Where It's AT – Assistive Technology Blog

Have you tried out the JAWS 14 Beta?

Contributed by Joel Zimba, Special Projects Coordinator, MDTAP

It’s definitely the time of year for new software and hardware releases.

Whether it’s back to school, gearing up for the holiday season or quarterly earning revenues, there’s probably something new and flashy to be bought, installed or otherwise upgraded on your computer or phone.

While you have to wait another month or so for Windows 8–the newest operating system from Microsoft, you may want to check out the public Beta of JAWS 14. Compatibility with the upcoming Windows 8 is the most important feature of JAWS 14, but there is plenty of other good stuff for Windows 7 users as well.  I’ve been using it for a week now, and while the initial startup was a little rocky, everything seems to be great.  Assistive technology vendors seem to have gotten out ahead of the curve with Windows 8.  I won’t fret about whether things will work when I finally upgrade my work PC.

The new and improved voices have never been my thing.  I like Eloquence.  It’s responsive and I can crank it up to quite high speeds without it becoming clipped or poppy.  The Realspeak voices sound nice at a normal speed, but just don’t respond as quickly.  I challenge anyone to actually prove they can understand them at very high rates. I wasn’t expecting better from the Vocalizer Direct voices, and I am glad to be proven wrong.

Those of you familiar with the myriad of voice options available in Mac OS will know how the Vocalizer voices sound.  After downloading and installing an HQ U.S. voice into JAWS, I was excited to have a new voice option.  I can only speak for the American English voices at this point, but they are highly responsive.  At this moment, I have the rate set to 77 percent, which would have turned the Realspeak voices into soggy garden mulch.  Voice selection is a highly personal thing, somewhere north of religion and just south of boxers or briefs.  I think everyone will be pleased with this choice though.  Good job Freedom!

Among the other changes are tweaks to Firefox and Internet Explorer which improve Web browsing, particularly on complex pages. Also, responsiveness seems to have improved, especially in Word and Outlook. I still believe JAWS for Windows is becoming a monolithic piece of software.  It could benefit from a strict diet, perhaps making many components optional in the future.

All said, I don’t mind parting with one of my SMA tokens to install JAWS 14 when it is finally released.  If you aren’t a current JAWS user, you can run the demo of JAWS 14 for 40 minutes before having to reboot your computer.  This will give you a chance to check out some of the new features.