This is a much more informal post than those published previously. I would like to discuss the current status of Leasey’s Help utilities; those which you will experience in the first build of Leasey version 10 and how these will be improved upon within the next two months or so.
Leasey has had a number of Help utilities. These include:
Hotkey Help, Leasey key then H. This was originally designed to give you keystrokes relative to the environment in which you were working. The difficulty is that Leasey did not always know which application you were working within.
Added to this, there are many keystrokes which can be used globally and you may well be missing out on something critical.
Leasey now has over 1000 keystrokes!
Leasey Help documentation. This is a difficult one on two counts. When working in the product itself, the help topic is displayed within the JAWS Results Viewer. As you will have seen already, we’re doing a lot to get away from the Results Viewer implementation. There is also the added problem that the documentation is lengthy at over 500 pages. JAWS these days has considerable issues when processing very large pages.
Searchable Hotkey Help. This was designed so that you could type a search string and the keyboard commands matching that search would be brought back to you. This works in the most part, but with more and more keystrokes added, and misrepresentations of words being typed by the user, there are issues to overcome.
Internally, these help systems were all controlled by different mechanisms which makes updating them very difficult.
So, what do we do?
We’ve had a good discussion about this and there are short-term and longer-term plans. By longer-term, we mean in approximately two months from now.
Leasey documentation. Version 10 implementation. This is accessed from the main Help menu, Leasey Key H. This takes you into a web-based help system which contains all the help categories of which there are currently 53 with more to be added shortly.
In addition to being able to read the help and get back to the main index, the help is searchable. An edit field is placed at the top of the main index page which allows you to type a search term, and help categories are returned matching the search. Of course all of this is 100 percent accessible. Hopefully, you would expect nothing less.
The longer-term plan is for you to be able to ask direct questions of the help system and obtain a good quality answer. However, many such services providing this kind of help at present in my view fall far short of the standard I would expect, and that component will not be released until such time as it has been tested and we collectively think it is robust.
Keystroke Help. The version 10 implementation is that again, you will access this from the main Leasey Help menu. You are taken into a web-page environment with the keystrokes listed according to category on a single page divided by heading. There is a simple layout so JAWS is not struggling with this one. If you are not sure quite which category the keystroke falls into, you can use JAWS Find.
Long-Term. All the keystrokes with detailed descriptions will be placed into a centralised database. This will make it possible to:
A. Copy the database periodically from the internet to the computer for off-line reference.
B. Make the keystroke list searchable adopting an extremely flexible search system to deal with incorrect spellings or misinterpretations.
C. Bring back the list of categories if you prefer accessing the keystrokes this way.
Conclusion.
The help system which will be in the initial release of version 10 is perfectly acceptable for release. However, we want to make the process particularly of reviewing keystrokes easier than it is. It can be achieved, but it is just a matter of time to get it implemented. Please bare with us while we do this.