As Jaws version 5 came into our hands, so did the speech and sounds manager. Jaws 9's out now: what difference has the manager made?
Dated: Tuesday, February 26, 2008.
The speech and sounds manager was a revolutionary concept when introduced, but it didn't half confuse this curious fifteen-year-old. I'd grown up with hardware synthesizers for my text-to-speech and learned to use a computer in word perfect 5.1 and DOS. When windows, JAWS and Eloquence came along I fell in love (and abhor using any other synthesizer to this day, so much so that I'll buy a lesser product if it uses it over DECtalk or whatever). So the reasons for people wanting to use sounds in place of verbal queues was something of a mystery to me.
Almost five years on, I still only use one feature of the speech and sounds manager - and that's a slightly different voice for various things (such as headings, web links and quoted text). Even here I only adjust the pitch at most by a factor of 20%, usually less than. Whilst navigating the web, intrusive bongings, pianos and beeps are of little interest to me - those elements I care about (such as links and headings) I denote with an adjusted voice, and the rest I let be. Equally if I'm reading fiction for pleasure (as I do often), hearing the quoted text in that slightly different voice is all that I could want. Granted, tagging spoken text from narrative in a novel and assigning specific voice characteristics could be interesting, but of limited practicality and even less feasibility.
I do wonder what I'm missing out on sometimes, though. As my cursor slides passed the speech and sounds manager in Jaws' configuration manager, I do sometimes stop and think "Hmm"... I had a look earlier at the sheer range of control types, and noted you could assign different voices, sounds, or textual labels to buttons, checkboxes, list views, even table rows and cells. I got to wondering just how useful this sort of feature is. As I understand the way it works the sound plays simultaneously with the text (so an OK button would read as "OK" with a sound at the same time, were it set up so).
My conclusion? Who can say. I don't know the use of such a system well enough because I don't use it myself. I can see the potential to speed up work and productivity - and in a competitive world, that's important. But its also just one more thing to back-up. We have enough of a time customising new computer systems as is. I guess if you're a fairly stable user with an established system, this may be one way to go. Hearing the type of the control is rarely necessary for advanced screen reader users anyway - after all, we all know that you can't select two or more radio buttons in the same group or that buttons aren't editable text. Still, in a world where Freedom Scientific seem to be falling behind in the screen reader market, we cannot forget the significance of the Speech and Sounds Manager.
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