Well, guys, whether or not JAWS has been or is tremendously helpful to the visually impaired is simply beyond the point. No one can or should deny the fact that JAWS has been helping thousands of users in a variety of context. However, that doesn't mean the follies of its developers should be ignored. That would be like, say, having ignored Windows Vista's multitudinous problems and headaches simply because Microsoft has been developing different permutations of Windows for so long. On the other hand, what we now call a positive experience, or simply a better experience, with Windows 7 is the direct consequence of user complaints and taking into account those glitches. Now who can deny the usefulness of Windows? On a similar topic, isn't iPhone a revolutionary product with its full-fledged screen reader, helping many visually impaired people all over the world with its cornucopia of apps and functions? But this doesn't prevent users from complaining about rather serious antenna issues with the 4th generation of iPhones. Likewise, when we simply state that Freedom Scientific is moving in the wrong direction with its approach toward beta testing and bug handling--and I don't want to mention the issue of the frequency of major upgrades which unnecessarily kill SMA licenses, it doesn't mean that we excoriate the whole history of JAWS from the HJ days forward. Rather, it's just meant to keep both the user community and, hopefully, the developers aware of the issues which have beleagured JAWS. As for this particular bug, why should people buy extra language packs when Unicode support in combination with a TTS engine can do the job? And this has been the case for some years and is still the case with other screen readers which support Unicode. And, last but not least, this has nothing to do with international sanctions against a particular country; rather, it's a totally technical issue as, say, Arab countries aren't under any particular sanctions whatsoever. Imagine having to purchase JAWS language packs from certain dealers in order to be able to read and write in Russian, Greek, and Polish.
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