JAWS, Spanish & Math

When using Windows 7 and Office 2010, have you noticed that if you download an attachment from the Internet, it sometimes opens in Protected Mode and you therefore cannot edit the file? This happened to one of my students with a paper that her teacher had sent her. The paper had Track Changes on it and the student needed to make corrections. Jaws talks the page fine but does not enable editing. The student needed to enable the editing manually.

I connected to the student using JAWS tandem and began teaching the lesson. My student opened her document from the Internet, in protected mode, and as I was teaching her how to get into edit mode, the fire bell rang. The phones disconnect and I knew they were on their way outside. While they were outside, I was able to go through her paper and look at the correction details she would need to make because I was still linked through the JAWS tandem.

The student had forgotten some knowledge over the summer and I could see on her math page, she was writing out the word "degrees" instead of inserting the degree symbol. The command: JAWS insert+4 gets you into "Select a symbol to Print". This area contains many math symbols as well as Spanish symbols and a variety of other things. It is worth a look.

When the class returned from the fire drill, they immediately called to make our connection again and she was laughing on the other end, as when they walked into the room, her JAWS was talking away with no one sitting at the keyboard. That was me checking over her work from my side of the world. She and her para knew what was happening but no one else in the room did. Kind of like a ghost. I could absolutely see the hilarity in this.

As we got back to work, I showed her the insert+4 again for her math and that "Ah Ha" moment came back to her and the knowledge that there is always an easier way to do something, or more importantly ...a way! We switched to her Spanish and once again the insert+4 brought up her á é ñ and so on, so she could do her Spanish characters quickly also. But I had to be reminded by a past student the day before that insert+4 also does the Spanish characters. I just love that collective knowledge. If we are away from something for awhile we forget. We all need reminders.

One thing to be careful of with this command is it is so close to the insert+F4 which turns off JAWS. Students only have to do it a couple of times though to remember.