How the Notification History Coexists with our JAWS-Based Products.

Hi everyone

Many people will be aware that in the update to JAWS version 2022 just released, a feature is in place to support alerts and notifications sent by the focused application or Windows itself to the screen-reader. This was widely publicised in the Mosen at Large Podcast.

Of course, Jonathan Mosen, host of the podcast, provided an excellent demonstration of the capabilities of the Notification History feature, together with describing the kinds of alerts and notifications which are sent to JAWS and which potentially can be filtered out or viewed in a list.

In the interests of efficiency, some of our products have filtered out such alerts and notifications for some considerable time, so I want to tell you how our various products fit into the new tool Vispero are providing so you are not caught out.

To begin, my view is that this new tool is a very promising start to making it possible to extensively customise the speech and Braille output in such situations. However, what it does not do is:
A. Give you the ability to stop the announcement of Windows notifications. I work with many people in call centres, and they need a keystroke to disable them temporarily. This is also true in meetings. If you are presenting, you may not wish to hear them at all, which is why the Zoom scripts were initially developed. While I understand that it would be counterproductive to disable alerts which communicate essential aspects pertaining to what an application is telling you, Windows notifications and those from clients such as Teams are not essential, so there should be the ability to disable them.
B. It does not at this point give you the ability to abbreviate the output in so far as being able to give you only notification of a new Email which has arrived together with its author as Leasey and the scripts for Teams do. Hopefully however that will come in the next JAWS version.

Because of these points, the existing functions in the Leasey and Teams scripts especially will stay in place because people are relying on them.

What You Need to Know.

1. In both Teams and Leasey, if you want to create new rules in the new Notification History and have them acted upon rather than using our ability to abbreviate, you should press Insert+Space followed by Control+A until JAWS announces "You will be advised of new notifications in full". In fact this is the default setting, so if you've not changed an option in this regard there will be nothing to do.
2. If you use one of our tools to abbreviate notifications or to stop JAWS announcing them, these still work.
3. Zoom is a special case which is why I am sending this message to the Zoom Email list. Because the new Notification History list can only hold 500 entries, in consultation with me Vispero have made the decision to stop chat messages appearing there. Zoom alerts such as, "X has joined the call but cannot hear you yet", are displayed there unless you choose to filter them out. But any text chat messages will not get through. The Zoom scripts in any event do give you the ability to review them, and of course, to disable them from being spoken or sent to Braille.

I hope that clarifies where we are with the first run of this very welcome new JAWS feature.