Basics With BITS – JAWS Updates and More for March 28, 2026

AI Generated Transcript

Welcome, everybody. Today’s Basics with BITS is on JAWS and learning how to update it, as well as how to create a new account with jaws, which is now a new requirement for getting your updates. Today is WOW, March 28, 2026. Where has the year gone already? We want to let you know that Basics with Bits is sponsored obviously by Blind Information Technology Solutions. We would like you to come and join us. Be part of our announce list, which you can get by subscribing at BITS Announce. Groups is the regular email, but then you have the subscribe email is bits-announce plus sign Subscribe@groupsio if you’d like to become a BITS member. We have an annual membership for $20. We also have a lifetime membership for, for $200. So please come and join us. And at this point I am actually going to turn this over to Liz Whitaker, who works for Jaws, and I really appreciate that you were able to come today and help present. Well, hi everyone and yes, thank you. It’s great to be here. My name is Liz Whitaker and I am the director of User education and outreach here at Maspero. And I’m really excited to be here to talk about our login and account registration because this is something we do get a lot of questions about. So I want to be able to show you how it works, walk you through the process and then answer your questions. So back In October of 2025, we released JAWS ZoomText Infusion 2026. And with that came a really important change, which is our new registration and account login requirement. Now this is something that other companies do. For example, Microsoft, you know, requires you to log in and you get access to all your Office365 applications and all those features. You, if you use an iPhone or Android, you probably used to logging in with your Apple ID or your Google email, same with your Google account. So we added this feature to enable you to access JAWS ZoomText Infusion, which I know today we’re really talking about Jaws, but all three products, whichever product you use, across all devices. So what this means is, you know, if you’re at work, for example, you use Jaws, you log into your account, it is not specific to a particular computer, so it is your account as your login. So it would be like logging into your Gmail at work, for example, and then you come home and you log into that same Gmail at home. Well, this is the same if you have a copy of Jaws at work, if they purchased it for you. If you purchased your own for home, for example, you’re going to use the same account to log in. We did this for several reasons. We did this so that we could, number one, keep you up to date on all the latest features, make sure that you’re getting everything as it is released. And then, number two, we are going to be adding some features here in the very near future that are going to allow you to remain connected in some really important ways. So let’s talk about that for just a second. So one of the reasons that we want to make sure that you get all. Well, we just want to make sure that you get all the information as it is updated anyway. But historically, when we released a major version of jaws, you know, 2025, 2026 and so forth, several years ago, when we were releasing those major versions, that’s usually when the bulk of the features were included. So throughout the year, you would get some more updates to that version, but it wouldn’t include necessarily a lot of new features. It would include some enhancements. Well, over the last several years, we’ve kind of changed that a bit. And so we have started rolling out new features to throughout the year. And so that way you don’t have to wait until the next major version of Jaws comes out. And part of that is because when you have this account login, for example, you’re going to be able to log in, you’re going to get all those features as they come out, and, you know, you don’t have to wait a whole year. The other thing that we’re going to be adding, and this is going to be really exciting, I’m. I’m actually very excited about this one, because when you set up Jaws, it’s very specific. It’s customized. You set your speech, your rate, your voice, whatever it is that you like. And you can change that along the way, of course, but you may have some, you know, core settings that you really like that really work for you. And so if you set that up at home, for example, and then you go to work and you think, well, I really want to have those same exact settings here on my work computer, but I don’t remember what all of them are. So now, you know, what do you do? You have to go through, and you have to walk through settings and go through the Startup wizard and, you know, do all of that and, you know, you can get it done, but you have to go through and do it manually, or in some cases, you just transfer a settings file, which that’s, you know, that’s definitely doable, but it’s not as Easy as what we’re going to do here with Account login. So with Account login now, when, when. We haven’t implemented this yet, but we’re going to soon. I don’t have an exact date, but we’ll be letting you guys know here very soon. You’re going to be able to transfer those settings to another device very easily. And you’re going to have the choice. It’s not just going to do it automatically for you, but you’re going to have that choice. And so it’s going to make it a lot easier for you to go from computer to computer, log into your account and, and have JAWS automatically if you choose to start speaking the way you want it to. All right, so those are a couple of the reasons why we implemented the account registration. So I want to show you a couple of ways that you can set this up. Now, again, with JAWS 2026, if you’re using a version that’s prior to JAWS 2026, you won’t have this, but with JAWS 2026, you will. And so what’s going to happen when you first install JAWS 2026, it’s going to ask you to sign in and at that point you can create a new account. If you don’t already have one or if you’ve already created your account, you can just go ahead and sign in. So you can do this in one of two ways. You can create your account through our portal, which I’m going to show you how to do. It’s portal.vespero.com and for those of you who are wondering how to spell vispero, it’s V as in Victor, India, Sierra, Papa, Echo, Romeo, Oscar. So it’s portal.vespero.com and if you go there, you’re going to get login Vispero Portal. This page, it’s going to say login Vespero Portal. Now, we’re in the process of moving this portal, developing this portal. So you know, if you have, for example, if you’re subscribed to a home annual license and you’re used to logging in and seeing all your information there, that is coming. So for those of you who log in and you think, oh, well, I just see my profile information, that is further development is coming on that. So I just wanted to let you know. But you can also create your account here. So if you know, for example, well, I’m going to be updating to JAWS 2026 next week, I want to go ahead and create my account. This is where you’re going to go to do it, and if you don’t do it that way, you can do it from the software. Now, I’m just going to show you a little bit about the portal and then I’m going to sign out of my current account and we’re going to create a new one from the software because ultimately it takes you to the same place. Whether you do it from the software, you come to the portal, ultimately you wind up here at the portal to create that account. So the two things that we need to do are create an account and sign in. Once you’re signed in, Jaws is going to behave as it always has. You don’t have to sign in again. It’s not going to sign you out or anything like that. Should you experience anything like that, you need to get in touch with support because that is not something that’s supposed to be happening. So Jaws is going to behave like it always has. All right, so we are here@portal.vespero.com Login Vespero Portal. And the first thing it says here at the top of the page is login vispero portal. Now, I’m just going to press the letter foxtrot that’s going to navigate us through the form field here. I’m not actually going to sign in sign in with Google button, but I am going to show you some