Hi all,

I had a weird experience with email the other day. I'm wondering if 
anyone knows what caused it or whether the screen reader plays a roll.

I've been exchanging email messages with someone about translation work, 
using this email address. When I finished the job, I sent the files 
using a different email address. It's an SBC Global address like this 
one, and the one I use for my business correspondence.

When the client replied, his message was blank. This has happened maybe 
half a dozen times, but in the past, when I've forwarded the message to 
myself or replied to it, changing the recipient's address to one of my 
own, I have been able to read the text. This time the message continued 
to be blank. In fact, it didn't even show the header for the previous 
message. I double-checked with OCR, and I asked a sighted person to look 
at the screen just to make sure. Then I asked the client to resend his 
reply.

When the client wrote to me again, Jaws and NVDA  reported one or two 
odd  characters and a lot of silence, suggesting there was something on 
the screen. I had a sighted person look, and she told me the message 
appeared to be written in Asian characters. This made no sense since the 
client is from western Europe and speaks a language that uses the same 
Roman alphabet as English. I asked him to resend one more time. I got 
another message in the same "Asian script."

Stumped, I wrote to him again using this email address, not the business 
address, and everything was fine.


We're both using Thunderbird, he in Linux and I in Windows 8.1. Neither 
of us has any active Asian fonts or input methods. Both of my email 
addresses are SBC Global, so what works on one should work on the other.

I'm using Windows 8.1, and I've got Jaws 15 and the current NVDA on my 
system. I don't think the presence of a screen reader has anything to do 
with the weirdness, but since I'm not sure why it happened, I'm kind of 
grasping at straws.

Any ideas?

Ciao


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