Category: Geeks r Us
Hi all,
So I've downloaded Apache Open Office, as a free alternative to Microsoft Office. It seems to work well.
But here's a problem I'm having, and I'm wondering if any of you can fix it.
Normally, if I open a document in Note Pad or Word Pad, I can just hit jaws key+down-arrow to read thhe whole thing, if that's what I want to do...and for some documents, that's precisely what I want.
Yet, in Open Office, this keystroke doesn't work. It reads by sentence instead.
I've checked Jaws settings, and I didn't change anything.
So I guess my questions are these:
1. Have any of you had this problem, and if so, is there a workaround?
2. If not, do you folks have a free suggestion instead of Open Office to read .doc files? A friend of mine has graciously given me a copy of his book, but it's a .doc file, and reading it sentence by sentence is going to be painful.
Thanks in advance.
I don't use this program, but here's a couple things to try.
Try using the page down instead one you have Jaws reading. When it stops, or is about to, page down.
Now, this next thing is much like the keystroke you are using, but a bit different.
On the 10 keypad use the number 2 instead of the down arrow.
I'm assuming when you say down arrow, you mean the arrow key in the 3 cluster. If I'm wrong, and you do use the number 2 along with the Jaws key, then that isn't your solution.
I am using a laptop, and my caps-lock key is my insert key. I am using caps lock+down arrow (as in, the actual arrows, not anything dealing with the number pad). This command works everywhere else (websites, word-pad or note-pad documents, etc), but does not work in Open Office for some strange reason.
Laptop. I dug these up from the manual. Give them a try on your program.
Start Skim Reading CTRL+CAPS LOCK+DOWN ARROW
Say All caps lock and A instead of the down arrow.
I know you already use the down arrow, but the A might work instead.
Jaws has keystrokes for paragraph reading and such too, so maybe you can get it to read faster, but have less hand motion if you can’t get it to say all.
To find all this information.
Open Jaws.
Arrow up to help.
Open it by pressing the right arrow.
Arrow down to keystroke commands.
Press enter on that, and arrow to the laptop ones.
Maybe you’ll find some in there that works for you.
I think my main question at this point, aside from the workaround, is why a keystroke which works virtually everywhere else does not work in Open Office.
And no, those things didn't work either, so I'm really at a loss here.
This is the first time I've seen this sort of thing happen.
Hi Greg,
You could see if Libre Office is any more accessible. Both it and Open Office
share similar code, but Libre Office is developed more quickly and can
incorporate Open Office features due to licensing peculiarities, whereas Open
Office can't incorporate Libre Office features.
The alternative might be to load the document into Google Docs and see if that
works.
Hi all,
So, a person actually sent me a private message with a solution that worked. Took a bit of fiddling, but it's perfectly doable.
It's a program called Jart that sort of acts like a hybrid between Word Pad and Microsoft Word. It auto-detects a screenreader as well, so I can use all my handy-dandy shortcut keys.
I still don't know why Jaws keystrokes would just stop working in a given program, but them's the breaks. I will have a play with Libra Office for fun at some point, but Open Office itself is gone from my system. No need for redundancy.
It has to do with coding. All programs aren't coded standard, so some keystrokes might not work.
FS may be able to tell you or provide a script for it however. That is basicly what the program you've found is.
I absolutely love Jarte!