options here. So we have an option here to sign in with Google. So if you like to use your Gmail address to sign into things, this is where you’d go. And if you press enter here, it would take you off to a Google page. It would ask you, you know, what is your Gmail address? Or if you’re already signed into a computer, whatever computer you’re on, it’s going to say, what Google account do you want to use? You’re probably going to see your address there and then it will probably go through the authentication that Google goes through and then you’ll be in. So you can use Google to sign up here for your vispero account. Email edit required. If I was going to log into the portal, this is where I’d type my email password password edit required, sign in button. And there’s a sign in button. Okay, but what if I don’t have an account? I’m going to press down arrow don’t have an account link. Create a vispero account. So this is where you would go to create a vispero account. We’re going to press enter now. Again, I’m not going to create it on the portal here, because I’m going to go through the software and show you, but it’s going to bring us right back to this page. But what it does is it takes you to the very first page. Register Vispero Portal. And that’s what it says. Register Vispero Portal. You can navigate this page in a couple of ways. You can go straight to the edit fields or the form fields by pressing the letter F. Boxtrot I am 18 or older radio button check. And I’ll explain this page when we come back and create the account. But so you have a few different pages here. So you’re going to go through this page and you’re going to go to next and you’re going to go to the next page and so forth. So this is the Portal Again, it’s portal.vispero.com. all right, let’s stop right here and go over to Jaws though, because I want to show you how to create it within the Jaws application. Alt F menu bar escape. All right, I’m going to go to the jaws window here with insert J title is Jaws. Okay, now I’m going to go to sign out. You’ll never need to sign out, by the way. This isn’t something you need to do. I’m just doing it so we can create a new account. But I’m going to go to help with alt H for help alt command search and check for updates. I’m going to go up to license and account submenu. License and account submenu. I’m going to right arrow to open that Manage license submenu Manage account. And I’m going to down arrow to sign out sign out menu bar. Leaving menu bar jaws sign out confirmation. A Vispero Portal account is required to run Jaws. If you need to switch account, keep me Sign sign out button. Enter jaws sign out confirmation. You have been signed out. Okay, but space jaws. Jaws. Jaws will run for 60 minutes to. Okay, now page has one region. What happened here is it came up and it told us jaws will run for 60 minutes. And basically you have 60 minutes to create this account. Now, again, we’re further developing this feature, so that could change. Just know that that could, you know, we could give you more time or, you know, do something else there. So. But our aim is to make it easier. So we’re definitely not going to do anything that makes it more difficult. Okay, but what it’s telling you, let’s say you install JAWS 2026 and you run it for the very first time. You’ve just restarted your computer after the installation and you’re running jaws. And this is what it’s going to come up and it’s going to tell you sign in to your account heading level one. So it’s going to prompt you here to sign into your account. And we heard JAWS say heading level one. So that indicates here that we’ve got something that’s like a web environment that we’re going to be navigating. This just makes it easier because you know, we use those navigation quick keys to navigate web pages so we can use them here too. But let’s down arrow main region heading level one. Sign into your account. You must sign in with a vispero account to use JAWS. JAWS will run for 60 minutes to give you time to complete the step. Sign in with Google button. Okay, so basically it just told us what you know, we were just talking about that we’re going to need to sign in. And so if you’ve already created an account on the portal, you would just tab to the right field here where you type in your email address and then tab to type in your password and then you could sign in. But let’s explore this dialogue. We don’t have, we’re going to assume we don’t have an account. Right? Right. Okay. So let’s just tab here. Email edit required. Okay, that’s the field and we heard forms mode engaged there. That’s the field where we would type our email if we already had an account password Password edit required. Bullet, bullet, bullet. And I’m going to space whatever is there. Forgot password link. So that’s where if you, let’s say you do have an account and you forgot your password, you could go there to retrieve it. Now I want to take a moment and just say if you have a home annual license where you have already signed into our freedom scientific portal, which we’re, we’re merging those by the way, so there won’t be two portals. But if you have a, an account that’s home annual, you can use that same account to sign in. What it will do in that case is it will bring you to the portal page after you’ve signed in and say okay, you’ve signed in. Now we want to few more pieces of information and I’ll and we’ll go over what that is and why. But that’s because when you created that portal account for the home annual license, all you were required to enter was your email address and password. And so because we asked for a few more pieces of information because of, you know, AI features that we have and things like that. Again, we’ll get into that here in a few minutes. But that’s why if you’ve ever purchased Jaws from our store online store, you, you might also, you’ll also have an account and you could sign in with that as well. Okay, but we’re going to assume here that I do not have an account. Let’s keep tabbing through and see what we have. Sign in with email button. Okay, that’s just your sign in button. Create Account link. There’s our Create Account link Account Sign in document, Email edit required. And there we go. And I’m tabbing through that. By the way. I’m going to shift tab back up to Create account Sign in with Google button. There’s our sign in with Google again. We saw that on the portal. So if you go there, it’s going to take you to the portal and take you to that page where you sign in with your Gmail address. Account Sign in document. Sign in with email. Create Account link. Okay, so I shift tabbed over here to Create account and I’m going to press Enter. It’s going to take us to the portal. Enter Opening new window. Register Vespero Portal. Register Vespero Portal. Loading complete. Page has three regions, one heading and four links. All right, so I’m going to go to the top of this page just so we have a good starting place here with Control Home Register Vispero portal. Now, I can go straight to the form field, but I, I’m not going to do that in this case because I want to show you around the page. So this actual process doesn’t typically take very long, but I am going to take my time a little bit going through these pages just because I want to explain a few things. So, you know, it may take me, let’s just say 10 minutes to do this. Whereas when you actually walk through the process, it may take you, you know, two or four or six, you know, whatever it is, doesn’t matter. It’s just that I wanted you to know that I’m going to press the letter H for heading. Please confirm your age Heading level one. All right, so we have Please confirm your age. Again, the reason we do this. Now, some of you may be familiar with this. At first we were asking, we had a dialogue that said, you know, what’s your date of birth? We don’t really want to know everyone’s actual age. That’s not why we ask for that. This, we’ve, we’ve changed this a bit because we don’t need to know your age. What we need to know is an age range. And that has to do with. Because we use AI services or AI features in our software, those AI features, those services that we use have regulations and we have to make sure we adhere to those. So that’s what that’s about. If you’re wondering. So if I down arrow here to create an