JAWS for Jim

I hadn't really heard from Jim since his second wedding.

But I knew things hadn't gone well. She left him. His alcoholism became totally disabling. He was living in a group home in South Georgia, his daughter living with the ex, grown now, working in a fast food shop and hoping to get into Junior College.

It was gratifying this morning to hear he is recovering. He's four years sober. He even works sometimes. That's thanks to JAWS, a collection of screen reading applications from Freedom Scientific of St. Petersburg.

Jim, you see, is now totally blind.

Jim had always suffered poor vision, the result of a traffic accident when he was young. Did his alcoholism tip him toward total blindness? I don't know.

But I do know he's better. I do know he's sober. My friend's note was very good news indeed.

Because when I knew him, Jim made his living as a writer.

The JAWS system consists of three applications, two of which he uses:

• Connect Outloud lets him access the Web with voice or Braille.
• OpenBook turns printed material into speech, using Optical Character Recognition, then reads it.
• MAGic is a screen amplification program, for those with some vision.

This stuff is not cheap. We're talking $1,100 plus updates. And it needs a high end computer with lots of memory. But it means he can write again. He's a very good one.

Of course, he is still imprisoned in one way.

JAWS only runs on Windows.