Hello, I would write to MICROSOFT enterprise disability answer desk at edad@microsoft.com. They exist to try and help with these sorts of situations as part of what they do. At one point I ran that service, but no longer work for MICROSOFT. I don’t remember the solution, but recall this situation coming up at least once before. Do you know if teams is still running and you are just not getting any speech? For example, if you did a JAWS optical character recognition on the screen, is it still running? I believe the problem was caused by security software blocking the use of a flag that tells programs like teams to render their information for accessibility purposes. I can’t remember the exact details and this isn’t something and then user can typically set in teams. I remember learning about it as a setting, in chrome that also impacts other applications. If you do a web search for something like chrome, force accessibility render, I think you will find it. Kelly

On Nov 19, 2023, at 7:03 AM, Andrew Hodgson via Blind-sysadmins wrote:

Hi.

I have been left somewhat dismayed last week with the quality of support I have got from both S&S and Freedom Scientific as a Jaws Pro customer in the workplace.

Back story is I have had to reinstall my laptop to standards of a large IT company that have taken over a small consultancy I worked for before the Toupee process kicked in. Once I reinstalled everything with the new setup I completely lost the speech in Teams on any screen reader. There are several security focused packages installed on the laptop which provide monitoring and data leak protection services, including Beyond Trust and Forcepoint. After digging around a bit I believe that something in Beyond Trust is stopping Teams from working with the screen reader.

Right now I am using a set of workarounds including using Teams on my phone, and also using the new Teams client which doesn't have this issue (yet). Using the new Teams client is frowned on by the company because its not supported by their security software. I suspect once it is supported I will be back at square 1.

The problem here is I have contacted both S&S and FS for support with this issue, since I need more information to go back to the people who manage this security software. I can get help from these guys in India, but they need to know exactly the issue, and have no clue on what a screen reader is. I was ideally hoping someone from one of the companies could remote into my machine and run some basic tests to see what was stopping Jaws from working.

Sight and Sound said they couldn't support with work related software queries as it would need scripting, they gave me Blazie's details. FS went slightly further but eventually gave me the same result, giving me contact details for the TPG group.

To my mind I am paying additional cost for Jaws Pro, and in the past the justification for paying a higher price was to provide more specific workplace support. I am not asking the guys to fix the problem, as that is beyond their remit, only to have a look at the issue and see if they can identify the software or reason that the screen readers can't read anything in Teams, so that I can go to other departments within the large company and try and move on with a solution. Right now I have no way forward because I can't identify the problem so can't go to the right team with the right questions.

Has anyone been able to get access to slightly more professional support from these companies? I can probably forgive Sight and Sound as they are mainly dealers, but it would be really good to get access to someone in FS who could give me some pointers to be able to move forward with this situation.

Thanks. Andrew.

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