8.1 JAWS Message Constants

In prior versions of JAWS, you had to create all of your messages as constants. A constant is a mnemonic way of representing a group of hard-to-remember values. Some examples of message constants follow:

Const
msgSettingSaved_S = "Setting Saved"
msgNoFollowPC_L = "The Jaws cursor will not follow the PC Cursor"
msgNoFollowPC_S = "Jaws will not follow PC"
msgFollowPC_L = "The Jaws cursor will follow the PC Cursor"

You can find the above examples in the default.jsm message file located in your JAWS settings folder. Each message ends with either an "S" or "L". Messages ending in "S" indicate the message is a short message. By default, JAWS speaks short messages when you use intermediate or advanced verbosity settings. The messages ending in "L" indicate long messages. JAWS speaks these messages when you use beginner verbosity setting.

If you needed to make changes in any of these message constants, you would have to make sure the quotation marks are in place after the modifications are complete. Failure to do so causes compilation errors when you try to compile any script file that includes the default.jsm message file.

Each time you wanted JAWS to speak multiple messages; you had to concatenate the messages together to produce one message. If you remember using hot key help in JAWS 3.7, the information spoken by JAWS was lengthy. The keystrokes spoken by JAWS were a series of message constants concatenated together to make the entire list of keystrokes. An example of string concatenation follows:

"This is the first part of my message." + " I am using concatenation to create a single message " + "out of 2 or 3 messages."

The result of concatenating the 3 strings of text follows:

"This is the first part of my message. I am using concatenation to create a single message out of 2 or 3 messages."

When you use string concatenation to create a single message, you also have to remember to use proper spacing. Otherwise, the words of your message may run together to create an unintelligible message.

 

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