account, we need to confirm you meet the minimum age requirement. And so that’s what it’s referring to here. I am 18 or older. Radio button checked. So the first option is I’m 18 or older and that is checked by default. But our other options, I’m going to leave it checked. But if I press the letter F boxtrot to navigate through these form fields, I am at least 13 and younger than 18. Radio button not checked. So that you know you’d be between 13 and 18. I am younger than 13. Radio button not checked. And again, these are radio buttons, so you can only select one. So you press space on the one you want to select. But I am over 18 is already selected. So I’m going to press the letter F foxtrot again, continue button. So we have a continue button. All right, so we’re going to press space space Register vispero portal. All right, we’re to the next page. Register vispero portal and I’m going to press H for heading again and let’s see what our next page asks. Let’s get started. Heading. All right, let’s get started. Email address. Okay, so now I can navigate through this field like I would or form like I would any other. I’m going to press the letter F boxtrot Email address edit enter and I’m going to enter there and activate forms mode. So now I’m going to type my email address and it’s going to actually send me an email that is going to have a link in it to move to the next step. So when you type in your email address, make sure it’s one that is a working email address and make sure it’s one that you can check easily because you’re going to need to do it to proceed and you’re going to need to do it on the computer, you know, where you’re actually creating the account. Okay, so I’m going to type my vispero address here udegger at this required. Okay, so it says it’s required. I can verify that it’s there by pressing jaws key up arrow to read this line. Email address set it required to it occur@visparo.com. okay, I’m in a tab register vispero portal Continue button to active and I’m going to press space on continue space. Loading page. Loading complete. Register Vespero. All right, it took me to the next page and so I’m at the top and I’m going to press the letter H for heading. Let’s get started. Heading Level 1. The email ludocur@visparo.com is already associated. Oh, wait a minute. Okay, I need to type a different email. I need to type it a different way here. Sorry about that. But okay, but if it tells you that this actually was a happy accident. Because if it tells you that the email ludacur@visparo.com is already associated with a portal account. So if you type in an email address and you think, oh, do I already have a portal account? What you could do in that case is go to forgot password and you could retrieve your password email address edit space. All right, let me do this a different way here. Udiker+22.com Register Vispero Portal Continue button. Enter loading page. Okay, now let’s see what it tells us. Verify your email. Heading level one. Here we go. An email has been sent to ruitaker+20twospero.com with a link that can be used to finish setting up your account. If you verify your email and finish setting up your account on a different device, link return to the home page to sign in. Okay, so I was, I. What happened was it went to the next page. I use the letter H to navigate to the first heading and I read that information with down arrow. So what that’s telling us is, okay, it sent us this email and so we can go over and get that link from this email, but it tells us if we are setting up this account on a different device and we’re accessing like for example, if we’re accessing our email from one computer but we’re setting it up on another computer, we can go back to the homepage and sign in. Okay, so I’m going to go over here to my open email tasks. Jaws screenshot Inboxy Whitaker at inbox Unread Vispero Portal. There we go. We have an email from Vispero Portal. I’ll press enter enter. Thank you for being a Vispero user. Please open the link below to verify your email address and complete setting up your Vispero account. Verify. Okay, so we should have a verify link here. Link Verify my email. And I Did hear it say link. So I’m going to press enter on that link. Enter verify my email link. Link Verify my email. To activate, press enter. Opening new tab. Loading page. Register Vispero. All right, so it said opening new tab. So it opened this page in a new tab. So let’s see what we have on this page. Register Vespero. I’m going to press the letter H. Register with email heading level one. So now it says register with email. If I down arrow here, first name star. Now it’s going to start asking us for information. So everything that says star is required, just like on any other field. So I’m just going to press F here for F Foxtrot first name star to get to this first form field. That’s a lot of Fs there. Enter. Okay, so first name. I’m going to type my first name. Right? First name Star Edit required. Elizabeth. B H Blank. I didn’t actually say my whole name. I don’t know. Elizabeth B L, Z A B Y H. Oh, that’s why Y. If I spell it correctly, then it will say it correctly. Elizabeth. There we go. All right, I’m going to press tab to navigate to the next field. Last name Star Edit. Type my last name. Last name Star Edit required. Whitaker. Okay, I’ll tab again. Password Star Password Edit required. Okay, I’m going to take a moment here now. I’m tabbing through this field, this form, but there’s some information that I really want to know here. And this is what are the requirements for this password? So I’m just going to stop right here and I’m going to turn forms mode off by pressing Numpad plus or caps Lock semicolon if you don’t have a numpad virtual PC cursor. And because they’re important, that’s important information to know. What are the requirements? What do you need to know to type in your password or to create a password? Password star. So if I press up arrow it says password star. Now I can down arrow here. Must contain at least eight characters including a number and a letter. Okay, so there are our requirements. Must contain at least eight characters including a letter and a number. Password Star Password space. All right, I’m just going to type in a password here and I’m going to tap confirm Password Star Password Edit required. All right, so I’ll confirm. I’ll type in that very same password and I’ll tab again. Register Vispero Portal continue button. Okay, so now we are going to press space on continue space. Loading Save your password. Okay, I don’t want to do that, but Google Chrome is asking me if I want to save my password. Register Vespero. Okay, now we get into some pieces of information here are going to be required and some aren’t. I’m going to walk you through all these just to explain what they are. You will have choices of what information you would like to provide or not provide. All right, so I’m going to press the letter H for heading. Finish account setup. Heading level one. Okay. Finish account setup. Great. That means we’re almost done. Down arrow. To help us offer better support and continue improving our products, we’d like to learn a bit about how you use them. Your remaining fields are optional. Okay, so let’s read that one more time. Sorry. To help us offer better support and continue improving our products, we’d like to learn a bit about how you use them. Your country is required, but the remaining fields are optional. Okay, now it says your country is required. As of right now, we only have registration available in the US but we are going to be adding more countries. So that’s why that information is there. But by default, if we press the letter F, Foxtrot country star combo box collapsed. Required. United States. So that’s already selected. So if you do not want to enter any more information, you do not have to, but we’re just going to quickly walk through this and then we’re going to finish and then we’re going to sign it. Okay, so I’m just going to keep pressing F here. Phone number edit. So you. You could enter your phone number if you chose to. What describes your primary use of the product? Combo box collapsed. All right, that’s a combo box. How do you use the product? I’m going to press the space bar here. Space register vispero Portal. Please select dot, dot, dot. And I’m just