Jawter: Twitter from Jaws with no software in the middle.
1. The New Jawter2. Jawter 0.5
Jawter (Now at BETA version 0.5) is a set of scripts for the JAWS Screen Reader that allow you to interact with Twitter, the insanely popular micro-blogging social networking site - without the need for any external software. In essence, Jawter turns your screen reader into a Twitter client.
Jawter managed a staggering 8 hours of private beta testing. Then the world went mad and everyone wanted a copy; there’s a download link at the bottom of this post for everybody.
This means you’re welcome to test Jawter out, but if you’re interested in trying there’s stuff you need to know before you get started.
What are people saying?
Feedback has been very positive so far - Tweets about Jawter have included phrases like:
- “You’re gonna love Jawter”,
- “You should’ve put your name down for a private beta”,
- “I have to say I’m impressed “,
- “There are so many things you can change, that’s one of the things I like about it”,
- “Jawter is Cool”,
- “Now that I am using Jawter it is easier for me to tweet”,
- “Jawter seems to be working really well here”,
- “Jawter working beautifully “,
- and the very first one from my lovely fiancee Kim - “this is guinea pig to world, posting from Jawter”…
Also, there have been several audio presentations and demonstrations. Earle Zwicker has recorded a Podcast at Blind Cool Tech, which showed quite an early version of Jawter, in very thorough detail. Darragh Ó Héiligh Has discussed and recorded Jawter demonstration and installation audio on His Website, and Rick harman From The Blind Geek Zone has recorded a podcast About Twitter, and various accessible ways of accessing it. The discussion of Jawter starts approximately 42 minutes into the presentation.
Because Jawter is a plug-in for JAWS, it will not run whilst JAWS is inactive. The earliest version of JAWS I have been able to test is 7.0, you’re more than welcome to try it on an earlier version if you use one.
Please read these sections carefully - particularly the one listing bugs. Remember:
- This is beta software - it is very untested, very unpredictable - and great fun to play with.
- The instructions are not complete and you should Always back up your JAWS scripts before modifying them. Only try if you know what you’re doing - don’t risk losing your screen reader’s stability.
- This software is in no way affiliated with Twitter or Freedom Scientific and will be released as open-source when I judge it has become sufficiently stable.
The things you can currently do in Jawter are:
- Hear a sound when, at a specified interval, Jawter looks for new tweets on your friends timeline.
- Cursor through each tweet, hearing the name of the poster and the time the tweet was posted. The order in which sender, time and message text are spoken is easy to change. You can choose to hear the time (i.e. 11:00 AM), or a difference (5 minutes ago).
- post new updates (tweets) to twitter, with notification if your tweet got there successfully. You’ll also be notified if your tweet is too long and given the opportunity to adjust it before its final send-off. Furthermore, twitter commands work here - follow (to receive updates about a user), d (to privately message someone) and all the rest.
- Reply to a tweet - which sends the appropriate ID to twitter (and puts the username of the original sender before your tweet transparently), ready for your message. Some clients use a colon after the name, some don’t - you have the choice.
- You can send a user a direct message by choosing their name from a predefined list or entering it manually. Direct’s are private, unlike replies.
- You can virtualise a tweet (or the entire history of tweets). This puts them into the JAWS virtual viewer, where you can read them word-by-word, hear how something particular is spelled, or copy text to your clipboard. Each tweet has a reply link and, if you’ve virtualised your entire tweet list, you can flip through them in the viewer with JAWS paragraph navigation commands.
- You can copy a tweet directly to the clipboard with a double keypress without the viewer. The format of this tweet is customisable - by default, the tweet will contain a link to the user’s twitter profile.
- If a tweet contains a qualified URL, you can open it in your default web browser. From the browser window, you can also choose to see the tweet itself in a browser, or the home page of the user (if they’ve defined one).
- Jawter always keeps the last tweet in non-volatile memory. This means if you have a crash, bring your machine from standby or turn off for the night,Jawter can always show you the last update it retrieved. This also means that, the next time Jawter checks for updates, only those posted since the one you have saved will be retrieved - which saves bandwidth and time not only on your end but on Twitter’s, too.
