When Beta is in the first screen

RantWoman is certain that she has emitted enough years of front line in-person tech support into the universe to be entitled to a flock of friendly, capable, accommodating gnomes who follow her around and troubleshoot details of her current interactions with electronica. The
universe apparently does not agree. Gnomes are scarce and just as
ornery, cantankerous, and erratic as RantWoman herself; in fact, RantWoman sometimes just resorts to the search engine of her choice.

RantWoman is NOT DOING THIS ANYMORE TODAY.

Someone in RantWoman's orbit did not get the memo. Someone in RantWoman's orbit wants users at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing to do data entry with a Google Form. RantWoman would LOVE to have our users do this data entry themselves. RantWoman would LOVE to stash this data in the cloud. RantWoman knows the people now doing data entry have plenty else to do. RantWoman would so happily lighten their burden.

Google forms are seductive. RantWoman got the email in her own nest where the resident device is one screen reader version behind the version now at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for extreme Computing, JAWS 11. RantWoman was able to step through completely mouse free. RantWoman excitedly sent her experience off to someone with the version current at the Friendly Neighborhood Center. All sorts of things went mutant and nonfunctional. Sigh.

"To rephrase, the form has elements unreadable on a computer with JAWS 11, Windows 7, and (our popup blocker). It works fine completely hands free without even any fancy cursor stuff on RantWoman's machine running XP, JAWS10, and no popup blocker. RantWoman wants to try it later with the JAWS 13 demo she downloaded recently."

If RantWoman's fantasy flock of gnomes were in evidence, RantWoman would have the gnomes check what Freedom Scientific promises about JAWS 13 interacting with ARIA. This would be an academic exercise at the Friendy Neighborhood Center anyway since upgrading to JAWS 13 is not on the horizon.

Meanwhile RantWoman, now visiting the Friendly Neighborhood Center, clicked on the Google forms link from her email. RantWoman clicked on the link a couple different times varying other external things to no effect, whether or not Zoomtext was enabled, and whether or not RantWoman was signed into her Gmail account. RantWoman witnessed lovely manifestations of mutant malfunction. rantWoman never made it past the first page of the Google form she had so happily stepped through in her own nest.

Today RantWoman is a hardy and adventurous gal. RantWoman put an appropriate incantation into the search engine of her choice. Mention of the beta for JAWS 11 and high hopes about ARIA popped up on the first screen.

http://wayneism.blogspot.com/2009/08/jaws-11-beta-released.html

Beta versions and high hopes are a bad sign. So on to the next link:

https://support.google.com/docs/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=1631585

RantWoman's poking yielded an instruction sheet which said "first turn key echo off." No! BAD idea! Maybe this would be sensible if RantWoman knew her JAWS key functions AND were a touch typist. RantWoman does not and is not! RantWoman ignored this suggestion. It seemed not to make a difference. RantWoman stepped through other suggested adjustments. All RantWoman succeeded in doing was causing JAWS sometimes to fail to read out loud. Worse, RantWoman banged away from several directions at a Continue button and never got past the first screen.

At this point, RantWoman lost patience with reading technical instructions out loud, lost patience with the need to Ctrl Tab between Windows and to go back to where she left off. RantWoman put better skills in this area on her "I mean to get better at" list. RantWoman succumbed to the notion that perhaps new light will dawn as the year rolls over, and RantWoman threw up her hands, at least for now.