going to down arrow through the few options here. Work to move to an item. So we have work. Home to move to an item. School to move to school. Now you have. You can only select one of these, so you’d want to just maybe select your primary. You know, where do you primarily use Jaws? And the one, the option you select that? Well, okay, the options that come next are going to depend on what you select. So if you select home, it’s going to give you a list of, you know, things you could do at home. Like to use it for shopping or entertainment or email or documents, things like that. If it’s work, if it’s school, it’s going to give you some different options but I’m going to choose home home to move to an item and I’m going to tab here register vispero portal what describes your primary use of the what describes your primary use of the product combo box Home select all that apply Group education schoolwork Checkbox not checked. So here you would just tab through all of these and check the one or the or the opt options that apply. So you know, I could if I let’s say I’m a student space check. I could just check that I could keep tabbing here. Communication email social media Facebook so communication social media information browsing browsing things like that. Microsoft Office products Word Excel Office products Entertainment music, movies games Checkbox not chat entertainment. Oh, I’ll check that one. So again, you have a choice here and this isn’t we’re not trying to gather a lot of information about you. What we’re trying to do is make sure that you get the information you’re looking for and all the features that you want and just learn more about how people are using our products. That’s really all this is about shopping and finances online shopping Other checkbox not checked and so other did you purchase the product Would give you an opportunity to enter space check. Please specify there’s a field if you choose other there is a an edit field that will come up here and then you could type other ways that you use jaws. I’m going to uncheck that though. Just select all that space not check. There we go. Okay, the next question, the final one here. Did you purchase the product combo box? Please select dot, dot, dot. And again this is optional. You don’t have to choose whether you purchased it or someone else did. If you’re, you know, rehab agency or school or whatever it may be. Yes, no. So I’m just gonna have it on no here and I’m going to tab who provided your product combo box Please select state or federal government agency. So here you could select where it came from. Nonprofit organization educational institution. So I could select whatever I want there. Who provided your product combo box checked Educational institution Create account button. And now you’re to the create account. So you wouldn’t have to enter any of that information once you select or once you make sure that us is the country that is selected which of course right now that’s the only country there there is listed here. Then you just go to the create account button and press space space loading page register Vispero Portal register. And if we press the letter H here age navigation navigate Hang on register again. Age link Return to home page. Navigate. Okay, it’s not a heading. Sorry about that. Link return to home page. List of 1 items. Elizabeth Button collapsed. List end navigation region end main region Heading level one registration complete. There we go. I don’t know why that wasn’t taking focus, but it did say heading level one registration is complete. All right, so again, as you walk through this, it probably won’t take you near that long. I just wanted to show you what all was there. Okay, so now we’ve created the account, I’m going to press Alt F4 to get out of the portal. Alt F4 Verify your Vispero account message. All right, let’s escape that account. Sign in to move to an item. Now you notice here that as we’ve been creating this account, jaws is working as it always does. So this account sign in dialog is still running here waiting for you to create the account or sign in. So it’s, you know, it said it would give us an hour, which it did. And you can request more time, by the way. Okay, so we’re back over to that dialog. I pressed alt tab until I got back over there. Now I need to sign in. So I’m going to press tab to move to where the email address should be entered. Account sign and document Email edit required has pop up and I’m going to enter my email 22 at. Okay, email edit required uitaker+22@visparo.com I’ll tab Password Password edit required. And I’m going to enter my password that I created and I can either tab to where it says sign in using email or I can just enter here, save your password, save your password, save your password, close your password, will auto fill the next time and will be saved to your device. Username username user heading level 1 sign in complete. Okay, so focus was still on that previous jaws was still focused on that and that save your password then came up. But no, that’s really not that important. So basically what it says here, heading level one sign in complete. It said sign in complete. Now if I down arrow, you may close this window and continue using Jules main region. Main region end. So I’m going to close the window alt F4 alt F4 in boxy. All right, I’m going to go over here to the jaws window with insert J and it told us that everything is signed in. We’re all good. But if you want to verify that, you can actually go to help with alt h hotel alt command, search and and up arrow to check License and account submenu. License and account submenu. Right arrow to expand that. Manage license submenu. And then down arrow manage sign out. And it says sign out. So that tells me I’m signed in. You don’t have to do that. I just wanted to show you this menu bar. So that is how we create and sign into our new vispero account. With that, I’m going to stop sharing my screen and see if you all have any questions. Howard, good afternoon. Very interesting. I have a basic question. What happens if two different computers are using the same language license? Does each computer have to set up an account so they get the update information? That’s a great question. If you’re signed into. Yeah, I did. Personally. Yes, I, I can answer that. I did have to. So I had, you know, I had two different laptops that were using the same license, and when I installed it, it, it asked me to sign in. That’s all. So when you, when you update that other computer. Yeah, it’ll just ask you to sign in. My wife and I are both using the same license. So if I create an account on my computer, can she just sign in for the same credentials? Absolutely, yes. So we don’t need two accounts, just one per license. Yeah, yeah. It’s not, it’s not tied to your license. It’s actually tied to the user. So if you guys are just both using those same computers all the time, that’s fine. But for example, let’s say she went somewhere else and was using a computer, she could still use that account to sign in, but it’s, it’s more tied to the user, not the license. But yes, you can do that. To answer your question. Okay, up next is Chris, does selecting all these, these options, is that going to affect what you get notified about? Since you did say it was optional, I was like, okay, I mean, I don’t think it’s going to affect it, but just to confirm, it’s not going to, like, affect what you will be like, notified about within the settings that, like the settings, message center or whatever else. Right? I would, I would assume not. No, you are correct. It will not. And one thing. Okay, there was a box that, I don’t know, I think it whizzed right past it. I probably tagged many times that said, do you want to be notified? Check or it’s unchecked. Do you want to be notified about features and marketing? You know, things like that? Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. But no, you’re no it will not affect what you’re notified. That’s what I thought, given that was optional. Okay, cool. Great question though. Great question. