Hartgen Consultancy Products with JAWS 18, What to expect.

Hi everyone

Since the very welcome release yesterday of Freedom Scientific's Podcast relating to the upcoming public beta of JAWS version 18, I can say that we have had a lot of enquiries about using it in conjunction with our products.

Before we begin, I have never advocated using any of our products with a JAWS public beta. Doing so means that JAWS is not working as Freedom Scientific intended as part of the public beta process, and if you were to submit bug reports having done so, you are not being entirely fair to them. However, as is clear from the flood of Email messages I received this morning, some people do want to use it with our products, so here is everything you need to know.
Please read this carefully. There is a lot to take in.

Our scripts for StationPlaylist Studio, J-Dictate and Leasey will all work with JAWS 18. If you ensure you download the latest releases of all of these products from our website, you will find the installers do accommodate JAWS 18. Simply select JAWS version 18 as part of the install process.
All of these products have been thoroughly tested with JAWS 18.

J-Say will not function with JAWS 18 and is not expected to do so until November/December of this year. As a side note, that is earlier than our usual release schedule of January/February of the new year.

JAWS 18 contains a feature which allows you to migrate settings from version 17 into 18. This will appear the moment JAWS is installed and started. If you are using one of our products, particularly Leasey, you should not attempt this process. Remember, this is beta software, and at the moment there are particular instances where, if some third party scripts are housed in JAWS 17, the migrate feature does not work.

If you wanted to install Leasey into JAWS 18, and bring over your Leasey settings, Placemarkers and JAWS dictionaries etc, I will now walk you through it safely.
you should:
1. Download Leasey 3.2 from our website.
2. Install into JAWS 18.
3. Run JAWS 18.
4. When prompted to migrate settings from an earlier version, select the "No" Button by pressing the letter "N". Do not press Escape otherwise you will be asked about this each time you start JAWS.
5. Press the Leasey Key then Control+Shift+B for the Leasey Backup and Restore Manager.
6. Select Inherit Settings from an Earlier JAWS Version.
7. Finally, select Inherit Settings from JAWS 17.
The settings will be brought over and JAWS will be restarted. This should take about 5 seconds.

That's everything, you should be good to go.

I should also point out that there is an import/export facility in JAWS 18. This is very cool as it allows you to take all your JAWS 18 settings and place them on another computer. It works flawlessly.

When you export your settings in this way, JAWS creates a file which you can then take to the other computer which you own and import. One of the possible uses for this feature is to share settings with other users. If our products are installed, this will not function, as each product is registered to a specific JAWS serial number and you will be doing your fellow JAWS users a serious disservice.

If you do wish to share settings with other users, and our products are installed, you should be very selective about the settings you choose to export and give to the other users. As you would expect, this can be achieved in a very accessible and easy way, but you need to be careful.

Within our upcoming training course relating to JAWS, I will provide full tuition on how to work with this feature in the proper manner. To find out about the course, please visit
www.hartgen.org/catchup

The new Import/Export/Migration facility has been a feature people have wanted for a very long time, and in the right circumstances, it works perfectly. But as a company, it is imperative that this blog post is published so as to hopefully minimise the number of technical support queries we will undoubtedly receive. We would far rather concentrate our limited resources on assisting people who are in genuine need.

I hope the above helps you before you install and use the public beta of JAWS version 18, and do enjoy working with it!