hi,

I've been waiting 2 months to tell the public about this. Two long months. You might of seen that i've been gone for this time, and never posted on this forum. But now i'm back to normal.
This topic is simply an overview of vista and its accessibility. I know it might be out - of topic, and I understand that 69 percent of this topic is not games. But I'm not signed up for any of the lists that are out there. Once I get on one, I'll post this on a list. And now, here it is, the truth you all been waiting for, vista and accessibility.
 
About 2 months ago, I downloaded Winvista feb ctp (comunity technical preview). Yes, I know that this might be illegal, but this is beta ; it contains 1000 glitches and errors. And Microsoft is going to post up a download link for beta 2 of vista in may. I'm not incouriging anyone  to download this vista build. Its not worth it ; performance is the key here, and there is practicly no antivirus that works. So don't do it. 
So I installed vista on my 2.80 ghz toshiba 752 mb ram 30 gb harddrive computer. Mind you, I got very shocking results, which you will see here.

After installing vista, i needed to use narrator. The narrator is improved, and there is a new cool sapi voice called microsoft Anna.  I'm dying to get it / export it from vista ; but I can't because the sapi engine has been greatly modified, from 5.1 to 5.3.

Second, jaws. Jaws 7.10.256 is working great. By great, i mean excellent. Besides getting uap (user account protection) messages like "do you want to install freedomscientific video intercept?" messages, all is fine ; video intercept installs, and jaws loads. Though for activation, I needed to disable uap with the registry.
One more thing with uap: This might be the bigest issue with jaws. You know how it feels when you have jaws running with reading and typing interrupt disabled? Well, this is the case in vista. Its like: jaws says "do you want to install this program?" During the message, you press tab, but nothing happens ; jaws continues on for hours if the dialog is too long. There is no way to stop it. After disabling uap however, it worked out fine ; it seems like uap is a seperate mode that the computer activates. This is an issue that needs to be fixed ; but its too early, and I'm not scolding fs for this. Only jfw 8.0 will have vista support.

And third, games. This is IMPORTANT!

You know the old windows games like solatire and spider solitare and freecell? They work with jaws. Instead of using pictures and the mouse, the games include buttons. like there is a button for 8 of spades in solatire, row 1, colomn 2 in freecell, etc. There are 2 new games, mohjong (not correct spelling) and purble place. It all works fine ; mohjong is Chinees chess.
Audio games work too. There arent many issues, except for super liam demo, where I get a runtime error when starting the program. All others are fine.

A note to developers: Vista is using a new layer of programming. They still use win32, but the OS relies on .net technology to run. You can't run vista apps from xp, you get a "not a valid win32 application" prompt. This is why I can't export sapi ; the sapiprxy.exe file, which runs to start the engine, is using this new .net technology. So if you're thinking of the future, you might consider this issue. Though old apps run, some wont because the kernel is re-written.

And last, performance. Vista is pretty slow. Jaws slows it down even more. 
No antivirus software work (I tired norton 2003/2004, and nod32 2.51.20). This is why I uninstalled vista in the first place ; I can't live without antivirus.
conclusions: Vista is going fine with accessibility. No problems with jaws, no problems with games, or any accessibility things. Some new vista programs don't work with jaws good. These are the new windows calendar, the new explorer shell / window (it works, but some links / parts don't), and windows calaberation. Windows defender, windows media player  11, and internet explorer 7 are fine.

And this is where I need your help. If any of you know of a list, or forum that deals with this issue please post it here. I would like to repost this topic to all those lists ; this might be useful info.
I'm sorry for the long topic. I had to post it somewhere... Comments and questions  would be appriciated.
Regards:
tomi