The things Jawter doesn’t do yet
- At present, only your friends timeline is checked for updates. This means that any direct messages sent to you will not appear in Jawter. note that by default Twitter e-mails these updates to you.
- There is currently no way to:
- Favourite or un-favourite an update. This will be relatively easy to implement. famous last words…
- Retweet. Not an official Twitter function but requested nonetheless.
- Read more than the last saved tweet. For instance, if you turned off JAWS without reading your updates and come back to find a new batch, only the one before the new set (i.e. the last one of which Jawter was aware before termination) is saved. Put more simply, Jawter only saves the latest tweet when it exits - the rest are lost. This is partly a design feature - 1 is a safe number and stops memory getting out-of-hand.
- It is an API limitation of Twitter that only 200 updates can be retrieved at once. This means that if you’re away for a while or you follow many people, Jawter may not retrieve everything you’ve missed in a given period.
Jawter also has several things; call them bugs for want of a better term. Some I can fix and some I can’t so we’ll go through them here.
- Whenever new tweets arrive, my system default beep sound is played.
- Well if yours isn’t, mine certainly is - and I have no idea why. One to work on.
- Sometimes JAWS speaks strange characters in my tweets. why?
- I suspect this is an encoding issue. If you find any, please be good enough to virtualise them, copy out the culprits and pass them along to me.
- After I reply to a tweet from the virtual viewer, the viewer disappears.
- This is standard behaviour - just call it up again if you need it.
- The New Tweets are coming in but my virtual viewer isn’t refreshing itself.
- It isn’t designed to - the viewer provides a static oasis of calm in which you can examine any existing tweet(s) at your leisure. Simply press the Hotkey again to refresh it.
- I want Jawter to check for updates more/less frequently: how do I get the configuration box back up?
- Pound on your Jawter Toggle key 2 or 3 times in quick succession. By default ctrl+windows+j, this key lets you turn Jawter on or off. Hit it enough times quickly and you’re settings are requested again. note that your username and password are retained - you can hit “Ok” at the prompts without needing to re-type them in.
Jawter System Requirements
Jawter takes advantage of XML and HTTP components. I am unclear whether these components come with Internet Explorer or as a native part of windows. Thus far, I’ve seen Jawter running successfully on Windows XP (sp3) and Vista.
Jawter Keys
Here’s a quick summary of the keys and what they do. they are all JAWS keys, just like anything else and after installation you can modify them accordingly.
- Ctrl+Windows+j
- This is the Jawter toggle key - ordinarily you don’t need to bother with it. pressing it will turn Jawter’s update function on or off, pressing it a few times in succession will pop-up the Jawter configuration options. If installed correctly Jawter starts with JAWS and will do its first update check x minutes after JAWS is loaded - x being the time interval you set on configuration. If you’ve turned Jawter off, it will never update until you turn it back on.
- Ctrl+Windows+n
- This key lets you compose a “new” tweet. If you write more than 140 characters, Jawter pops the chunk of your tweet that will fit back up for you to edit. A requested feature is to put the whole tweet back just as you typed it, letting you edit the whole thing (in other words, for Jawter not to chop the end off). Coming soon. If you just enter “@” (an At sign) here and hit enter, you can choose to whom you wish to direct a tweet. Note that by “direct” we mean in public..
- Ctrl+Windows+r
- lets you reply to a tweet
- ctrl+windows+D
- Allows you to send a direct message (which is private). there’s no reading of direct’s sent to you yet.
- Ctrl+Windows+v
- Virtualise a tweet. This lets you put a single tweet or, with two keypresses all stored tweets, in the virtual viewer.
- Ctrl+windows+b
- Views a tweets URL(s) in a browser.
- ctrl+windows+f5
- Refreshes tweets (if you can’t wait a few minutes).