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, I thought I would just want to clarify that in case others were like, what the heck? All right, Yep. Because of the work and all that. All right, good. Yes. Okay. Up next is Judy. What I would like to know is sort of a two parter. How does this differ if you have owned Jaws Professional and you paid for it yourself? Also, the second part of it is if your license is paid up through 2028, which mine is, are. Is that going to be honored? Okay, so yes, the license will be honored, but you’ll still have to create the account and sign in anytime you run JAWS 2026 for the first time. And that’s our current version that’s out. You’re going to be required to sign in. But it’s just a sign in process. It’s not going to affect your license or how anything. But yes, your license will be honored. But is there a difference between the sign in procedure for Jaws Professional and what you just did for the home? Oh, no, sorry, no, there is no difference. No matter what version of Jaws you’re running, there is no difference. It’s the same exact process. Thank you, Carla. My one question was just answered, but something you just said suggested another question. Okay. Because the question I had was the Pro account. All right. So the other question that I have is the box that you just whizzed by. Okay. That said something about do you want to be notified about marketing and updates? Okay. If critical updates come down the line and you’ve failed to check that box, will you still be notified about, you know, like feature updates or. I guess what I’m asking is would you advise us to check that box or not? And what are the advantages of doing each? Okay, so yeah, that’s a great question. So that is actually the last field that you get to before you get to create. And I think Jaws was reading a lot of extra stuff and I pressed Control so it didn’t read that if you check that box, that just means that you’ll get emails about what’s coming. But it, what it doesn’t mean is that you won’t be notified within the software about updates or in Message Center. All that stuff is still taken care of within the, in the software. But it just means that, you know, do you want to receive our emails that come from marketing about, you know, maybe new features that are coming or something like that? That’s all that means so if you don’t mind those emails. We’re not going to send a ton of emails, by the way, so it’s not going to flood your inbox. So if you want those notification emails, then you can check that box and we’ll add you to the list. I hope that answered your question. Up next is David, a couple of questions. When we come to the next upgrade, JAWS 2027, will you need to log in just to get in there or once you’re logged in having done it in 2026, no login when the upgrades come? That’s the first question. And then secondly, once I have my vispero account, is there any particular reason why I would want to periodically go in and see something on that page related to my account on the portal? On the portal page, yes. Okay, so as to your first question, I don’t know the answer to that yet. I don’t think we’re, we’re still figuring that out because we are going to make some changes to make the sign in process even easier than it is now. So I don’t know if you’ll be required to sign in or not. My guess is if you’re updating Jaws and you’re already signed in, then probably not. But I really don’t know what that might look like. But we will make sure that you all know the answer to that. The second question or second answer to your second question. We are in the process of moving the Freedom Scientific portal and combining all of those. So and we are going to be adding things to that portal. So as of right now, if you go to that portal page and you sign in to your account, you’re not really going to see a whole lot, but you will be seeing more in the coming weeks. So yeah, there will be more that you can see there, more reasons to go there. Okay, thank you, Christy. Can you repeat the steps of being able to find out what your license, you know, when, when what license you have and when it expires? So in Jaws, you’re going to go to the JAWS window with insert J or if you don’t have an insert key, it’s control shift caps lock J. Okay. Huh. That takes you to the Jaws window. You press alt H to go to help. Okay. You’re going to go up to, you can go to check for updates and that will tell you if you currently have any updates. Okay. Or you can go to license and account submenu, you can go to manage license submenu and that gives you a couple of options and. Or you can go to manage account online. So if you want to check for updates, though, that’s your first option there when you press alt H and you move up. Okay. Yep. And that’s how you would do it. Okay, thank you. Guy is up next. You were mentioning that home license is only available in the United States. And I am Canadian and I am registered with a home license. Now I was wondering, does that affect when you register? Because I haven’t done the registration yet. Okay. Yes. So the home annual license, you guys do have access to that. Yes. But what’s available in the United States is the registration. So, no, you will not be asked to create that account and sign in to the portal. And I know that’s confusing because with your home annual license, you. You do have a portal account, but when you install 2026, as of right now in Canada, you will not be asked to sign in. Okay. Because I guess I go too many times in the United States. I understand. That’s why I get confused. It is confusing. We’ll wait for the registration then. Yes. All right. Thank you. You’re welcome, Marcy. Hi, Liz. Thank you so much for the presentation. Sure. Love it. Which email that or which way does Vispero recommend that a new account be set up? Because I know if the Google is used, then it’s one less password to remember. Because you remember that Google account. Right, Right, that Google account password. But I have mine set up with the new one. But which one is recommended by you guys? You know, we really don’t recommend one or the other just because you can do either and it’s personal preference. So if somebody prefers to sign in via Google, great. Otherwise you don’t. You have both options. Perfect. Thank you. Huh? All right, that’s everybody for now. All right, well, thank you guys very much. That’s it for my presentation. But if you do actually have questions that you think of after today, I do want to tell you a couple of things. One, you can email us@trainingespero.com and once again, Vispero is Victor, India, Sierra, Papa, Echo, Romeo, Oscar. So it’s trainingspero.com and you can go to freedomscientific.com training to see all of our training content. And I do want to mention very briefly here too, that we are in the process, and I know this has very been very confusing over the last several years. You hear us talk about Freedom, Scientific, you hear us talk about Vespero, and we get a lot of questions about what is Vispero. So Vespero is the main company. That’s our company name. And we still had all of those other, you know, names, Freedom Scientific and Optelec and all of those. So what you’re going to be seeing in the coming weeks, we’ve already started this process, is everything is going to be under Vispero. So we’re not changing the products, we’re not changing how anything works. You’re just going to hear the, you know, the company name, Vispero. So there’s some rebranding that’s going on. So I did just want to mention that. So it’s going to be called Vispero Training instead of Freedom Scientific Training. For example, one hand did just pop up. Do you want to take that? Yeah, let’s take that. Okay. Anna SEO. Hi, good afternoon, Elizabeth. Yes, this is, this is a different question. I’m wondering if I can take advantage of you being here to ask. Go for it. I just yesterday received the update saying that there was a March update for jobs for 2026. So I updated, you know, I said, yes, go ahead and download it, then installed it. And at the end I got an error and I don’t know what the set error number was. And so, you know, I said, okay. And I said, try again. So I tried again. And what happened since then is that my computer just totally went berserk. Jaws would stop, wouldn’t talk. I asked my silent wife. She said the screen was black when I I press Control Alt delete would bring the Looking for the test manager. It would, it would work. I mean, the screen would be on for 30 seconds or so and then you shut off again. So there