19 Introduction to the JAWS Managers This learning module is entitled, “An Introduction to the JAWS Managers.” There are several small programs that were developed to make it easier to customize JAWS based on individual needs. These are utility programs that allow you to change the way JAWS speaks, add and change hotkeys, add and change prompts, and much more. You can access most of these programs through the Utilities menu on the user interface. Or, you can open a dialog that lists all of the programs available. Currently the only programs I have running are JAWS and HJPad. Please load these programs if you have not already done so. Settings changed in the JAWS managers and utilities can be made at a default or application level. Default level changes affect all applications, while application level changes affect only the current application. For example, if you press INSERT+F2 and select a manager while Word is active, changes you make only apply to Word. I’ll press INSERT+F2 now. JAWS SAYS… The first utility is Configuration Manager, which can be used to change settings such as how much or how little JAWS will speak in various situations. We’ll come back to this later. For now, let’s see what else is on the list. Press DOWN ARROW. Custom Highlight Assign Use Custom Highlight Assign to specify colors that are then recognized by JAWS as highlighted. This is very useful in applications that do not use Windows colors, or do not allow you to modify preset color settings. Press DOWN ARROW. Dictionary Manager The Dictionary Manager is used to specify how JAWS pronounces words, allowing you to more easily recognize spoken information and to work more effectively. Press DOWN ARROW. Frame Viewer The Frame Viewer is a great new feature that allows you to specify areas within an application window that can then be set to be read with a keystroke, in response to some change in the program, or to silence a change in the application that you do not want to hear. Also, frames can be set to launch scripts to accomplish other tasks. Press DOWN ARROW. Graphics Labeler Windows is a graphical user interface. A graphic can be an icon, toolbar button, or a picture in an application or on the Internet. Many graphics that you encounter in Windows are already labeled. When you navigate over a graphic, JAWS reads these labels to you. Some graphics are not labeled. In this case you will hear, "Graphic XXX." JAWS assigns the numbers you hear after the word graphic and uses a different number for each graphic it finds, to be able to later recognize them. With JAWS, you can label graphics that don’t already have a label specified. You can label graphics automatically or manually. You may need sighted assistance, to help you determine what the graphic is so that you can label it appropriately. Press DOWN ARROW. Keyboard Manager Use Keyboard Manager to review, add, or change keystrokes assigned to listed actions. Press DOWN ARROW. Mark Colors in Braille Use Mark Colors in Braille to specify text colors to be identified when the Color attribute is selected in Configuration Manager, Braille Options. Press DOWN ARROW. Prompt Creator/Modifier Prompts are the labels spoken when you navigate to a control. However, these labels are not always automatically spoken. Use Prompt Creator to specify the label JAWS speaks for specific controls, and even include a custom tutor message to provide helpful navigation tips. Press DOWN ARROW. Script Manager Use Script Manager to write and compile scripts - small programs - that can greatly alter how JAWS functions within applications. Press DOWN ARROW. Windows Class Reassign A Windows class is a programming level label for a window or control. Some programs use non-standard Window classes, making it difficult for JAWS to recognize and read them properly. Windows Class Reassign allows you to specify a standard Windows class assignment that JAWS can recognize and access. Let’s go back and take a closer look at a few of these managers. Press the ESCAPE key to exit the Manager Dialog. Your application focus should be in the HJPad application window. You can confirm this by reading the title bar, INSERT+T as in title. Title equals document dash HJPad. Now I’m going to press the keystroke that will open my JAWS Manager’s Dialogue again, INSERT+F2. We will do these exercises for the most part in HJPad. If you wish, you may go back and make some of these changes in the DEFAULT.JCF file, especially for things like typing echo, reading by sentence instead of line, and so on, as those might be used a particular way in ALL programs. Run JAWS Manager dialogue. List box. Configuration Manager. One of ten. The first item in this list is Configuration Manager, which is selected upon activating the JAWS Manager Dialogue. The only two other controls in this dialogue, moving from left to right, are the OKAY button and the CANCEL button. I’ll activate the Configuration Manager now by pressing the ENTER key. Document dash HJPad. Edit. ____dash JAWS Configuration Manager. So here I am in the JAWS Configuration Manager and the configuration that was loaded is specific to the