November 2023 - Blind-sysadmins - lists.hodgsonfamily.org

Teams woes on a new laptop install
by Andrew Hodgson 27 Jan '24

27 Jan '24

Hi. I'm a bit stuck at the moment with an issue on Teams. The company I work for has recently been taken over by a large corporate and this morning they wiped my laptop in the expectation I would reformat it with a clean install and provision it with their InTune. This seemed to go well at first, I installed Windows 11 23H2 from an ISO I downloaded, and the provisioning was successful. They are using the BeyondTrust Privilege Manager to stop people installing software and even though I have extra perms to install I am still prompted. Getting JFW 2024 installed was a bit of an issue. This also does some other lockdown of the system but unsure what and how it is locked down. The main issue though is that the InTune installed Teams on the device, and when I go into Teams I get absolutely no speech in any part of the app. I have tried several things to rectify this without issue. Its Teams Classic version 1.6.00.28554 that is installed. The version of Office they have installed is 16130.20810 which is from the 2302 semi-annual enterprise channel. Has anyone seen this issue where Teams is completely unusable with JFW? At this point I'm not sure if it's a problem with this BeyondTrust software or something in Teams, but its going to cause me a bit of a headache next week if I can't get this resolved quickly. Thanks. Andrew.

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Losing focus in terminal all the time
by Andrew Hodgson 21 Dec '23

21 Dec '23

Hi. Latest JFW and Windows 11 builds on multiple machines, I lose speech output in the terminal or command prompt when navigating to and from the window. What I mean by this is I am not hearing the output of commands or what I am typing into the window. This is really starting to stress me out now and I can't believe I am the only person experiencing it. Its been happening since the beginning of the year since a Windows update I think. Any suggestions? Thanks. Andrew.

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Getting good quality support with Jaws Pro
by Andrew Hodgson 19 Nov '23

19 Nov '23

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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accessible phone systems
by Mike Fulton 03 Nov '23

03 Nov '23

Hi all, The company I work for has a very old Mitel phone system, and we're starting to look at upgrading to a modern phone system that's managed in the cloud. Has anyone had experience with modern phone systems, and can comment on which are or are not accessible? Mainly asking in terms of administration and soft phone applications. The options we're currently looking at are Windstream and Harbor Cloud, but are also open to other suggestions. Thanks, Mike

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