was definitely a problem. So I finally was able to bring Narrator up. I shut down. I bring up again. I started the computer again. The whole thing started again. So for the third time, what I did was shut down again with Narrator, brought it up, Jaws came on and before I did anything, I closed Jobs and then I brought up, I loaded jaws 25 and I have not turned off my computer again because it’s working. So I’m assuming there was something to do with the update and I didn’t have a chance to call support yet because it’s a weekend. But I’m wondering, have you heard anything at all about issues with this update or the installation? No, we haven’t heard anything about that. But that is definitely something you’ll want to talk to Support about because that we do need to be aware of that if other people are experiencing that. It could just, you know, sometimes Windows and updates and Things like that, things happen. But I would definitely reach out to them on Monday about that. Okay, thank you. And again, congrats and thanks for all the work you do and the trainings and everything. Sure. Thank you. You’re welcome. Tyson, you’re up next. And then we got. Yep, I got you guys. Thanks. We got three more after you. Yep, I saw that. Hi, Liz. And again, thank you for the presentation as Tyson. So I got a couple questions for you that more that I was waiting just for you to be done because these are kind of more off topic, but has Vispero thought about implementing, especially with the, with the bringing together the two accounts, implementing passkeys? I know that is something we’ve talked about, and I don’t know where we are in making that decision, but, you know, we, we definitely want to make it as easy as possible and secure as possible. So, yeah, I will definitely ask about that. Okay. And then my, my second is. Is possibly a 2, 2, 2 combined. Question is, is there going to be another next big thing? We are working on that. Yeah, I, I hope so. I really hope so. That is something we weren’t able to do this last November, but I’m hoping that we can bring it back this November. I was kind of keeping my out for that. Yes. So then in absence of make feature requests, because I’ve, I tried to do that through the old way that it states and I get an error message going back. We don’t do this this way anymore. You know, I don’t know what our new address is for that. So if you have a request for a feature or an idea or suggestion, anything, send it to me and then I’ll get that address. I’ll make sure it gets to the proper place and I’ll give you all the correct address for that. Gorgeous. Thank you so much. Sure thing. Love to hear your ideas. So if any of you have any, any suggestions for features. And for those of you who might not know what the next big thing is, it’s something that we started a few years ago where people submit their ideas for features and we have a couple sets of judges who pick, you know, the, the top three. And then we all get together for an event and we have a panel of judges who picks the next big thing. So stay tuned for more about that. Claris, you’re up. I was just wondering if it’s true or not. With the home annual license, is the web Page Explorer coming? Is it in May? Yes. Oh, that’s exciting. Yes. Yes, we’re very excited about that. So, yes, I know. I heard. I saw like on social media platforms that you guys have mentioned at CSUN that the webpage explorer is coming out. And I was like, oh, my goodness. So very cool. Yes, awesome. I look forward to it. Yes, I know a lot of people are looking forward to that. And you know what we’re going to do? Even we’re going to do some more training on it because now that more people are going to have access to it, it’s just going to be that much more exciting. And it is a very powerful feature. So you guys stay tuned for that. Lewis, When I first created the account, Jaws was not speaking. Oh. So I said to myself, aha, maybe it’s not running John’s system tray. So then I fixed the thing and lo and behold, it started up like a charm. All right, so maybe that’s what’s happening with some people. Okay, great, great troubleshooting tip there. Louis, I’ve asked you to unmute again. I do have a question. I work in a major utility company. We have a very strong security firewall and because of that, I still have am not able to use JAWS 2026. I did register, but the validation that I was supposed to receive back, it never came. I contacted the office and I don’t know why, but the person in tech support said that my employer who needs to relax our security model and that’s never going to happen. We are a major utility company and this is something that will force me to go to nvda because obviously we’re not going to compromise our safety. Right? So I tell you what, we’re going to help you out with that. And if you will send an email to trainingsparrow.com I will make sure that gets handled on Monday. Plus Tilde to reach lower hand. Okay, thank you. Yes, you’re welcome. Penny. Hey, Elizabeth, I was wondering if you could just spend a minute to talk about some of the new things in this update and are we going to have an extra update before October? Is this it till October? So we are rolling out updates roughly every six weeks. Not all of them are going to have new features in them. You know, there are a lot of times we will create enhancements or enhance other features, fix things that, you know, may not have been working as they should be. So in this particular the March update with Jaws, one of the main features was we’ve added the keyboard commands that are used in Excel for reading or speaking columns and rows, or they’re used in Word for tables. You can use those in Google Docs and Google Sheets. That’s one of the main things there. And also, and I will mention this, I know a lot of you are using jaws, but if any of you are using Zoomtext or, you know, anyone using Zoomtext, we have just added OCR to Zoomtext. So it’s like the convenient OCR that you use in Jaws, but in Zoomtext, you know, you may have images with text and you want to be able to read that text. So with the app reader tool in ZoomText, you can now. It will. It will now read that to you. So those were the main features there in the March update. We got some more things coming up here in May. And so yeah, there will be a May update. There will be a couple of updates before October. Okay. Yep. Thank you. You’re welcome. David, sorry, me again. Quick question. Maybe you can’t answer it yet, but do you anticipate that there will be discounts this summer during the conventions for purchase of company products? I don’t know the answer to that just yet, but I know we will have information coming out about that soon. So I know we usually do something there. So yeah, just thought maybe I could wheeze it out. Yeah, I really don’t know. No success. Okay. All right. Thanks, Carla. Thanks again for doing this. My quick question is I still have 25, but there are a couple of things that 25 legacy things that 25 doesn’t support and the only way I can get support for them is to go back to an early version. So if I get 26 with the account and everything, will I still be able to revert back to a previous version if I need to for. