[access-uk] Re: Happy 20th Birthday, JAWS for Windows

  • From: "Jackie Brown" <jackieannbrown62@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2015 10:42:35 -0000

Wish I could throw a party, but I have no inclination! (smile).

Kind regards,

Jackie Brown
Emails: thebrownsplace@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Jackieannbrown62@xxxxxxxxx
jackie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Website: www.thebrownsplace.info
Twitter: @thebrownsplace
Skype: thejackmate

-----Original Message-----
From: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Colin Howard
Sent: 28 January 2015 20:26
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [access-uk] Happy 20th Birthday, JAWS for Windows

Greetings,

Seen on the VicugL group, thought it may be of interest! Shows how rapidly
time passes!

From: David Goldfield <david.goldfield@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 20:46:24 -0500

Episode 102 of Freedom Scientific's FSCast podcast reminds us that 2015
marks the 20th anniversary of the JAWS for Windows screen reader. In  fact,
Jonathan Mosen reminds us that January is, in fact, the month in  which JAWS
turned 20. I remember installing and using JFW 1.0 back in  January of 1995
and I thought I'd dedicate this short blog post to some  of my early
memories of that product and of that time in general.

In 1995, I was working for Blazie Engineering providing technical  support.
Windows 3.1 was a fairly well-established operating system with  several
Windows screen readers already available, including Blazie's own  Windows
Master which I believe was already out at that time. While I had  used
Windows 3.1 and was familiar with it on a very basic level, I was a edicated
DOS user. While I was very familiar with Vocal-eyes and JAWS for DOS, ASAP
from Microtalk was my screen reader of choice, along with a trusty Braille
'n Speak as my speech synthesizer.
It was during the end of 1994 or the very beginning of 1995 when we received
our boxed copy of JAWS for Windows 1.0, with January 19, 1995 being the
official launch date of that product. If you really want to read a piece of
classic assistive technology history, you can, courtesy of the Internet
Archive's Wayback Machine, read the December 1994 Henter-Joyce newsletter
which, among other things, contains the big announcement regarding JFW 1.0.

Around this time, I found out I had enlarged tonsils which needed to be
removed. As I constantly used my voice to do my job, it was recommended I
stay home for two weeks during my recuperation. This was, I decided, the
perfect time to finally dive into Windows 3.1 with our new copy of JAWS for
Windows, version 1.0.

The box contained a collection of cassette tapes with tutorials recorded by
Eric Damery and Ted Henter. Eric's voice is very familiar to JAWS users as
he annually introduces the new features which are being added to new JAWS
versions. Eric has participated in these recordings since the very beginning
of JFW and, even in the 1.0 days, was a fabulous and professional presenter.
I think the product was often referred to as JFW or JAWS for Windows more
than it is today as Henter-Joyce wanted to distinguish it from the other
JAWS product which ran on DOS machines.
Once I listened to some of the tutorials, I installed the product onto my
Windows 3.1 machine from the included 3.5 inch floppy disks, followed by the
authorization key, also on a floppy, a form of copy protection I had
previously never heard of and was having some difficulty wrapping my mind
around. After all, in those days most software packages never had any sort
of copy protection; you installed it and then used it.
Well, the installation and authorization process went smoothly and, soon
thereafter, I had JFW working with my trusty Bns 640. After all, for the
most part we had no software-based synthesizers at that time and so you
needed a bns, Accent, Artic, Audapter, Dec-talk or Doubletalk to get speech,
with no Braille support at that time.
They wanted JFW to feel like JAWS for DOS by giving it a PC cursor as well
as a JAWS cursor. It included the insert-G hotkey to label graphics and the
insert-T hotkey to read the window title, two features we didn't really need
in DOS. Insert-down arrow was the "say all" key and the other keys on the
numeric keypad tried to emulate what we were used to with JFD. I remember
this first version crashing quite a lot but this was quickly fixed in an
update which I probably downloaded from the Henter-Joyce BBS.

If you're curious about what was added in JFW 2.0, you can go to their
announcement on an old version of the Henter-Joyce home page, also courtesy
of the Internet Archive.
Those early versions would have seemed so limited to us compared to what we
have today, but back then it was cutting-edge technology. The JAWS cursor
could only move within the active window. When using the Internet, you had
to press insert-f5 to reformat the page, which you read using the JAWS
cursor. You couldn't freely navigate through a Web page using standard
reading commands with the PC cursor the way you can with any screen reader
today. If my memory is correct, that capability didn't get implemented until
version 3.31. In fact, the ability to use single letter navigation keys,
such as pressing H for heading or N to jump to the next block of text wasn't
even implemented until a later version, probably around 3.5.
What more can I say, except a happy 20th birthday to JFW, or JAWS as we now
call it. JAWS has certainly come a long way in the past 20 years. I wonder
what it will be like 20 years from now. I'm sure that it will be supporting
Windows 43 or whatever OS Microsoft will have pushed out to us and we'll all
have fond memories of running our screen readers on those ancient, primitive
Windows 7 computers. It's too bad that the Internet Archive doesn't supply
us with snapshots of pages from the future.
-- 

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

From: Tom Lange <lange85@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 21:04:56 -0800

Hi,
Boy, does that jog my memory.  Back in 1996, I was using Winvision with an
Artic Transport synth, and when I saw Windows 95 with JFW 2.0 I thought that
was just the best thing to come along.  I then switched to a different
machine and was running JFW 2.0 with a Dectalk PC1 synth.

Wasn't it JFW 3.3 that finally introduced the Eloquence software
synthesizer?  That was pretty cool, too, except that the original Eloquence
always sounded really smug to my ears; something in its inflection.

And then there was good old Doctor JAWS, who always made it a point to
"diagnose" your system because if you didn't have the right video card
installed, JFW would get deathly ill and do really crazy stuff, and, worst
case, crash your system. Which brings to mind a funny situation where I was
showing JFW at a seminar at Braille Institute, and the vendor whom  I was
with installed a beta version just prior to the demonstration. Doctor JAWS
"diagnosed" her laptop and promptly crashed her machine, whereupon I, in my
smart-aleck frame of mind at the moment, remarked that Doctor JAWS should
really have been called Doctor Jack, as in Kevorkian.  We both got a
tremendous laugh out of that one, though Eric Damery, who was on hand to
observe the proceedings, certainly wasn't at all amused. Be that as it may,
we got the situation resolved and the JFW demo was a resounding success.

I'll stop my rambling, and close by saying screen reading technology,
including JFW, has come a long way since then, and I, being the geek that I
am, can't wait to see what the future holds.

Tom

From: Jeff Kennyon <jkenyon7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 06:50:12 -0500

Has it really been so long?  I also had Artic at home and Master Touch in
high school which I graduated from in 1996.  My first exposure to JAWS was
that summer, and I wasn't too impressed with Windows I stuck with DOS for a
few more years and finally moved to Windows in 1999.  I also had an
imbarrising moment with JAWS and a demo.  In 2001 I interviewed at Motorola,
and brought a long a demo version and it had already expired.  I did manage
to show them the Keynote Companion  Does anyone remember that?  I used the
Keynote to go on line with my old ISP, which sadly has been taken over by
spammers.

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