Accessibility Agony Aunt #4

Katherine Turner

In the fourth instalment of the Accessibility Agony Aunt, we look at an issue where JAWS appears to stop reading a document in Word and subsequently crashes the application.

If you need a hand with your assistive tech, whether it is a screen reader, magnifier, speech to text system, mind mapping tool or anything else, you can ask the Accessibility Agony Aunt for help. Email your questions to info@blazie.co.uk - we aim to respond to all questions within a few weeks. Be sure to sign up to our newsletter to receive updates on new Accessibility Agony Aunt questions and other useful tips!

Question:

Hi Blazie

Can you please help me with this problem? Whenever I create a new document in word, save it and then try to read it, JAWS will only let me read the first paragraph or so and will not let me read any further, it appears to crash Word, notwithstanding that the entire document is visible on-screen.

This is highly frustrating and has only just started happening.

Thanks, John

Answer

Hi John

This has been a puzzling one. We tried in the office and half of us could replicate this issue every time and the others couldn’t experience it at all.

After a lot of trial and error we think we narrowed down the issue to one specific version of Word, Version 2307.

An update to version 2308 should resolve this and allow you to read an entire document from beginning to end.

To check the version of Word you are running do the following:

  1. Open Word.
  2. Press Alt+F to open the File Menu.
  3. Press D to move to the Account Area and then A to open the about details.
  4. The version will be read out automatically, you are listening for the number immediately after the Word version.

If you are on version 2307 you will need to perform an update, this will not necessarily be possible if you are running an enterprise version of Office.

If you have the ability to update do the following:

  1. Open Word.
  2. Press Alt+F to open the File Menu.
  3. Press D to move to the Account Area and then R to open the update options.
  4. Choose Update Now from the options. Word will check for updates, and if there is one to apply it will do so. This process can take some time to complete, and will usually ask to force Word to close.