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. You sure will. I’m just curious, what are some of the things you don’t have to share that if you don’t want to, but what are. Sure. My old office. Oh I see. Until I. And in the new office won’t read my. It won’t let me populate my email like if I send out to a list. So really a big problem. So I just go back to old, you know, an older version and I have no problem with that when I’m doing email. And it. It doesn’t read email as well either. It seems to be stuck new email, which I hate. So that’s, you know, that’s why I have to do that. So. Okay. Well feel free to reach out to us if we can help in any way with that. Feel free. I was told you no longer you will no longer give tech support to anybody. Doesn’t have 26, so that’s one. Well, we will give training to everyone, so if you reach out to me, I’ll get you some answers. Okay. Thank you. You’re welcome. Well, thank you so much, Liz, for coming and presenting. This has been great and very informative. We really appreciate you taking a Saturday to come out. No problem. Happy to. But now you get to go enjoy the rest of your weekend, hopefully. Right? Hey, I enjoyed this very, very much. So thank you guys for having me. Not a problem. And I think that’s it. All right. Thank you all. Thank you.Welcome, everybody. Today’s Basics with BITS is on JAWS and learning how to update it, as well as how to create a new account with jaws, which is now a new requirement for getting your updates. Today is WOW, March 28, 2026. Where has the year gone already? We want to let you know that Basics with Bits is sponsored obviously by Blind Information Technology Solutions. We would like you to come and join us. Be part of our announce list, which you can get by subscribing at BITS Announce. Groups is the regular email, but then you have the subscribe email is bits-announce plus sign Subscribe@groupsio if you’d like to become a BITS member. We have an annual membership for $20. We also have a lifetime membership for, for $200. So please come and join us. And at this point I am actually going to turn this over to Liz Whitaker, who works for Draws, and I really appreciate that you were able to come today and help present. Well, hi everyone and yes, thank you. It’s great to be here. My name is Liz Whitaker and I am the director of User education and outreach here at Maspero. And I’m really excited to be here to talk about our login and account registration because this is something we do get a lot of questions about. So I want to be able to show you how it works, walk you through the process and then answer your questions. So back In October of 2025, we released JAWS ZoomText Infusion 2026. And with that came a really important change, which is our new registration and account login requirement. Now this is something that other companies do. For example, Microsoft, you know, requires you to log in and you get access to all your Office365 applications and all those features. You, if you use an iPhone or Android, you probably used to logging in with your Apple ID or your Google email, same with your Google account. So we added this feature to enable you to access JAWS ZoomText Infusion, which I know today we’re really talking about Jaws, but all three products, whichever product you use, across all devices. So what this means is, you know, if you’re at work, for example, you use Jaws, you log into your account, it is not specific to a particular computer, so it is your account as your login. So it would be like logging into your Gmail at work, for example, and then you come home and you log into that same Gmail at home. Well, this is the same if you have a copy of Jaws at work, if they purchased it for you. If you purchased your own for home, for example, you’re going to use the same account to log in. We did this for several reasons. We did this so that we could, number one, keep you up to date on all the latest features, make sure that you’re getting everything as it is released. And then, number two, we are going to be adding some features here in the very near future that are going to allow you to remain connected in some really important ways. So let’s talk about that for just a second. So one of the reasons that we want to make sure that you get all. Well, we just want to make sure that you get all the information as it is updated anyway. But historically, when we released a major version of jaws, you know, 2025, 2026 and so forth, several years ago, when we were releasing those major versions, that’s usually when the bulk of the features were included. So throughout the year, you would get some more updates to that version, but it wouldn’t include necessarily a lot of new features. It would include some enhancements. Well, over the last several years, we’ve kind of changed that a bit. And so we have started rolling out new features to throughout the year. And so that way you don’t have to wait until the next major version of Jaws comes out. And part of that is because when you have this account login, for example, you’re going to be able to log in, you’re going to get all those features as they come out, and, you know, you don’t have to wait a whole year. The other thing that we’re going to be adding, and this is going to be really exciting, I’m. I’m actually very excited about this one, because when you set up Jaws, it’s very specific. It’s customized. You set your speech, your rate, your voice, whatever it is that you like. And you can change that along the way, of course, but you may have some, you know, core settings that you really like that really work for you. And so if you set that up at home, for example, and then you go to work and you think, well, I really want to have those same exact settings here on my work computer, but I don’t remember what all of them are. So now, you know, what do you do? You have to go through, and you have to walk through settings and go through the Startup wizard and, you know, do all of that and, you know, you can get it done, but you have to go through and do it manually, or in some cases, you just transfer a settings file, which that’s, you know, that’s definitely doable, but it’s not as Easy as what we’re going to do here with Account login. So with Account login now, when, when. We haven’t implemented this yet, but we’re going to soon. I don’t have an exact date, but we’ll be letting you guys know here very soon. You’re going to be able to transfer those settings to another device very easily. And you’re going to have the choice. It’s not just going to do it automatically for you, but you’re going to have that choice. And so it’s going to make it a lot easier for you to go from computer to computer, log into your account and, and have JAWS automatically if you choose to start speaking the way you want it to. All right, so those are a couple of the reasons why we implemented the account registration. So I want to show you a couple of ways that you can set this up. Now, again, with JAWS 2026, if you’re using a version that’s prior to JAWS 2026, you won’t have this, but with JAWS 2026, you will. And so what’s going to happen when you first install JAWS 2026, it’s going to ask you to sign in and at that point you can create a new account. If you don’t already have one or if you’ve already created your account, you can just go ahead and sign in. So you can do this in one of two ways. You can create your account through our portal, which I’m going to show you how to do. It’s portal.vespero.com and for those of you who are wondering how to spell vispero, it’s V as in Victor, India, Sierra, Papa, Echo, Romeo, Oscar. So it’s portal.vespero.com and if you go there, you’re going to get login Vispero Portal. This page, it’s going to say login Vespero Portal. Now, we’re in the process of moving this portal, developing this portal. So you know, if you have, for example, if you’re subscribed to a home annual license and you’re used to logging in and seeing all your information there, that is coming. So for those of you who log in and you think, oh, well, I just see my profile information, that is further development is coming on that. So I just wanted to let you know. But you can also create your account here. So if you know, for example, well, I’m going to be updating to JAWS 2026 next week, I want to go ahead and create my account. This is where you’re going to go to do it, and if you don’t do it that way, you can do it from the software. Now, I’m just going to show you a little bit about the portal and then I’m going to sign out of my current account and we’re going to create a new one from the software because ultimately it takes you to the same place. Whether you do it from the software, you come to the portal, ultimately you wind up here at the portal to create that account. So the two things that we need to do are create an account and sign in. Once you’re signed in, Jaws is going to behave as it always has. You don’t have to sign in again. It’s not going to sign you out or anything like that. Should you experience anything like that, you need to get in touch with support because that is not something that’s supposed to be happening. So Jaws is going to behave like it always has. All right, so we are here@portal.vespero.com Login Vespero Portal. And the first thing it says here at the top of the page is login vispero portal. Now, I’m just going to press the letter foxtrot that’s going to navigate us through the form field