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From: Grant.Downey@p0.f9.n381.z1.fidonet.org (Grant Downey)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: jaws and vocalize
Message-ID: <16515@handicap.news>
Date: 28 Jun 91 14:38:01 GMT
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Index Number: 16515

[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]

Wow! Mary, you asked me one mighty difficult question trying to
point out the advantages of Vocal-Eyes and Jaws.  These two screen
readers are so good!, have so many excellent features!, and are so
user friendly! that it is not easy to say which one is better or
more advantageous.  However I will point out my praises and
criticisms of each program and in doing so illustrate their
advantages and disadvantages.
First of all I think we should look at Vocal-eyes with its
companion speech sinthicizer The Soundingboard put together as the
Desktop Voice Package.  This is a combo that is hard to beat as far
as price and features.  The soundingboard offers much more than the
standard adjustments of rate, pitch, and tone and Vocal-Eyes offers
many features unique to it.  Feature for feature the Desktop Voice
package I believe gives the user the most boom for the buck.  Jaws
is sold with the Accent speech sinthicizer.  Jaws is an outstanding
screen reading program with power and flexibility with an extremely
well thought out menu system and setup.  I'm sorry that they
elected to match such a fine screen reader with the Accent.
When I started with Jaws 2 one of the biggest improvements made
were the additions to the manu system, Extra which has settings
particular to the particular sinthicizer you might be using, less
verbose menus, a separate Jaws cursor voice, the ability to save
configurations frames, environments, voice, and macros, each in a
separate configuration file and finally the smoothness with which
this version of Jaws seems to run is impressive. Jaws work well
with the Soundingboard also except for the Talking Clock function.
Here are some of Jaws drawbacks as far as I'm concerned.  I find
that for a totally blind person setting up frames isn't
particularly easy and with jaws is more difficult than most.  I
can't get Jaws to handle programs that use bar tracking very well.
Jaws does not have End of Word delay or Trigger delay which are
helpful in communicating with a remote computer.
Vocal-Eyes control panel seems somehow cumbersome when compared to
Jaws 2 but on the other hand it controls a lot more functions and
offers more choices than Jaws I thin it's a draw.  I've found that
setting up windows is easier with Vocal-Eyes, setting the bar
tracker, and checking attributes seems to be to be easier with
Vocal-Eyes.  Jaws 2 now has a similar response when saving and
loading files as Vocal-Eyes making knowing what is happening
easier.  I may be mistaken but I believe Vocal-Eyes in its review
mode only reads from line 1 through line 24 which is quite a
disadvantage where as the Jaws Cursor covers all twenty five lines
down and eighty columns across.  Of course Vocal-Eyes relies on
Hot keys and Jaws macros each of which have their place and that
to is a draw one system is no better to me than the other.  I like
the way that Vocal-Eyes handles Wordperfect, the way it's
hyperactive monitoring works, the ability of vocal-eyes definable
hot keys, the way the character dictionary works, and when used
with the Soundingboard's exception dictionary it is really
effective
Jaws 2 is an extremely fast running program with extremely quick
loading of configuration files.  A weakness of Vocal-eyes is its
slowness relative to the time it takes to get the configuration
files loaded and the application program working.  With Jaws 2, I'd
say that Wordperfect loads in 3 to four seconds where as with
Vocal-Eyes it takes almost ten on a 8386 system with 20 megahurt
clock.
So, where are we?  It's pretty even, Mary.  What we are comparing
are two excellent screen readers each doing things a little
differently but both performing splendidly.  We are talking about

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