time.

I did misunderstand what you said thinking you meant Jaws 2019 did not work with new versions of Excel which it does perfectly well. It is of course up to you if you want to use Office 2000 or 2003 or if people still feel they need to use Windows XP simply because they are afraid to learn something new, but Vispero certainly does not need to support operating systems and software which is no longer supported by Microsoft for the last 10 years or more. Even Office 2007 and 2010 count among those, Office 2013 which is already a lot more like Office 2016 is probably still supported, but even Windows 7 will soon be at the end of its life (can’t remember the exact date I think next year) and Vispero’s efforts right now are very much focused on the future which is Windows 10 and Office 365 and the new deep level hooking which replaces the old accessibility display driver since that technology no longer gets all the information from Windows 10 it needs. This is a big reason why in Windows 10 the Jaws cursor often cannot see/read anything, but there are some improvements in later builds of Jaws 2019 and in Jaws 2020 we should expect some pretty significant improvements in that area which will be fantastic.

I don’t understand why you feel you need the latest version of Jaws when on the other hand you are using a version of Office which is 6 versions old and which was released almost 20 years ago. You already suggested the solution which is to use an older version of Jaws and since any number of Jaws versions can live together on the same PC you can simply use Jaws 2018 or Jaws 18 for your ancient Office version and if you want the best web browsing experience load up Jaws 2019 and use it with Chrome or the new Edge Beta.

 

Regards,

Sieghard