HJPad application. If there isn’t a configuration file already in existence for a particular program, JAWS will create one as soon as you launch the Configuration Manager from that list view. And the name given to that configuration is going to match the name of either the exe, executable file, or dll, dynamic link library file that runs your program and will be given a “J C F” extension, which stands for JAWS Configuration Manager. For example, the name of the file that runs HJPad is called HJPad.exe, so the name of the corresponding configuration file is HJPad.jcf. As we move onto some of the other managers in this tutorial, you’ll see that they work very much the same way. Everything that you’re going to do in the JAWS Configuration Manager is going to be done from within the menu system. Most of the things we’ll be doing are under the “Set Options” menu, so I’ll go ahead and press ALT+S to move to and activate the Set Options menu. Should you wish to switch from an application specific configuration file to the default configuration file, there’s a shortcut key you can press, CTRL+SHIFT+D. Let’s not open the default file now, but stay in HJPad.jcf. However, I’ll talk about the default file for just a moment. If you activate the default.jcf option you will make changes that affect ALL applications. You can think of your default files, whether they’re your JAWS Configuration Manager files or Frame Manager, Keyboard Manager, etc., as kind of the generic set of manager files whose job it is to try to accommodate for the most probable Windows scenario. If you’re running an application that you just bought and there isn’t a JAWS configuration file for it, JAWS is going to run the default.jcf file. It’s important to understand that JAWS already provides manager files for many popular applications, so in most cases, you will not have to do anything to make changes. There are also some options in your application-specific configuration files that are unavailable, but are available in the default JAWS configuration file. This is because these options are set specifically for the JAWS program. Let’s go ahead and take a look at a couple of these options now. Again, you should be in the file called HJPAD.JCF, and can verify this by pressing INSERT+T to read the title bar. SET OPTIONS The set options menu item can be found on your menu bar, but I’m going to get into the Set Options menu by pressing the access key combination ALT+S as in set options. I'm going to down arrow through this list and I'm just going to let JAWS do the talking so listen as we go through the list; * USER OPTIONS U * VERBOSITY OPTIONS V * TEXT PROCESSING T * FORMAT OPTIONS F * WINDOW CLASSES W * GRAPHICS & SYMBOLS G * CURSOR OPTIONS C * KEYBOARD OPTIONS K * BRAILLE OPTIONS B * SYNTHESIZER OPTIONS S * HTML OPTIONS H * CUSTOM HIGHLIGHT OPTIONS O * ADVANCED OPTIONS A * USER OPTIONS U Ok so we wrapped around and came back to the top of the list and we landed on User Options... The ellipsis telling us we are going to open the dialog, so I'll press ENTER now Enter, leaving menus. User Options dialog. Show virtual viewer on screen checkbox checked. To clear checkmark, press Spacebar ALT+W. This is the check mark that will allow you to show the virtual viewer on the screen and it is checked by default. Should you not want to show it on the screen, you still have access to it in the same exact manner and you would uncheck this check box. The next section is called typing echo and it is a series of radio buttons. Tab. Typing echo character radio button checked two of four. To change the selection, press UP or DOWN ARROW. The choices here are: off; characters, which is the default; words; and characters and words. Characters and words might be a good choice for someone who's just learning to type because they would hear their keyboard echo as they type their characters and then they would hear the word as they press the spacebar or punctuation afterwards and hearing the word would help them understand if they misspelled it. I'll tab to the next section. Tab. Screen echo echo highlighted text radio button checked two of three. To change the selection press UP or DOWN ARROW You should normally leave this setting alone. Echo highlighted text is the default for JAWS and typically that's what you want. Now, I'll press TAB to the next control. Tab. Typing interrupt checkbox checked. To clear checkmark, press Spacebar ALT+T Let's press INSERT F1 to see what screen sensitive help says about this. Clear this checkbox if you want JAWS to continue speaking information from the last command, even if you press keys such as letters or numbers you can still press control to interupt speech. Leave this option checked if you wish such keystrokes to interupt speech, therefore freeing JAWS to begin speaking text from the most recent command. This option is checked by default. Press ESCAPE to close this message. And remember while in virtual viewer you can read around with your standard reading keys. For example, I can press CONTROL+HOME. Clear this checkbox if you want JAWS to continue speaking information from the last