Text console for development in JAWS?

Question

I'm working on a web application and I want to make it easy to use via screen reader. Testing stuff in JAWS is time consuming. Is it possible to make JAWS display text instead of reading it? I don't want actually to hear the content during development. I just want to see what would be read by JAWS.

Answer 1

There is no speech viewer for Jaws, as far as I know. However, you can make it write all speech output to a log file using the "/z" switch. Unfortunately, you cannot view the log file in a text editor while the screen reader is running, because it is locked. Open a command prompt or bring up the Run dialog by pressing Win+r and type: "jaws_executable" /z"log_file" Where "jaws_executable" is the full path and file name of the Jaws application and "log_file" is the location and name of the speech log file. Important: There should be no space between "/z" and the log file name.

Answer 2

I believe there is a visual indicator in JAWS, but my version of JAWS is being a bit wonky. These days, NVDA plays pretty similarly to JAWS, so you can use that, and it has a speech output console: Right click the NVDA icon in the system tray, select Tools, and Speech Viewer.

Answer 3

You can enable the Braille Viewer in Start Menu > All Programs > JAWS 14.0 > Braille Viewer.

Braille Viewer will render visual text output of what would be sent to a braille display. It sometimes uses abbreviations or shorthand but is a close representation of the speech output.

Also take a look at Fangs Screen Reader Emulator for Firefox. It will render a text output of what a screen reader would announce on a page, in the correct read order, though it does not render dynamic content.

Answer 4

The easiest way to see what a screen reader 'sees' is to disable the CSS. This will show you everything on the page that the screen reader can access. This will give you a good idea what is going on during development until you want to get into the more complicated stuff.

See http://www.iheni.com/quick-tip-testing-web-content-for-screen-readers-without-a-screen-reader/. This site has a lot of useful info too http://webaim.org/articles/.

Answer 5

This is an old thread, but since it came up top in my search I thought I'd update it. JAWS 15 has just introduced this capability through the "Speech History" feature. Follow these directions to enable it:

If you miss one or more messages spoken by JAWS, you can press INSERT+SPACEBAR, followed by H to open a Results Viewer window containing up to the last 50 announcements spoken by the synthesizer. When the Speech History window opens, you are placed on the line containing the most recent announcement. To clear the history, press INSERT+SPACEBAR, followed by SHIFT+H. The history is also cleared when you lock the computer or completely log off. If you do not want JAWS to maintain a speech history, clear the Enable Speech History check box in Settings Center.

Read more in the JAWS 15 What's New document under New Speech History for Speech-only Users.

For those of you stuck with JAWS 14, Nektarios Paisios answer using the "/z" log worked best for me.

Answer 6

JAWS is supplied with a Braille Viewer in the 'Utilities' folder, which will render any text from the focus.