- Ctrl+Windows+cursor up, down, home and end
- These keys let you select the tweet on which the various functions operate, and read them as you move through. any new tweets will offset the cursor for you, so all you need do is ctrl+windows+up to read the new ones until you’re at the top again. Then you can leave your cursor for the next update.
- Ctrl+windows+f1
- Provides a help screen and some further options.
Download Jawter
The latest version of Jawter is beta 0.5 and you can Download it here.
Please, please read the readme file within the archive before blasting off without any idea what you’re doing.
New in this one:
- times are now much more customisable.
The $time variable in the templates has changed. Upon configuration, Jawter will now ask you for your UTC offset (after trying to automatically determine it). If it can’t find it then you can enter the number manually. - If you don’t want the “ago” format, you can use “$time2″ in plae of “$time”. You can also format how this is handled through the INI file. Kevin, I owe you for this one.
- you can now send direct messages with ctrl+windows+D.
- You can now tell Jawter to grab upto 200 tweets on a hard refresh, rather than the 20. The default remains as it was, though.
- if you turn Jawter off with ctrl+windows+j it now stays off. thanks to Brian for this one.
- Finally, huge thanks to everyone - I didn’t download Jawter over a thousand times myself, after all. The messages of support, the audio some of you have recorded, the tweets, retweets, recommendations and resourcefulness of all of you is truly great to see. Bugs - to me on twitter, to me by email, suggestions the same, welcome and all read.
Beta 0.2 was originally intended for the private beta team - but the request list increased seven-fold in an eight hour period and showed no signs of slacking. It is for this reason that I would sincerely like to thank all the privateers, and to let them (and you) know that all and any feedback is always welcome.
You can be alerted to new jawter versions by following me on twitter, or subscribing to this page comments rss feed. Failing that, you can visit this page - there’s a link from Jawter’s help screen. I don’t know when the next update will be or how major or minor; but this is the place to find it.
In closing
Jawter’s been stupendous fun to write thus far - and I can only hope it goes further.
Now that you can try jawter yourself, I’d be tremendously grateful if you’d leave a comment here - either just to say you’ve downloaded it, or with some thoughts. if you don’t want your comment published, say so (in the comment) - nobody sees it but me. If you wish to remain anonymous and have your comments posted, I’ll gladly remove your name.
I ask this not just for my ego (although it’s nice to get that patted once in a while), but also for those who find modifying their JAWS to such an extent a little daunting. it can be a scary prospect - your positive comments might just help someone take the step.
I’ll also be happy to talk anyone through an installation; we can schedule some help over Skype, IRC, an IM session (or if it comes to it, maybe even a phone call). yet again, clicking “leave a response” takes only a few seconds - response can also mean request, you know.
Of course I have to thank people - Kim; for her patients, Twitter; for their fantastic API, my followers (for putting up with my spammy test message tweets) and everyone who’s given me help (in whatever form - support, assistance, testing and spreading the word).
there’s a way for Jawter to go yet - it’s not perfect. Yet in using it, I feel so natural - it’s almost as if Twitter, and the whole community I can reach there through, has become an extension of my screen reader (which is, as you are all doubtless aware, a constant companion). there’s no feeling of distance - no loading up a separate window or even logging in to a web page - it’s just there, and the lives of those in whom I take an interest are laid out in front of my ears - all in little 140-character-or-less chunks.
I hope you can share this feeling with me too. Beta software is always a risk and if you want to wait until the product is a little more rich, I don’t blame you in the least. But if you are giving it a whack, be careful, and tweet responsibly!
Jump to:
February 8th, 2009 at 7:22 am
I would like to test your approach. My twitter name is tuukkao.
February 8th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
When it’s ready, it will involve modification of your default JAWS script file and updating of the default Keymap. If you’re OK with that, please keep the comments coming in.
I’m also going to apologise - if your comment doesn’t appear here be assured that I’ll get to approving it at some point. if you want to test but don’t want your comment to be public, say so in the comment - I do read them before approving them.
