JAWS for Windows developed by Freedom Scientific is one of the most widely used screen readers in Euro-language speaking countries. In this section, key concepts required to understand the operation of JAWS for Windows are introduced. Other screen reading products also employ similar concepts, thus understanding those in JAWS should help understanding other products as well.
You can access the entire documentation on JAWS from the Help menu in the JAWS window, or from the context menu which is opened as you do INS + J. The help documents explain all the concepts and details of JAWS commands and can be used as the reference document.
Another way to access the help system is to press INS + F1. Pressing this key combination once shows a brief help, and if it is pressed twice quickly in succession, you are taken to the part of the help document that explains how to use JAWS in conjunction with the application program you are currently using.
Another tool to aid you when you use JAWS is the keyboard help mode, which can be turned on and off by pressing INS + 1 (1 in the number row, not in the number pad.) When keys are pressed within the keyboard help mode, the functionality assigned to the keystroke is announced. If the same key combination is pressed twice quickly, detailed information on the functionality is provided.
In order to use JAWS, users must understand the concepts of three different types of cursor which are explained briefly below.
The PC cursor is the cursor, or the caret, on the screen. When PC cursor is active in JAWS, pressing arrow keys moves the caret on the screen. When PC cursor is active, users cannot go to any part of the screen where the caret cannotbe placed. For example, users cannot use the PC cursor to go up and read the title bar. This, however, is most commonly used cursor, and is sufficent in most tasks.
JAWS cursor is linked to the mouse pointer. When the JAWS cursor is active in JAWS, preesing arrow keys causes the mouse pointer to move, and at the same time, the part where the mouse pointer is moved to is read by JAWS.
The primary purpose of the JAWS cursor it to allow users to read part of the screen where the PC cursor cannot go to. This sometimes helps users to have a good understanding of how things are laid out in the window. At the same time, it can be used to emulate mouse operations. For example, when there is a button that cannot be activated by any keyboard operation, users can find it by moving the JAWS cursor, and click on the button using the mouse button emulation keys. The mouse emulation keys are the ``/'' and the ``*'' keys on the numpad, and they are equivalent to let mouse button and right mouse button respectively.
When the JAWS cursor is active, users must keep in mind that pressing the arrow keys does not affect the caret on the screen. Thus, it is not possible to select, and cut/copy and paste using the shift key and the arrow keys when the JAWS cursor is active.
The Virtual PC cursor is similar to the PC cursor except that the caret is not affected by key press. This mode is availble in several specific application programs, and the Internet Explorer is probably the most commonly used application amongst them. Another such application program is the help file viewer.
When Internet Explorer is started, the Virtual PC cursor becomes active. In this mode, users can use the arrow keys to read through the document opened by the Internet Explorer, even though the caret on the screen does not move. Users can select, and cut/copy and paste using the shift key and the arrow keys just as in the PC cursor mode.
A very important thing for both users and instructors to remember is that even when reading through a page using the down arrow key, it doesn't necessarily mean that what seems to be one line on the screen is read at once. One press of the down arrow could read just a part of a line, or several lines at once. How much information is read by one press of down or up arrow key depends on how the page is written in HTML. Without remembering this, users may get a wrong impression that all the Web pages on the net looks quite tall and narrow.