Hi All,

I just had a really strange issue. The solution was to use NVDA instead 
of Jaws. Since the situation in general doesn't seem screen reader 
related, I'm wondering why it happened and am curious to hear any thoughts.

I collect student homework by email. Students send attachments, which I 
save, read later in word, and respond to also in an email attachment.

To limit the spread of viruses, the campus email system puts all 
attachments in protected view, so when I open student documents in Word, 
I need to enable saving in order to get an easy word count, etc. For 
whatever reason, I find it distracting and annoying to enable saving 
when I'm in the throes of grading, one step too many when my goal is to 
move on, so I open all the files and enable saving before I read the 
first one.

The process is to open word, go into the Open dialog, select the first 
five files in the folder, press enter; then in each file, press F12, tab 
to Enable Saving, press enter, and press ctrl+w to close. When I'm done, 
I select the next five files and go through the same process.

I did this today. When I'd get to the third or fourth file, Word would 
appear to freeze. Jaws didn't give me any feedback on the file: the 
screen was reported as blank whether I arrowed, used say-all, or used 
ins+b; pressing alt, F12, or ctrl+w produced no response; even the Jaws 
cursor got me nothing. If I hit alt+alt to go into another program or 
document, everything was fine.

the first time this happened, I thought the problem was with the file. I 
tried unsuccessfully to close Word, but eventually shut down the 
computer, restarted and tried the same file again. The file worked 
perfectly, so I thought the strange behavior had been a fluke.

but when I opened the next set of files, the exact same thing happened. 
And it happened yet again. so I thought I should try opening fewer 
files; maybe the problem was that Word couldn't handle four unprotected 
files. The same thing happened yet again.

Since I'd restarted my computer four or five times at this point, I 
decided that, instead of restarting another time, I would try NVDA in 
case there was a notification Jaws wasn't reporting. With NVDA, however, 
I had no trouble reading the file or enabling save. So just for giggles, 
I tried opening five more files and enabling saving on each of them as I 
described earlier, and with NVDA, I had no problems at all.

I'm using Jaws 15, NVDA, Word 2013, and Windows 8.1.

Why would Jaws behave so strangely and so consistently every X number of 
files when it did just fine with the rest of them? Just wondering.

Ciao


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