What's New In Jaws 14

What's New in JAWS 14
This page describes the new features and improvements available in JAWS 14.

•Choose JAWS download links to go directly to the download links on this page.
•For a complete list of enhancements made in this release, including the most recent update, see JAWS 14 Enhancements.
•Listen to Eric Damery, Vice President of Software Product Management, introduce and demonstratethe exciting features available in JAWS 14 in the August 2012 FSCast.
•Listen to Eric Damery and Jonathan Mosen demonstrate Flexible Web in the September 2012 FSCast.
•To access all of the FREE JAWS 14 Training material in DAISY or MP3 format, visit the Freedom Scientific Training Downloads page.
•To read about features and updates made in earlier JAWS releases, see Previous JAWS Enhancements.JAWS 14 Features
Flexible Web
Frequently, you will encounter Web pages that contain a lot of excess content which can make it difficult to locate the actual content you want, or interrupts the flow when reading. For instance, many sites contain Google ad frames. These can be troublesome for JAWS users as they disrupt the reading order of surrounding content.

Flexible Web enables you to takemore control of Web pages by allowing you to quickly find the content you are looking for, as well as hide content that interrupts the reading experience. You can hide sections of content, such as Google ad frames or other types of unnecessary content, for a smoother reading experience. In addition, you could have JAWS begin reading at a level one heading, or ARIA main region, as these maycontain the most interesting content.

To use Flexible Web, open a Web page you want to customize in Internet Explorer or Firefox. Then, move the Virtual PC Cursor to the page element you want to hide, or from where you want to start reading when the page first loads. Activate the Flexible Web wizard by pressing the layered keystroke INSERT+SPACEBAR, X. Alternatively, press INSERT+F2 to open the RunJAWS Manager dialog box, then choose Flexible Web.

Through several easy-to-follow steps, The Flexible Web wizard that opens provides you with two options: hide or start reading at the selected element. The wizard then guides you through the process of creating a temporary customization by giving you various choices about the selected element and how you want to hide it or from where exactly tostart reading. Once the customization has been made, it is immediately applied to the page. For instance, if you choose to hide all frames containing advertisements, you will not see any advertisements when navigating the page after making this temporary customization.

If you are not happy with how a customization is working, you can open the Flexible Web wizard to undo the last customizationyou made. When you return to the page, you can choose a different element or the same one, then reactivate the Flexible Web wizard to retry the customization again perhaps with different criteria. For example, in the case of hiding those advertisement frames mentioned earlier, you probably want to hide all of them, not just the first one on the page. The wizard will provide you with choices aboutwhether to hide just the first one or all of them.

You can create as many customizations for a page as you want. Once you have created one or more customizations, you can save them as a rule, which is applied every time you load the particular page or site. To indicate that a rule has been applied to a page, JAWS plays a sound after the page loads. Rules can be applied to the current Web page,entire Web site, or globally for all Web sites. Otherwise, customizations are only temporary and are lost as soon as you attempt to go to a different Web page in the current browser window, or completely close the browser. If you have made temporary customizations and you attempt to navigate to another page or close the browser, a dialog box opens asking if you want to save your customizations as...