February 8th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Yeah, I’m bored and want something to play with. @BorrisInABox
February 8th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Would love to test this thing. My twitter name is serrebi. Modifying it default script is fine with me, this sounds like an interesting aproach for a twitter client.
February 9th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Would ilke to help test your jawter client am kevinrj on twitter
February 9th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Hi I would love to test. My twitter username is elliott94
February 10th, 2009 at 2:51 am
Page updated with keystrkes, current bugs and beta schedule for those of you following the comment feed.
Bed time (nearly 3:00 AM here), by this time tomorrow all you private testers will have nice scripts to install.reuests
February 10th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
This thing is amazing.
February 10th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
I would also like to try this. KVP2008 on twitter. Running JAWS 10.0, Windows XP SP3, Internet explorer is installed and this machine is newly formatted if that helps.
February 10th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Those of you on OS X, who want to have a similar (yet different) experience, should check:
http://drikin.com/twitterpod/
The accessible OSX mailing lists get this question daily. Twitterpod is accessible, and reads out all new tweats with growl. command shortcuts allow for visiting a twitter page, visiting the link in a tweat, replying to a tweat, etc. All tweats are saved locally, and can be searched with spotlight. Direct messages are supported.
February 12th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Keep up the great work with Jawter. Installing it was simple, and I believe a beginner could even follow the extremely detailed instructions in the readme file. It’s so cool to be able to update twitter without going to the web site. The best part of Jawter in my opinion, is I can check my twitter updates at any time, with just a few keystrokes.
February 13th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Jawter is a good thing, I love it.
February 13th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Yo! Jawter is cool!!! I found one problem though, when I post a new tweet it says posting failed, but it worked. Thanks!
February 13th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
At Chris’s insistance, I checked it out. While I’d initially not really understood why one would even want a client, I’ve already come to rather like this one. Nice work, and look forward to seeing what you do with it.
February 14th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Very cool client you have cooked up. I’ve been playing for about 5 minutes and think the utility of it is fantastic. Been watching and hoping for an accessible client.
Couple of thoughts.
1) With regard to the Replies function I submit that most people (as in fact the Twitter site itself does not, do not use a colon after the username being replied to. Also, a suggestion for handling the overtype issue. Extract the “@username” into a variable, get the length of the variable plus a space, change the “overflow” length of the tweet to 140 less the calculated length, and set the input box prompt to “Reply to username”. Just a thought
2) curious if you’re extracting real name instead of username on purpose?
Again, this is very cool and I’m quite impressed. Keep it up. Thanks for the great tool.
February 14th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Tony, Thanks for your feedback.
Firstly, you can remove the colon if you’d like by editing the template in the INI file. Whilst this doesn’t take care of anything really, it does give you an extra character to play with in your reply.
I’m re-writing the reply function as I type to do exactly as you suggest, which will stop the overflow issue.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by extracting the real name? I always assumed the use of a full name was preferable to a screen name - unless I’ve screwed up somewhere, the replies should always go to the screenname, and the use of a full name is what other clients I’ve used do (mobiel web doesn’t to save space, for instance).
I’m sincerely grateful for all comments and thoughts though, please keep them coming.
February 15th, 2009 at 5:23 am
I’d also like to see the screen name, at least when vurtualized, but it’s not a deal breaker for me either.
February 15th, 2009 at 11:26 am
The Jawter configuration file contains templates for how tweets are displayed. At time of writing (0.4) you can use $screenname, $user (which is the full name if given), $time, $text and $userURL in these variables. So it’s quite easy to add the screenname to the virtual template. Be wary of getting 0.4 if you haven’t already, it’s a bit problematic - I’ll release a patch for it in the next few hours.
February 16th, 2009 at 4:16 am
Wow. Jawter is really cool. I hardly ever used to post with some dumb client I used to use, because it kept minimizing to the systray or something, I dunno it would just like disappear but still be in the processes list. In a nutshell it was an absolute pain. What I like about Jawter is that it’s there, there’s no applications that need launching. What’s really cool is the sounds it makes, and I think you can even make your own if you don’t like the defaults, because they’re standard wave files. (I think.). Sorry for the long comment but I had a lot to say.
