Post #3939891

I have been putting Leasey 11.5 through its paces for the last day or so and am very impressed, even amazed. Not everyone will want every feature as is the case with any application or suite of applications. For example, I know Microsoft Word like the back of my hand and use its increasingly capable Copilot features. But others will appreciate a word processor with a good old menu bar, ChatGPT, and comprehensive features. Hartgen Consultancy has published here comprehensive summaries of all the new features, and there are a lot of them, so I won’t go over what has already been well-covered, but I will make a couple of general points. First, if there is one way many developers short-change their users, its through poor documentation, or even no documentation at all. As far as I’m concerned, when you’ve got stable code, you are still not finished until you’ve written proper documentation. A user guide is great, but in this case, the truly context-sensitive help in Leasey 11.5 is exemplary. Anyone teaching a class on how to do proper context-sensitive help needs to use Leasey as a case study. You can be on any control, press Insert+F1, and get help based on that specific control as well as help relating to what you are clearly trying to do given the control you’re seeking help with. The user interface paradigms are similar across applications. So once you understand how to engage with one Leasey application, you can take those concepts to others. This is one of the things that made KeySoft, when HumanWare used to do proper KeySoft, so successful. Consistency is key. That said, talking about applications in this context brings me to an issue I have been pondering as I’ve been exploring. Leasey started off as a tool to maximize efficiency with JAWS. I bought it because I am an efficiency nut. All the features I use are still there, and in fact some have been improved. But with this release, the scope of Leasey has changed a lot. To some extent, this has been a gradual thing, with the introduction in previous releases of features like radio and podcasts. But this release adds many new tools, all of which are very well developed. Since we’ve now gone well beyond optimizing JAWS, and there are now applications that are of interest to those who do not use JAWS, it seems a pity that there is currently no way for those users to take advantage of these applications. If you try to run any of the apps with another screen reader running, you will get a message that they have detected that JAWS isn’t running, and they quit. Since many of these features are now stand-alone executables, I hope a way can be found to create a suite of applications that those who do not use JAWS can purchase. NVDA is incredibly vibrant and continues to gain traction, and Narrator is increasingly viable. I am not suggesting the business model should change at all. Leasey is a commercial product. But with this suite of applications, it seems to me it would make business sense to let people who want to use the product hand over their money, even if they don’t use JAWS. This is not just a Leasey thing either. There are one or two add-ons for NVDA that aren’t really screen reading enhancements that others may want to use as well. In the end though, those who write the code and put the work in have the right to distribute it however they want. They can make whatever business decision they see fit, and to me, that’s the end of it. The second thing I have been reflecting on is putting so many eggs in one basket. If one is using all these tools in the one suite produced by an indie developer, and for any number of very valid and understandable reasons something happens to cause development to cease temporarily or permanently, that is a lot of functionality affected in one hit. Something developed by a team, or by the community through open source, is less at risk of this happening but of course not immune. That does not, however, take anything away from the remarkably good quality of this whole suite, and for the record I also have this same worry with other tools I use such as the StationPlaylist suite. If you are a JAWS user, I highly recommend trying the demo of Leasey 11.5, it is quite something.