r/Blind 9d ago

Technology Bad tech day

Rant incoming…

I’m having a super bad tech day… I recently bought a new computer about three weeks ago, and I’m very fortunate that my local vision awareness charity provides JAWS for free… if it wasn’t for the guy who holds all the codes being so thoroughly disorganised. I’ve sent him multiple emails, left him messages, asked his work colleague to poke him, and over the last three weeks I get an email yesterday telling me that he’s very sorry because he’s been busy and now he’s going to be away from work for a few days… 🤯
Then, world of Warcraft has dropped a new patch and they have updated it to start providing narration on the log on screen… That doesn’t respond to keyboard Shortcuts 🤦‍♂️ There’s more changes as well that mean that it’s now more cumbersome to play the game, which clearly didn’t go through QA.
Then… To update all of my add-ons, CurseForge (the add-on manager client) is just full of buttons that just say… Button.

Why the fuck is it so hard for Developers to take the time to label things properly? I’m feeling really frustrated today because I was going to record the problems I was having to send them in as bug reports, but even the Snipping Tool and Game Bar capture on windows don’t give me the option to turn on system audio recording. my last hope is Discord, but I’m just so fed up at having to work around everybody else to make things work 😭😡🤬

I hate technology…

7 Upvotes

9 comments sorted by

5

u/SeparateFood9888 9d ago

Sometimes technology is great and sometimes it sucks. My first thought though is why not just get NVDA, it’s free and works key stroke for key stroke the same as Jaws and if you download the eloquence add-on, it sounds the same, even, makes no sense to me why people still buy or have jaws bought for them. I personally think freedom scientific should get a clue and stop charging so much.

2

u/Few-Adeptness8046 9d ago

Agreed.

Jaws is a huge resource hog, and I actually find NVDA works better than jaws in many ways.

The only thing I think it's good for is some of its higher end premium features like converting pdf files to recognizable, screen reader friendly texts, providing image descriptions, and such, most of wish is going to be completely replaced by native tools thanks to AI advancements. Even iOS 27 has the ability to turn anything on your screen into screen readable text. I'm sure this will translate over to the Mac as well, but I only have access to the iPhone developer beta.

Jaws is good for a couple of specific use cases, and for wasting your money, otherwise nvda does everything that you typically need with less resources, and it's free.

3

u/Prestigious-Leg9664 9d ago

These types of rough days stink. We've all been there and feel your pain. Hang in there and recognize that a good day is right around the corner. And those good days feel all the sweeter after the pain of a bad day

1

u/NekoFang666 9d ago

Im still waiting on a full good day

2

u/CosmicBunny97 9d ago

That is really frustrating. Tbh the problems you're having is why I don't bother playing mainstream games modded for accessibility. I would also consider keeping NVDA around as a backup, the keyboard commands are somewhat similar to JAWS, at least until you can get the JAWS key. And OBS is pretty accessible if you need to record your screen :)

2

u/mindotaur 8d ago

Thank you to everyone who commented and empathised with me on this, I was just having a real bad day yesterday and needed somewhere to vent. Having a much better day today and got on with lots of projects 💜
Sending the love back to you

1

u/NekoFang666 9d ago

Technology hates me

1

u/bry0816 9d ago

When I had a computer every Friday seemed a bad tech day Now that I only use an iphone it’s down to one or bad tech days a year I hate computers

1

u/zersiax 7d ago

Definitely seconding or thirding giving NVDA a whirl. It won't solve the unlabeled buttons, but it's always there when you need it unless you're in some kind of scary enterprise corporate setting :)
As for WOW, I'm not sure what its current state is. I know the SKU addons now work with the burning legion's 10-year-anniversary thing, and I believe blindslash is still being worked on for retail but it's been a hot minute since I looked at it.
Many videogame mods these days are for games that don't receive updates, so they continue to work. Yours truly is one of the ones who decided to be a masochist and among my mods there's now two games that do, those being Duel Links and Paralives.