From Andy
February 17th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Set aside time this morning to give this a go. Friends have tried it and say it is a must have. Wish me luck.
February 17th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Jawter is friggin amazing. For anyone who is apprehensive about trying it due to the somewhat technical nature of installation, don’t worry. If you do exactly what the ReadMe says, you’ll have no problems. I’ve never modified a script file in my life and I just got it up and running a few minutes ago. it friggin rocks, man. Thanks Sean for an awesome set of scripts, and thanks to Earle for reviewing it on BlindCoolTech, which is where I heard of Jawter in the first place. GO JAWTER!! WOOOO!
February 17th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Oh, I apologize for posting two comments in a row but if any of you want to follow me on twitter, my twitter ID is cary5871. at the moment I’m pretty boring but with jawter I’ll probably be posting all the time. wooo!!!!
February 18th, 2009 at 1:33 am
Think I’ll give this a try. I’m using twitterlicious now. My username on twitter is blindndangerous.
February 18th, 2009 at 11:16 am
this is the most amazing thing ever!awesome job and very clear, easy to understand readme
February 19th, 2009 at 12:17 am
I love jawter only had it 12 hours or so. for me install was simple i just wish window-eyes users could have somethin like this. hmmm nice to suggest on script central out there. only thing is sometimes it doesnt say if a tweet was sent and my windows key gets stuck but i think thats just psycho thats what i call my computer. 256 megs of ram also jaws sometimes forgets it needs to actually talk, but i give it a sec and she works fine. but yeah, i love the thing all the same psycho works worse on the twitter website. heck any site at that.
February 20th, 2009 at 6:42 am
This sounds amazing. I’m holding off on it until the time zone thing is address, but then I’m all over it. I tried twitter out for a bit but didn’t really care for it. But now, this just might win me over. The reason? Twitter can automatically set your facebook status. Facebook is something I do a lot more often, but I hardly set my status since when I get on facebook there is so much to do I forget to do that. Now it will be quick and easy, and I don’t have to worry about falling into a huge time drain if I’m in a hurry.
When this is released, how hard would it be to modify to be able to work with the facebook API? They do have one I suppose? Assume someone who has never done any scripting. That’s a project I’d like to tackle.
Thanks for the good work!
February 20th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Just grabbed the scripts today and posted. You can follow me as diannaamarich on Twitter. I like the approach; it’s now built-in to JAWS; easy to use. The instructions were very clear and I had no problems.
February 21st, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Not sure how to leave you some feed-back about jawter. Great little program first of all! Just a couple of suggestions: 1.) It would be nice to be able to append individual tweets to the clipboard. 2.) I’m in the US, and we of course divide our days into 2 halfs. It’d be nice to hear 1:30 PM in stead of 13:30. Hope these aren’t too overwhelming, but I figure you’d appreciate knowing what users are thinking. Many thanks once again.
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:02 pm
This is really some cool stuff. Well done. I’m very impressed.
I posted about it on my blog. HOpefully anyone who uses Twitter will hear about it.
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:22 pm
To help any users with the installation of this, I have posted two audio walk thorughs to http://www.lalrecordings.com
………………………………………….
The first recording will guide users through the installation of these scripts.
The second recording is a review / introduction of the Jawter client.
Please Email me with any questions.
http://www.lalrecordings.com/audio/jawter-review.mp3
http://www.lalrecordings.com/audio/jawter-installation.mp3
February 24th, 2009 at 11:48 am
[...] Jawter: Twitter from Jaws with no software in the middle [...]
February 24th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
I’m working on a main menu review for jawter! Once it airs I’ll tweet about it!
February 24th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
[...] L’autore l’ha testata con Jaws 7.0 e sembra funzionare adeguatamente. Che dire se non provatelo ed inviate eventuali commenti [...]
February 24th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
It looks like Jawter is not reading the entire 140 characters of each message. Is this possible? / known about?