command. Even if you press keys such as letters or numbers you can still press control to interupt And I'm just pressing the DOWN ARROW here. So I can stop on a word, even Command comma even if you press keys This information can be copied to the clipboard and pasted into other documents. I'll press ESCAPE to get out of the virtual viewer. Escape, typing interrupt checkbox checked So remember as you go through these controls, press INSERT F1 to get screen sensitive help on any of the controls you have questions about. This is where you are going to find a tremendous amount of information on how to configure JAWS. The next control as I press TAB, Tab. Reading interupt checkbox checked. To clear checkmark, press Spacebar ALT+R Is reading interupt and the one following that is key interupt. And these are all I'm going to talk about in this particular dialog box so I'll press ESCAPE. Escape. HJPAD JCF dash JAWS Configuration Manager Let's go back to the Set Options Menu ALT+S ALT+S Menu Active Set Options User Options dot dot dot To move through items press UP or DOWN ARROW U Verbosity Options dot dot dot V I just pressed DOWN ARROW to move to Verbosity Options and I'll press ENTER here. Enter. Leaving Menus Verbosity Options dialog Verbosity level beginner highest radio button checked one of three. To change the selection press UP or DOWN ARROW You have three choices here for JAWS, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Beginner has the highest level of verbosity or information that is spoken with advanced having the lowest. If I press TAB, Tab. Beginner preferences dot, dot, dot, button. To activate press Spacebar ALT+E I land on the beginner preferences button and there's also beyond that an intermediate preference button and an advanced preferences button. I'm going to press SPACEBAR now. Space Verbosity Options dialog Beginner preferences dialog. Items to be spoken listbox. Application start message checked. One of nineteen. To move to an item press the ARROW keys. Here we have 19 items in this list. All of them checked except for one, which is tool tips. This includes the application start message, JAWS message and others. If I press TAB again, JAWS message length long radio button checked one of two. To change the selection, press UP or DOWN ARROW Here I have a choice of making the message length for JAWS long or short. To give you an example, a long message would say, "PC cursor" when I pressed the PC cursor key. A short message would say simply say, "PC." This is useful for people who are more familiar with JAWS and know their way around and desire less speech. The less speech you have the faster you can work and do your job. The other buttons here are OK, Restore Default settings, Cancel, Help. So, I'm going to press ESCAPE to get out of this dialog. Escape. HJPAD JCF dash JAWS Configuration Manager Verbosity Options dialog. Beginner preferences dot dot dot button. To activate press Spacebar ALT+B. I'll press TAB to the Advanced Preferences button. Tab. Intermediate. Tab. Advanced Preferences dot dot dot button. To activate, press Spacebar ALT+A And press SPACEBAR to activate it. Space Verbosity Options dialog. Advanced Preferences dialog. Items to be spoken listbox. Application start message not checked one of nineteen. To move to an item press the ARROW keys. In this listbox I count about 8 different checkboxes that are not checked including the application start message. The start message that says for help press INSERT+F1 F1 and so on. Also in this particular Advanced preferences the JAWS message length is set to short as opposed to long. So you can see you can go and customize these preferences to your liking. I'll press ESCAPE to go back. Escape. HJPAD JCF dash JAWS Configuration Manager Verbosity Options dialog. Advanced Preferences dot dot dot button. To activate, press Spacebar ALT+A And I'll press ESCAPE to get out of the Verbosity Options dialog box. Escape. HJPAD JCF dash JAWS Configuration Manager Let's go back to Set Options yet again. ALT+S ALT+S Menu Active Set Options User Options And I silenced it there. I'll DOWN ARROW to text processing. Text processing dot dot dot T. Pressing ENTER Enter. Leaving menus. Text processing dialog. Say All Line with Pauses radio button checked. Two of four. To change the selection press UP or DOWN ARROW. In this section the default is now set to Line without Pauses. I'd like to DOWN ARROW one time to sentence. Say All Sentence radio button checked. three of four. To change the selection press UP or DOWN ARROW But that's a personal choice. The other choices in this section are: Tab, Say All, Say Blank Line checkbox not checked. To check, press SPACEBAR This particular option allows you to proofread a document while doing a Say All and hear all of the Blank lines spoken. Normally during a Say All, we skip over blank lines. Some of the other controls in this section I'd like to point out are numeric date processing, which is in this section. Number processing which means that single digits would be pronounced like 1, 2, 3, 4. Pairs pairs, which would be pronounced 12, 34. And full numbers