Support in Leasey for Skype Version 8.

Hi to all

As many people know, Microsoft deferred its decision to retire Skype version 7 for a little while. But we must look forward, and so during September, we'll be releasing our support for Skype version 8. This will also be included within our J-Say product, naturally with voice commands added as you would expect.

Features include:
Pressing Control 1 through to Control 0 will read the last 10 messages sent or received in a chat window, with Control 1 giving you the most recent. Pressing any of the keystrokes twice quickly will place the message into the JAWS virtual viewer so you can read more slowly or check spelling.
Press Control+Shift+T to toggle on or off a sound which plays when someone is typing a message.
Irrespective of the above setting, F12 will report the name of the person typing if this is the case.
Control+F5 will toggle on or off the filtering of date and time stamps. If enabled, you will just hear the message which is incoming without its date and time.
Keystrokes exist to move to various elements within Skype, such as the chat text entry field.
Various other accessibility improvements.

In addition, one of the potential difficulties with Skype 8 is that people do not know how to use it. We have therefore introduced context sensitive help for many areas of Skype. For example, when focused in the conversations list, pressing Insert+F1 (which should be familiar to most people) will cause JAWS to output:
"This is the Skype conversations list. Press the Up or Down Arrow keys to move through the Buttons. Each Button represents a conversation in which you have taken part, and possibly the last activity such as a chat message. Press Enter or the Space Bar to open the conversation.
Press Escape to Close this Window."

We hope that the work done to support Skype 8 will not only provide a greater level of access to it, but will also give people an idea as to how to interact with specific controls with which they will be unfamiliar.

A comprehensive audio demonstration of this functionality will be available next week.

Have a great day!