How to determine the Reading Speed you have your JAWS set to
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Alan Dicey <adicey@...>
Dear Friends,
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This message will tell you how you can compute the Reading Speed you have your JAWS set at. It also has a small Chart, with the percentages that show up in the JAWS settings and the equivalent reading speeds, but since most computers will not run as fast as others, the best way is to follow the instructions and get a better closer rate of speed. With Best Regards, Alan Miami, Florida Alan Dicey, President United States Braille Chess Association - USBCA "Yes, Blind and Visually Impaired People, Can, and Do, Play Chess!" United States Braille Chess Association Home Page: http://AmericanBlindChess.org Known factors which influence speed outcomes: 1. By default, the screen reader pauses for a fraction of a second at sentence punctuation marks, such as commas and periods, in order to give a better reading experience. This would tend to give a slightly slower average speed for each percentage. 2. In calculating the number of characters, punctuation of all kinds, including quotation marks, dashes, and sentence punctuation and other printable characters were included (spaces were excluded). This would tend to give a higher character count, and therefore, a higher average speed. Though this has not been tested, the assumption is that the two variables tend to cancel out one another. 3. Different versions of the Eloquence synthesizer have yielded different results. Both Window-Eyes and JAWS have included a proprietary version of Eloquence within their screen reader in recent releases. These versions have yielded higher rates from the nonproprietary versions. 4. Probably related to the previous point, we found that current versions of these two screen readers produced markedly different reading rates at the same percentages. The test was performed for Window-Eyes 7 and JAWS 11 with their own proprietary version of Eloquence. Comparison Tables Percent Window-Eyes 7 JAWS 11 60% 346.3 524.7 50% 251.6 437.4 40% 196.5 344.5 30% 135.3 284.1 20% 107.8 224 Percent - - - - - In order to determine an approximate words-per-minute test for a screen reader, we used this process: 1. The screen reader's speed was set to a chosen percentage. 2. A long document was selected of sufficient length for the "Read All" command to be invoked without running out of text in a two-minute reading session. 3. A timer was set for two minutes. 4. The timer and the "Read All" command were invoked at the same time. 5. The "Read All" command was stopped when the timer expired. 6. The rest of the document was selected and deleted. 7. The Microsoft Word "Word Count" command was invoked. 8. The number of characters without spaces were found. 9. This number was placed into Windows Calculator. 10. The number was divided by 5 to obtain an approximate average length of five characters. (Five characters is the average word length in American English.) 11. The result of this was divided by two to obtain average words per minute. 12. The deleted text was restored and the process repeated for another speed rate. s
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From: <ckrugman@sbcglobal.net> To: "The Jaws for Windows support mailing list" <jfw@lists.the-jdh.com> Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2011 2:47 AM Subject: Re: How Fast do People use JAWS to read? as I stated previously JAWS used to show the actual rate and I recall thatat rate 95 ]\= 50% and when it actually showed the word count it was at 350 WPM. If you have any earlier versions of JAWS you might go back to them and experiment with the settings under voices in the options menu to find out more about word rates.
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