[Mailed to the JFW users' mailing list and to [EMAIL PROTECTED]] This is a proposal for a way to get JAWS to quit repeating words unnecessarily when you use Word-Left and Word-Right commands in Word, WordPad, or similar applications. As many of you have surely noticed, JAWS considers a "word" to be all characters surrounding the active cursor up to the nearest space in both directions. In other words, JAWS considers blank space to be the only word delimiter. Windows apps vary on this point: NotePad agrees with JAWS, while WordPad and Microsoft Word consider punctuation marks to be delimiters. More accurately (I think), Word and WordPad seem to consider a "word" to be all characters around the active cursor which are in the same character class as the character under the active cursor. A string of punctuation marks, for example, is considered a single word by Word and WordPad. How hard would it be to add a configuration option to JFW specifying what JAWS should call a word? This would then be used on an app-by-app basis to make JFW aggree with the app, thus avoiding a lot of word repeating when using word-left and word-right commands. My new students often get confused when hearing a word two or three times when using word-left and word-right commands when there is only one copy of the word present in the document. Considerations I can imagine: Some users might prefer the current behavior. Those users could set the new option for each of their favorite apps such that the behavior remains as it is now. There may be subtle variations among apps as to what they skip over with word-left and word-right commands, but I'd hate to require users to list word delimiters manually. I envision this problem being solved by two new options rather than one: A user-settable pair of radio buttons, like, "Words stop at spaces," and, "Words stop at character class changes," and an option in the JCF file, possibly not directly accessible in the Configuration Manager, which lists the characters in each class. I suspect this second option would not need changing much at all and could thus be set by Henter-Joyce in the shipped product. Any comments, further suggestions, complaints, etc., to this idea? -- Doug Lee, Computer Instructor Blindness: Learning In New Dimensions (BLIND), Inc. http://www.blindinc.org - Visit the jfw ml web page: http://jfw.cjb.net
