[gui-talk] Window-Eyes 9.0 Beta 1/First Impressions

Wed Nov 26 14:10:00 UTC 2014

Hello David

Thanks for your interesting post giving us your initial impressions of
Wineyes 9 beta 1.

I have been a GW Micro client from around 1991. I used Vocal-Eyes and
Window-Eyes since its birth round-about 1995. I have a fully paid-up version
and I still have 4 SMAs remaining for Window-Eyes upgrades. I consider
myself to be a bit of a power user of Window-Eyes and have also done a bit
of scripting.

But I stopped using Window-Eyes a year ago and since then I have been using
NVDA because it is just so much more stable, more responsive, its web access
is far superior to that of Window-Eyes 8.4 and it reads in several
applications where Wineyes does not read. The way I feel, is that it would
take something very special from GW Micro to win me back to Wineyes.

I am rather underwhelmed by the latest upgrade. Most of it is just playing
catch-up to NVDA. And then not even quite. Yes, once Wineyes 9 is released,
I will download and install it, but I will still not use it; just keep it
for a rainy day, hoping that a day will come when it offers something really
special, that it at least will have some kind of OCR function or app, that
it might become as stable as NVDA and talks where it is now silent where
NVDA speaks, when it works with OpenOffice. I will check out Wineyes with an
open mind from time to time while using NVDA.

I can't say I have any meaningful experience of JFW, so I can't make any
comparisons on that front, but a price difference of over $1000 speaks
volumes.

NVDA has come a very long way these past two years or so and does all for me
that I need very efficiently and snappily. I have seen more crashes of the
"rock solid" Window-Eyes than I cared to count, but I still have to see an
NVDA crash.

Kind regards

Christo

-----Original Message-----
From: gui-talk [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of David
Goldfield via gui-talk
Sent: 26 November 2014 2:05 PM
To: Discussion of the Graphical User Interface, GUI Talk Mailing List
Subject: [gui-talk] Window-Eyes 9.0 Beta 1/First Impressions

As I had a bit more time today than I originally anticipated, I decided to
go to http://www.gwmicro.com/beta and give the new Window-Eyes beta a little
test spin.
The Web site contains a lot of info about what's been added and changed and
has a few cautionary notes. First, you need to have Window-Eyes 8.0 or later
installed for this upgrade to successfully install. Second, it does not
officially support Windows XP. Interestingly, they don't say that XP support
was removed, only that it wasn't tested for XP.
Apparently, it may install and run on XP but, as it hasn't been tested, they
warn that people who choose to run it on XP do so at their own risk. The
installation was straightforward, although it did not update all of the
built-in set files and some of them were reported as being out of date but I
was able to go into the Factory settings from the Window-Eyes file menu and
reinstall the ones reported as being outdated.
If you're used to WE8.x, the 9.x control panel is identical. While I'd like
to see a search feature as we have in the JAWS settings center and quick
settings dialogs, I really like the Window-Eyes control panel. I like the
treeview interface and how items can individually be set to be either global
or application specific. I'm not saying that it's a better interface than
JAWS but it's different and I happen to like this particular implementation.
What I really took a look at was their beefed-up Web support. While I did
find a few bugs, which I've already begun reporting, it's definitely a vast
improvement over the previous version and is, if you'll forgive my saying
so, very JAWS-like. I don't normally like to place one screen reader above
all others as a type of gold standard but I have to give JAWS credit where
it's due. While NVDA is very similar to JAWS in many respects, JAWS has done
quite a bit to perfect Web access as much as a screen reader can do such a
thing. While NVDA and JAWS have virtually the same navigation commands, no
pun intended, JAWS does take things to a higher level with features like
PlaceMarkers, Flexible Web and the ability to wrap navigation by being able
to press a key and wrap back from the bottom up, such as pressing the letter
H at the bottom of a page to move to the first heading at the top.
Window-Eyes 9.0 Beta 1 now has the same type of navigation wrapping. It
presents messages about where you're located more efficiently than it did in
8.x and, as I said, feels very JAWS-like. I think Window-Eyes users are
going to enjoy these new capabilities.
There are some negatives to report but bear in mind that this is a beta,
meaning that it's still not a final release. Sadly, and somewhat
surprisingly, one of the big JAWS-like features, placemarkers, has been
removed. As I don't use placemarkers this wouldn't particularly bother me
but Window-Eyes users who used this feature may be a bit disappointed. My
guess is that its removal is due to how Window-Eyes now accesses the Web,
which is very different from previous versions but this is merely a guess.
Window-Eyes doesn't place the Web page in a static buffer; they say that
you're arrowing through the Web page practically in real time, even if
something in the page changes. They've added the ability to use the f8 key
to block text to copy it to the clipboard. While this is quite nice, it is
not possible to use the shift key and navigation keys to highlight or select
text on a Web page as you can with Word and as you could in previous
Window-Eyes versions. I actually wish they'd expand this by allowing you to
block text in any text editable area, negating the need to use the familiar
but clunky method of using shift with navigation commands.
I really didn't have time to test the other features but other features
there are, including Quickbooks support, improved Skype support, preliminary
support for Windows 10, improved Outlook support and many other bug fixes
and improvements from the 8.x branch. I think that Window-Eyes users will
like what's been added and I'm looking forward to hearing comments from them
as more people use this new version.

-- 

-- 

Feel free to visit my new Web site
http://www.DavidGoldfield.info

Feel free to visit my LinkedIn profile
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-goldfield/12/929/573

Visit my blog
http://davidgoldfield.wordpress.com

Follow me on Twitter
http://www.twitter.com/davidgoldfield

         David Goldfield,
        Founder and Peer Coordinator

    Philadelphia Computer Users' Group for the Blind and Visually Impaired
To learn more about the users' group, visit
http://davidgoldfield.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/updated-faqphiladelphia-compu
ter-users-group-for-the-blind-and-visually-impaired/

_______________________________________________
gui-talk mailing list
gui-talk at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/gui-talk_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
gui-talk:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/gui-talk_nfbnet.org/cjdk%40mweb.co.za