which would be pronounced 1,234. There's also a checkbox in the text processing area called speak dollars. This is a nice tool especially if you're using Microsoft Excel. With speak dollars checked, Excel will read dollar figures more naturally. For example, now without this checked it would read dollar one point two five. If you checked this and save your changes, Excel would speak as one dollar and twenty five cents. There are several other items in this text processing dialog box. Feel free to explore them and press INSERT F1 for more help on any given item. I'm going to press ESCAPE now to go back to the main HJPad JCF dialog. Escape. HJPAD JCF dash JAWS Configuration Manager And once again I'll press ALT+S to go to the Set Options. ALT+S. Menu Active. Set Options User Options And silence it. And the next thing I'd like to look at is called Graphics and Symbols. We're going to go ahead and skip over Window Classes for now because that gets into more advanced topics. We'll go to Graphics and symbols by pressing the letter G. G. Leaving menus. Graphics and symbols dialog. Graphics Verbosity All Graphics Radio Button checked. Three of three. To change the selection, press UP or DOWN ARROW. Now, in HJPad we have it set to read all graphics because we use that to get in there and show you where the graphics are. If you set jaws to read only labeled graphics, JAWS will skip over the graphics that are not labeled. So we leave it set to All Graphics in HJPad. However, if your in a program where most of your graphics are labeled, you're likely going to be set to read Labeled Graphics only, which is just one choice above this. I'll press the UP ARROW now. Graphics Verbosity Label Graphics Radio button checked. Two of three. To change the selection press UP or DOWN ARROW That's about the only thing I change in this area. Normally I like to leave mine set to labeled graphics. But as I said, in HJPad I'm going to leave it on All Graphics, so I'll DOWN ARROW again. Graphics Verbosity All Graphics Radio Button checked. Three of three. To change the selection, press UP or DOWN ARROW Again there are other items in this dialog box that you can explore by pressing TAB then INSERT F1 to get more help on each item. I’m going to press ESCAPE right now and go back. Escape. HJPAD JCF Silenced it there with CONTROL. ALT+S for Set Options. ALT+S. Menu Active. Set Options User Options dot dot dot And I pressed CTRL again. The next item I'd like to look at is Cursor Options. So I'll press C. C. Leaving menus Cursor Options dialog. Notify when cursor changes shape checkbox not checked. To check, press Spacebar ALT+N If you're interested in hearing how the cursor changes shape in a program. For example, when the system is busy or processing a lot of times the pointer changes to an hourglass or when the system moves into an edit field in Microsoft Word, the pointer changes to an I beam cursor. When the pointer is over the title bar, for example, it's simply an arrow. So if you're interested in hearing how the cursor changes shape and when it does, this is where you would check this checkbox. It's fun to try for a while and listen to it, but at times it can be annoying so I tend to leave it off. But I do like to show people where it's at. Again, there are other controls in this dialog box that you can explore by pressing TAB and INSERT F1 on any control. Let's press ESCAPE to get out of here. Escape. HJPAD JCF dash JAWS Configuration Manager I'll go back to Set Options yet again. ALT+S ALT+S. Menu Active. Set Options User Options dot dot dot To move through items press UP or DOWN ARROW U And press K for Keyboard Options K. Leaving menus Keyboard options dialog. Navigation quick keys on radio button checked. 2 of 3. To change the selection press up or down arrow. Navigation quick keys are shortcuts you can use to move around web pages in Internet Explorer. You can change the selection so they are off or so they only work during say all. This is a multilevel tab dialog box, you land on the general page and there's another page called key labels. I'll go ahead and press ESCAPE and we'll go back and look at the next one. Escape. HJPAD JCF I pressed CTRL for silence and ALT+S for Set Options and followed by CTRL again. ALT+S. Menu Active. Set Options The next one I would like to look at is Braille Options B. Leaving menus Braille Options dialog. Focus Braille display options button. To activate press spacebar. This button opens a dialog where you can adjust the options for the Focus Braille display. I’m going to press TAB. Grade 2 enable translator checkbox not checked. To check press Spacebar In the earlier versions of JAWS, you had to go several tabs into the dialog to find this checkbox. Here it's the first one. If you like contracted Braille, this is where you want to go to enable contracted Braille translation. So you would press the spacebar here to check this. I'm going to press TAB. Tab. Grade 2 expand current word checkbox checked. To clear checkmark press Spacebar If you do change to contracted Braille, which a lot of people will do, this next Ctrl, expand current word, will