Angelo, thanks for the appreciation. I am in the process of writing FS and Symantec an email with all the technical details so that they can address this issue in all future releases of their products. Lucky for them I am not in the United States, I would have sued Symantec because they are so damn bold in writing on their site that their product blocks screen readers.
Mujtaba Merchant Bangalore, India "Motivation is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going." ~ Jim Rohn -----Original Message----- From: Blind-Computing [mailto:blind-computing-boun...@jaws-users.com] On Behalf Of Angelo DeMarsico Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 8:34 AM To: blind-computing@jaws-users.com Subject: Re: [Blind-Computing] Symantec and JAWS Screen Reader Wonderful work! Angelo -----Original Message----- From: Mujtaba Merchant Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2013 10:20 PM To: blind-computing@jaws-users.com Subject: [Blind-Computing] Symantec and JAWS Screen Reader Hello Folks, This is something spectacular I came across at my work place and thought I should share it with you guys. I work on a Windows 7 OS PC with JAWS 14 installed on it. Now, this PC is behind a corporate firewall and has Symantec protection I believe corporate edition. When the IT department installed JAWS on this PC there were initial glitches in installing it and activating it to the full version. Had something to do with Administrative privilages. Anyhow, this has nothing with the concern of this email. I started experiencing iratic behavior from JAWS on applications that were of my daily use. For example we use Microsoft Communicator 2007 as an internal communication tool or IM client as some of you may know it as. JAWS fails to announce the status of my contact in the contacts list, there is absolutely no clue if the contact is away, in a meeting, busy or just offline. Then on some web pages it failed to read elements like buttons and some links. In excel when I switch to the worksheet from another application, by default the home tab is already selected so I need to press the escape key before doing anything on the sheet. Sometimes, JAWS would just get paranoid and start reading arbid text from an application which is no longer in focus. This made me get really frustrated and I wrote to Freedom Scientific. They gave me a work around for my communicator issue, unfortunately it did not work as expected. I did a little research on the net and found out the culprit is the Symantec protection software that is blocking JAWS functionality. Here is what Symantec had to say on their website: You can create file exceptions for Tamper Protection. You might want to create a Tamper Protection exception if Tamper Protection interferes with a known safe application on your client computers. For example, Tamper Protection might block an assistive technology application. Source: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content <http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO80927> &id=HOWTO80927 Now my question is why does one have to got to go through this extra effort in adding JAWS or for that matter any other screen reader in the exemption list of applications in Symantec? Should not they have already figured out that this will create hinderances to any blind user in a corporate environment? Why can't Freedom Scientific OR Symantec take some ownership in creating a more accessible environment for a blind user when it comes to security. Lucky for me, I have some technical knowledge to back up my researching ability, imagine a novice blind computer user, he/she would have to go through a lot of trouble to demystify this strange behavior of his installed copy of JAWS. This is of most concern because there is no mention of this issue being reported by Freedom Scientific on their site. I am going to dig their forums to further investigate this claim of mine. Mujtaba Merchant Bangalore, India "Motivation is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going." ~ Jim Rohn For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/ For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/ For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
