Technique for getting out of a frozen-speech situation caused by an application crash, using Narrator:
1. Launch Narrator with Windows+U. It should say at least "Utility Manager" or something like it, though it may not say much else. If it ever says, "Foreground window," you need not do the rest of this because your system should allow you to get speech from your screen reader of choice. Jump to step 7 in that case. 2. If you heard nothing and you're running Vista, press Space once, which should activate Narrator if I remember correctly. 3. (optional) Close Utility Manager with Alt+F4. You probably won't hear much if anything. 4. Begin the following repetition: Alt+Shift+Tab, Ctrl+Shift+Space. Alt+Shift+Tab will cycle through your open windows in reverse, and Ctrl+Shift+Space will start reading the entire window for whatever your Ctrl+Shift+Tab activated. Do this until you find the crashed application. 5. When you find the crashed application: If it's a Microsoft error box, press Space to close it. In the unlikely event that Space doesn't work, try Shift+Space. If it's just an application window but you know or suspect it's hung, type Alt+F4, wait about ten seconds, then type Ctrl+Shift+Space again. You'll probably get one of those boxes that says, "This program is not responding. If not, and the app window is still up, try Alt+Shift+F4 instead of Alt+F4." 6. Type Alt+E to close the "not responding" window and also shut down the corresponding application. If Alt+E does nothing in about 20 seconds, try Alt+Shift+E. 7. Some time after you do this, Narrator should start getting chatty and will start saying "Foreground window" as focus changes from app to app again. If the application you shot down was your screen reader, find and unload Narrator and then relaunch your screen reader. If the app you shot down was something else, your screen reader has also most likely become quite noisy by now. I recommend unloading narrator, then unloading and reloading your screen reader, just to make sure the unloading of Narrator does not mess up your screen reader flag. A note about the extra Shift variants of keystrokes: I find these work when the screen reader itself crashed but still hooks a lot of standard keystrokes, like Alt+F4. The Shift bypasses the dead hooks and makes the keystrokes work as intended. Best of luck. All this probably sounds messy, but I'm afraid it became second nature to me after enough crashes. On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 08:16:06AM -0700, jim grimsby Jr. wrote: Actually this is not a window eyes problem, you will note, this happens with all screen readers. try loading nonvisual desktop access, and have such a crash, then you would have to use window eyes to recover. job accessed with speech routinely has this problem. As far as I can remember, this was a problem with window eyes 6.1 as well. It should also be noted that Michael from GW micro has already stated that they are working on a possible solution to this problem post 7.0. Hope this helps. -----Original Message----- From: Marvin Commerford [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 7:46 AM To: Mike Pietruk; John G Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: instability problems Hi. There's another situation that crops up on my system quite often. It seems that WE has crashed but in fact it has not. If, for example, Windows Explorer crashes an error dialog pops up. On my system it totally locks WE up. No WE key works like the ctrl-insert-f4 to close WE. No speech comes through at all. If I start NVDA I can navigate to the error dialog. Once I close the error dialog WE also starts talking again. I turn off NVDA and continue with what I was doing. So, WE didn't crash but somehow it's locked out until the error dialog is closed. I hope this at some point can be resolved since I don't remember having to do the same thing in 6.1 when Explorer blew up. It's possible that this just happens on this machine. In the mean time I do have a reasonable work around that seems to work all the time. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Pietruk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "John G" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 7:59 AM Subject: Re: instability problems >I Truly believe that much of this is due to turning on scripts -- and > probably specific scripts if one wished to take it a bit further. > I've turned off scripting using it only sparingly, and it is now reacting > more or less as 6.1 did. > Yes, there are the occasional speech losses; but I have learned to expect > this since day 1. > Probably, if one began isolating scripts, certain ones may be causing > given individuals more of a headache. > This may be a necessary tradeoff opening the screen reader to this new > power. > Given that these often will be 3rd party creations, this may be a bit > tricky to deal with at times. > > > Be good and true; be patient; be undaunted. Leave your usefulness for God > to estimate. > He will see to it that you do not live your life in vain. > Scottish preacher George Morrison > > If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original > sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and > your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending > your message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so the entire list will receive it. > > All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and > can be searched through and sorted using the search > form at the bottom of the page. > > If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include leave gw-info in the body > of the message. > If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. -- Doug Lee, Senior Accessibility Programmer SSB BART Group - Accessibility-on-Demand mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ssbbartgroup.com "While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done." --Helen Keller