Also, control + backspace does not work. this is very likely a limitation of Jaws though as your using a standard jaws input box.
February 25th, 2009 at 1:13 am
Hello. I absolutely love Jawter! I was rather skeptical when I first heard about it, and daunted by the install process. However, I had a friend help me with the install, and now find that I’m using Twitter even more frequently than I did before. (That’s a scary thought.) Thank you for coming up with this software: it’s brilliant. I look forward to more updates as you go along.
February 25th, 2009 at 9:55 am
it would be so cool if we could use control plus windows plus page up and down to jump by a set number of tweets
jawter rocks!
February 25th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Needs to be listed here: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps
(perhaps under beta software)
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Just downloaded 0.5 Beta. Two interesting phenomena to report: after downloading my initial 20 tweats, it downloaded them again after three minutes. Also, when I hit ctrl-windows-F5 to check for tweats, Jawter told me it wasn’t active, though when I hit ctrl-windows-j the first time it told me Jawter off, and I had to hit it a second time to turn Jawter back on.
I am pleased with the fixes and improvements though, and am looking forward to continued development on this program.
I know you told me once, but whom do I follow on Twitter to follow you?
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:04 am
One more question: if I want to issue Twitter commands, what is the actual sequence? I tried issuing the follow command in my tweat, and it just showed up as a tweat, rather than following my intended recipient. Would I have to do follow @username or d @username to follow or DM someone?
March 6th, 2009 at 8:21 am
frases clave…
Es cierto, gracias por compartirlo. Una herramienta a tener en cuenta es Key sentences, te permite ver no solo que palabras son las más interesantes, sino las frases que más venden….
March 10th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Jawter appears to not be dealing with Daylight Savings time, as tweet time stamps are an hour off.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
[...] a free script written for Jaws to work with twitter, written by Sean Randall. It’s called Jawter. Let me tell you, it makes tweeting fun! Once this script is installed, I don’t even have to [...]
March 28th, 2009 at 7:56 am
Have just installed Jawter and am im pressed. It’ll take me a little time to get used to not having Tweets in a separate window, but i do like the function to put them in the virtual viewer if necessary. I find keystrokes such as control, windows key, F5 a little difficult as I don’t have a right windows key on this laptop.
I would say though that the instructions are extremely clear and anyone should be able to follow them they are so well written. Just read them through carefully and follow each step at a time and you’ll be fine.
now just need to find out how to follow you on twitter and also to increase thenumber of tweets from 20.
April 21st, 2009 at 9:07 pm
For a *fully accessible Twitter web site*, try me, http://AccessibleTwitter.com.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
This looks really interesting. I’m really looking forward to using it. As I use Jawter more and more, I’m convinced that because of it’s incredibly simple interface it’s the best option for users of jaws but I’m also regularly inconveenienced by the pauses it causes with jaws when retreaving new messages.
Keep up the very good work.
May 12th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Just downloaded the jawter beta. heard many good things about it.
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:42 pm
[...] Jawter website [...]
May 25th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Well, I have just started using Jawter, and I find it to be very easy, even fun to use. My only issue with it is the anouncement of the time. That is, it will say that something arrived an hour ago, when I know full well that it just arrived. But that is not a major issue with me, and it is probably just something I am doing wrong, or something that I did wrong while installing it. Otherwise, it works beautifully. Also, a kind of advantage that I have using Jawter is that when I am posting from the web, my keys lag, and when I say lag, I mean maybe one and a half second lag. This can be quite frustrating as I am quite a fast typer, and when I make mistakes, it takes a few seconds to correct my many typing errors . But the second I started using Jawter, I found that there was no lag, and I could type as fast as I could. But above all things, I would like to thank you for creating this. This is the only program of its kind that I have seen. It is programs like this that make me not so hesitant to go on social networking sites, in fear that it will not be accessible to us blind users. Well, then there is the fact that I am usually not a social networking type of person. Now if only someone could make something like this for myspace! Grin. And if you or anyone would like to follow me, my user name is ali8923.