JAWS and SBL Files

Like the tactile map write up, I'll cut to the chase and post the video here on how to modify JAWS SBL files:

JAWS is a program that, while it has its fair share of critques (Freedom Scientific can we please get some better voices for this), it is actually an incredibly designed program. What the engineers have done to make it work across as many platforms, browsers, and document types is genuinely a technological miracle. I STILL wish the voices were a bit better, but for now I will give credit where credit is due.

Still, JAWS still comes up short in a few area. JAWS can only recognize so many symbols, so what do you do if there are new symbols that are created that were not included in the origianl JAWS symbol library? In this particular scenario, we had a student who was taking an English class that talked about International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA) symbols. Not only is this subject matter hard, but what really makes this stuff fun is the fact that IPA symbols do not always have a name associated with them. Instead, they are meant to represent a sound. This is done so linquistic experts can have a universal way to represent sounds, regardless of the language they are studying. While this is great if you are a linguistic expert, if you are taking an introductory English class that has IPA symbols as a subject mattter, AND you are using a screen reader that cannot recognize these symbols, it makes this an impossible task and class.

Let me go ahead and link the article that the video above is based on, and that my student assistant found for me. In short, you need to go into the JAWS files, find the voice file for the voice that your user likes to use the most, and add in the hex values for it that tell JAWS how to pronounce the symbol. The symbols all have a hex value associated with them, so when the screen reaer comes across the symbol, they refer to the symbols that are in the SBL file. If the hex value is there, it will read whatever you put in the file. If it is not there, it will skip over it.

The obvious question that still remains is "if these symbols dont have a name associated with them, how is associating the symbol and the hex value with the name going to help?" And you got me there. I don't know if this is the 100% best way to solve this issue, but for my particular user in this particular course, it was the perfect answer. They took the class, knew all the symbols, and aced the class and final.