For those who don't know the background, Tom Behler alerted us to a program called Chirp, free software that can edit data stored in the memories of several different radios from the "big three" manufacturers, as well as Wouxon, Alinko, and a few more.  He expressed interest in the program, but said he didn't have time to look at it, and hoped that someone else could, and would report their findings.  Since the program got good reviews from www.hamradioandvision.com, and the price was right, I downloaded and installed it on my laptop which runs Windows XP Pro with JAWS 12.  Here are a few observations:

1.  Although the program responds to some keyboard commands, it is by no means a standard Windows user interface.  For example: although you can activate the Radio menu with Alt+R and read the menu items by pressing the arrow keys, once inside the menus you will have to use the JAWS cursor to navigate.  JAWS will occasionally read items, but most of the time you don't really know where you are, and entering data requires using the JAWS keystroke for left-clicking the mouse.  It took me almost an hour to figure out how to select the com port and radio make and model, which is ok if you only have one radio, but a royal pain if you have more than one and want to switch between them.

2.  Although Help was one of the menu choices, I was unable to access anything in the Help system.  I looked in the program folder and didn't find anything even remotely resembling either a .HLP or .CHM file, both of which are standard Windows extensions for help files.  Since I found no other documentation, I have to assume that you're pretty much on your own when it comes to figuring out how this software works.

3.  Once I set up the COM port and manufacturer (in my case Kenwood), I was able to use the program's auto-detect feature to find the correct model.  This would have been more impressive if it hadn't taken so long to figure out how to select the port, etc.

4.  Once the data was read from the radio, a message popped up advising me that since the TM-V71A operates in "live mode" (whatever the hell that is), any attempt to change the data will send the altered data to the radio immediately, and that for best results, I should export the data to a .CSV file and edit it somewhere else.  Incidentally, I had to look around with the JAWS Cursor to find this message (not my idea of a good time).

5.  The data from the radio was presented in a table with each row representing the data from one memory.  I didn't try to change anything (see above), so I don't know how easy that would be, but given the rest of my experience with this software, it just didn't seem worth the bother.  Btw, JAWS couldn't recognize this as a table, which isn't much of a surprise given the non-standard user interface. 

I can't speak for programming software from other companies, but the programs from Kenwood are far more screen-reader friendly than Chirp, despite whatever quirks they may have.  Based on my experience thus far, I'd have to say that Chirp is about to be thrown into the bit bucket.

Steve