Anybody know anything about Jaws for DOS? I am developing hardware synth emulation software so you can build a hardware synth out of a Raspberry Pi. I have it working really well for the Linux screen reader Speakup. I mean, it works so well I tend to forget I'm using a hardware speech synth I built myself. But it doesn't work nearly as well with Jaws for DOS. I set up a FreeDOS machine on bare metal because I didn't want to have to worry about virtual machine weirdness. But either Jaws for DOS or FreeDOS itself does not behave well. If I press the control key, it goes into a weird mode where it's as if the control key is being held down all the time. There are a lot of other fairly bad quirks and I don't know if they are from FreeDOS or Jaws. Anyway, has anyone tried installing Jaws for DOS on FreeDOS? How did it work?
John G. Heim via Blind-sysadmins <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> wrote:
But it doesn't work nearly as well with Jaws for DOS. I set up a FreeDOS machine on bare metal because I didn't want to have to worry about virtual machine weirdness. But either Jaws for DOS or FreeDOS itself does not behave well. If I press the control key, it goes into a weird mode where it's as if the control key is being held down all the time. There are a lot of other fairly bad quirks and I don't know if they are from FreeDOS or Jaws.
I used JAWS for DOS decades ago, and it didn't have such issues then. If I remember rightly, this includes the version that was ultimately released for public download by Freedom Scientific. The operating systems in those days were MS-DOS and DR-DOS. I used DECtalk-PC as the text to speech hardware.
On 2/25/26 6:05 AM, Jason J.G. White via Blind-sysadmins wrote:
I used JAWS for DOS decades ago, and it didn't have such issues then. If I remember rightly, this includes the version that was ultimately released for public download by Freedom Scientific. The operating systems in those days were MS-DOS and DR-DOS. I used DECtalk-PC as the text to speech hardware.
I'm a Linux user and my synth works great with Speakup, the Linux screen reader for the console. I know the problem is not with my emulator because FreeDOS and/or Jaws gets weird even if I have my real LiteTalk connected. I am going to try it in a virtual machine. If that doesn't work, I might try installing Windows somewhere and trying the demo version of JFW. I presume they still allow you to run it for 40 minutes before it shuts down, right? And JFW still works with hardware synths, right? Somebody asked me to try to get my synth emulator to work with Jaws for DOS, sent me a Raspberry Pi and everything. But I don't know what hardware and operating system he is using. I didn't think to ask him because I didn't expect it to matter. I expected Jaws to just work with FreeDOS.
Hello, That program I believe last time I looked was freeware. I believe I have that version since my disks are long gone. Thanks HTH Dave. On 2/24/2026 10:52 PM, John G. Heim via Blind-sysadmins wrote:
Anybody know anything about Jaws for DOS? I am developing hardware synth emulation software so you can build a hardware synth out of a Raspberry Pi. I have it working really well for the Linux screen reader Speakup. I mean, it works so well I tend to forget I'm using a hardware speech synth I built myself.
But it doesn't work nearly as well with Jaws for DOS. I set up a FreeDOS machine on bare metal because I didn't want to have to worry about virtual machine weirdness. But either Jaws for DOS or FreeDOS itself does not behave well. If I press the control key, it goes into a weird mode where it's as if the control key is being held down all the time. There are a lot of other fairly bad quirks and I don't know if they are from FreeDOS or Jaws.
Anyway, has anyone tried installing Jaws for DOS on FreeDOS? How did it work?
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participants (3)
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David Mehler -
Jason J.G. White -
John G. Heim