We dove headfirst into our mission to better understand and improve the user experience of JAWS, the renowned screen reader software. Our meetings were packed with valuable insights, both from our own team members and internal experts. In this blog post, we’ll provide an overview of our activities and key takeaways from these meetings.
Understanding JAWS
One of the highlights of our week was our meeting with Liz from the Freedom Scientific team who we met with September 25, 2023. Liz, who uses JAWS daily, gave us a hands-on demonstration of how the software works. She showed us how to navigate Word documents and webpages, shedding light on the challenges users face when dealing with webpages that don’t interact seamlessly with JAWS.
We also had the opportunity to meet with Glenn, a software engineer at Freedom Scientific and one of the founding engineers behind JAWS, who joined us on September 27, 2023. This meeting delved into the technical side of JAWS, including its coding language and infrastructure. Glenn’s insights were instrumental in shaping our project’s direction. We discussed the possibility of launching EchoPilot up in the cloud to solve the issues between different coding languages.
Tasks and Brainstorming
Our primary tasks revolved around understanding JAWS comprehensively, exploring its capabilities, and identifying its limitations. This knowledge will serve as the foundation for brainstorming ways to address these limitations through our project. We also sought to gain insights into the inner workings of JAWS, including the coding language used. In addition to our focus on JAWS, we also delved into research on CoPilot, a related technology that could play a pivotal role in our project.
With a week brimming with meetings and enlightening discussions behind us, our resolve to enhance the user experience of JAWS has grown stronger than ever. The invaluable insights shared by Liz and Glenn from Freedom Scientific have enriched our perspective, and our ongoing research and brainstorming sessions are driving us toward our goal. Keep an eye out for further updates as we navigate the intricacies of JAWS and work tirelessly to improve it for our visually impaired users.