change the word where the cursor is from contracted Braille to computer Braille so that you can read it a character at a time. This is good for editing. I'll Tab again to the next control. Tab. Braille Marking Highlight checkbox checked. To clear checkmark press Spacebar Now in versions of JAWS prior to version 4 this was a series of radio buttons. In later versions of JAWS you can choose all, none, or one of several of these here. By default highlight is checked, but now that we have got checkboxes you can go through and check each of these items that you would like on your Braille display. These include: highlight, bold, underline, italic, strikeout, color, and script defined markings. There are also other things in here about attribute rotation and Braille mode such as Structured or Line or SpeechBox mode. Those tend to be a little more advanced, so we won't talk about them here. But one thing I definitely want to mention is in this dialog box, you can define your can define your own Structured mode. The Access key to move directly to that box is ALT+E to move to define Structured mode. There is also new item here called Panning mode, which is currently set to best fit. But you can set that to fix increments. There are quite a few new changes in the Braille options for JAWS 4.5. So I encourage you to come into this dialog box and explore some of these changes. And again remember to press INSERT+F1 whenever you need help. I'm going to press ESCAPE now to escape out of this dialog. Escape. HJPAD JCF And CONTROL. And now I'll press ALT+S one more time. ALT+S. Menu Active. Set Options And control. Next I want to look at synthesizer options, so I'll press the letter S. S. Leaving menus Synthesizer Options dialog. Eloquence for JAWS. Punctuation combo box Most. Three of four. To change the selection, use the ARROW keys. Now, if we were in the default file, there's a choice you would have landed on first called default synthesizer. So if your using a hardware synthesizer and a software synthesizer or multiple hardware or multiple software synthesizers, you can go in and choose which synthesizer you wanted. The next control beyond that is the punctuation for JAWS, which is currently set to most. I'm going to go ahead and press ESCAPE to get out of here. But this is where you would change your default synthesizer if you needed to. Escape. HJPAD JCF And CONTROL for silence and ALT+S to open up the Set Options Menu yet again. ALT+S. Menu Active. This time I'm looking for HTML Option so I'll press H. H. Leaving Menus. HTML Options dialog. Skip past repeated text on new pages checkbox checked. To clear checkmark, press Spacebar. ALT+S. This is a place where you should come and explore, especially if you're interested in reading Web pages with JAWS. There's quite a bit of information in here. Most of it I tend to leave alone. We have it set to read a line per page as 24 and maximum line length of 150. Text block length of 25 and so on. So I encourage you to explore this dialog box especially if you go out on the Web and do surfing. Again, most of these items I tend to leave as they are, but it's good to know they are here. So I'll press ESCAPE. Escape. HJPAD JCF And ALT+S for Set Options. ALT+S. Menu Active. And of course I'm pressing CTRL as I go through this stuff. The next one down below HTML Options is Custom Highlight Options, which I'm not going to discuss on these tapes and then Advanced Options. Lets go ahead and look at the Advanced Options by pressing the letter A. A. Leaving Menus. Advanced Options dialog. Sleep Mode enabled checkbox not checked. To check, press SPACEBAR. This is a place where you would come if you had another speech enabled product that was running and you do not want JAWS to conflict with it. You would go to that other program, pull up Configuration Manager, come into here under Advanced Options and check the Sleep Mode enabled checkbox just for that application. For example, now we're in HJPad so if I checked this checkbox whenever I went to HJPad, JAWS would go to sleep and not speak. This is how we've done this for OPENBook, and Kurzweil. For these programs, we've created a JCF file that puts JAWS to sleep. In other words, the enable sleep mode checkbox is checked. There are other items in this dialog box so feel free to explore it, but that is the primary one I wanted to point out. So I'll press ESCAPE. Escape. HJPAD JCF dash JAWS Configuration Manager Just to the right of Set Options, if I press ALT I land on the word File. Menu Bar. File. To navigate, press left or right arrow. ALT+F And then RIGHT ARROW gets me to Set Options. Set Options. ALT+S One more RIGHT ARROW Reset Options. ALT+R Now let's take a look at this by opening it up with the DOWN ARROW Menu Active Reset to Factory settings. To move through items, press the UP or DOWN ARROWS. F So you have a choice to Reset Options to Factory Settings should something get messed up. And this will change as you view different programs. Again, I encourage you to explore your menus. And this wraps up the session on the various JAWS Managers. 20 19 Introduction to the JAWS Managers