From Alberto Piovani's article published in the mailing list of Porte Aperte sul Web, a community for accessibility to school-related websites - USR Lombardia.

JAWS is a Windows compatible software designed for persons with severe visual impairment. It is distributed by Freedom Scientific (in English), and by Subvision of Milano (in Italian), in a time-limited free trial version. Either in an artificial voice or, when duly set and coupled with a special display, through the touch-readable Braille system, JAWS reads what appears on the computer screen in several languages.

Here are a few directions and Jaws prompts to help you as you experiment with the software.

You can install Jaws 9.0, Italian version, after downloading it here: link

Since it is a free version, there is no customer assistance to go with it. Too bad! The trial version (nearly 100 mb) is just like the full version, but after forty minutes of use it will stop working and you will need to start it again.

If you own a previous version of Jaws, the prompts I'll list below will still work, although you might get slightly different answers the Web pages or PDF files.

Whether you install the new version or use an older one, do not change Jaws' default settings, except for the potentially bothersome auto-start settings.

While reading Web pages, depending on the virtualization of the page, you can experience an imperfect alignment of your cursor with the Jaws cursor, showing what is being read. It can also happen that while you see text on the screen, Jaws goes on to read in the next page.

• What you see and what you hear are different;|
• What you see is completely ignored;|
• What you see becomes, in Jaws' words, a "graphic nnn".|

• Ins+F4, allows you to download the software from the memory;|
• Ctrl, pushed once, will stop the reading;|
• Ins+F6, will show you a list of the headings/titles present in a Web page or a virtualized page (like a PDF file);|
• Ins+F7, will show you a list of easily accessible links;|
• Arrow Down, will move the Jaws cursor (and the reading) down to the next line;|
• Arrow Up, will move the Jaws cursor (and the reading) up to previous line;|
• Ins+Arrow Down, will start the reading from the point shown by the Jaws cursor to the end of the file/Web page;|
• Ins+ArrowUp, reads the line shown by the Jaws cursor;|
• Enter: by pushing Enter when the cursor shows a link, will activate the link (*1);|
• Enter, in the vicinity of objects like radio buttons, text boxes, etc. will allow you to interact with them, but you will have to use the Tab key to move from object to object. To exit this mode, push the + key on the keypad(*2).|

(1) When moving the Jaws cursor with the Arrow keys, you will find that all links are read as a separate line. This is no error, but an aspect of virtualization meant to make pages easier to manage.

(2) Remember to lock the keypad. I hope I didn't leave out important prompts, but bear patience with me if I did. Remember that Jaws comes with a good and complete online guide. (Ins+F1 for the quick guide; Ins+F1+F1 for the full guide).

Yours sincerely.