here. I’m not actually going to sign in sign in with Google button, but I am going to show you some options here. So we have an option here to sign in with Google. So if you like to use your Gmail address to sign into things, this is where you’d go. And if you press enter here, it would take you off to a Google page. It would ask you, you know, what is your Gmail address? Or if you’re already signed into a computer, whatever computer you’re on, it’s going to say, what Google account do you want to use? You’re probably going to see your address there and then it will probably go through the authentication that Google goes through and then you’ll be in. So you can use Google to sign up here for your vispero account. Email edit required. If I was going to log into the portal, this is where I’d type my email password password edit required, sign in button. And there’s a sign in button. Okay, but what if I don’t have an account? I’m going to press down arrow don’t have an account link. Create a vispero account. So this is where you would go to create a vispero account. We’re going to press enter now. Again, I’m not going to create it on the portal here, because I’m going to go through the software and show you, but it’s going to bring us right back to this page. But what it does is it takes you to the very first page. Register Vispero Portal. And that’s what it says. Register Vispero Portal. You can navigate this page in a couple of ways. You can go straight to the edit fields or the form fields by pressing the letter F. Boxtrot I am 18 or older radio button check. And I’ll explain this page when we come back and create the account. But so you have a few different pages here. So you’re going to go through this page and you’re going to go to next and you’re going to go to the next page and so forth. So this is the Portal Again, it’s portal.vispero.com. all right, let’s stop right here and go over to Jaws though, because I want to show you how to create it within the Jaws application. Alt F menu bar escape. All right, I’m going to go to the jaws window here with insert J title is Jaws. Okay, now I’m going to go to sign out. You’ll never need to sign out, by the way. This isn’t something you need to do. I’m just doing it so we can create a new account. But I’m going to go to help with alt H for help alt command search and check for updates. I’m going to go up to license and account submenu. License and account submenu. I’m going to right arrow to open that Manage license submenu Manage account. And I’m going to down arrow to sign out sign out menu bar. Leaving menu bar jaws sign out confirmation. A Vispero Portal account is required to run Jaws. If you need to switch account, keep me Sign sign out button. Enter jaws sign out confirmation. You have been signed out. Okay, but space jaws. Jaws. Jaws will run for 60 minutes to. Okay, now page has one region. What happened here is it came up and it told us jaws will run for 60 minutes. And basically you have 60 minutes to create this account. Now, again, we’re further developing this feature, so that could change. Just know that that could, you know, we could give you more time or, you know, do something else there. So. But our aim is to make it easier. So we’re definitely not going to do anything that makes it more difficult. Okay, but what it’s telling you, let’s say you install JAWS 2026 and you run it for the very first time. You’ve just restarted your computer after the installation and you’re running jaws. And this is what it’s going to come up and it’s going to tell you sign in to your account heading level one. So it’s going to prompt you here to sign into your account. And we heard JAWS say heading level one. So that indicates here that we’ve got something that’s like a web environment that we’re going to be navigating. This just makes it easier because you know, we use those navigation quick keys to navigate web pages so we can use them here too. But let’s down arrow main region heading level one. Sign into your account. You must sign in with a vispero account to use JAWS. JAWS will run for 60 minutes to give you time to complete the step. Sign in with Google button. Okay, so basically it just told us what you know, we were just talking about that we’re going to need to sign in. And so if you’ve already created an account on the portal, you would just tab to the right field here where you type in your email address and then tab to type in your password and then you could sign in. But let’s explore this dialogue. We don’t have, we’re going to assume we don’t have an account. Right? Right. Okay. So let’s just tab here. Email edit required. Okay, that’s the field and we heard forms mode engaged there. That’s the field where we would type our email if we already had an account password Password edit required. Bullet, bullet, bullet. And I’m going to space whatever is there. Forgot password link. So that’s where if you, let’s say you do have an account and you forgot your password, you could go there to retrieve it. Now I want to take a moment and just say if you have a home annual license where you have already signed into our freedom scientific portal, which we’re, we’re merging those by the way, so there won’t be two portals. But if you have a, an account that’s home annual, you can use that same account to sign in. What it will do in that case is it will bring you to the portal page after you’ve signed in and say okay, you’ve signed in. Now we want to few more pieces of information and I’ll and we’ll go over what that is and why. But that’s because when you created that portal account for the home annual license, all you were required to enter was your email address and password. And so because we asked for a few more pieces of information because of, you know, AI features that we have and things like that. Again, we’ll get into that here in a few minutes. But that’s why if you’ve ever purchased Jaws from our store online store, you, you might also, you’ll also have an account and you could sign in with that as well. Okay, but we’re going to assume here that I do not have an account. Let’s keep tabbing through and see what we have. Sign in with email button. Okay, that’s just your sign in button. Create Account link. There’s our Create Account link Account Sign in document, Email edit required. And there we go. And I’m tabbing through that. By the way. I’m going to shift tab back up to Create account Sign in with Google button. There’s our sign in with Google again. We saw that on the portal. So if you go there, it’s going to take you to the portal and take you to that page where you sign in with your Gmail address. Account Sign in document. Sign in with email. Create Account link. Okay, so I shift tabbed over here to Create account and I’m going to press Enter. It’s going to take us to the portal. Enter Opening new window. Register Vespero Portal. Register Vespero Portal. Loading complete. Page has three regions, one heading and four links. All right, so I’m going to go to the top of this page just so we have a good starting place here with Control Home Register Vispero portal. Now, I can go straight to the form field, but I, I’m not going to do that in this case because I want to show you around the page. So this actual process doesn’t typically take very long, but I am going to take my time a little bit going through these pages just because I want to explain a few things. So, you know, it may take me, let’s just say 10 minutes to do this. Whereas when you actually walk through the process, it may take you, you know, two or four or six, you know, whatever it is, doesn’t matter. It’s just that I wanted you to know that I’m going to press the letter H for heading. Please confirm your age Heading level one. All right, so we have Please confirm your age. Again, the reason we do this. Now, some of you may be familiar with this. At first we were asking, we had a dialogue that said, you know, what’s your date of birth? We don’t really want to know everyone’s actual age. That’s not why we ask for that. This, we’ve, we’ve changed this a bit because we don’t need to know your age. What we need to know is an age range. And that has to do with. Because we use AI services or AI features in our software, those AI features, those services that we use have regulations and we have to make sure we adhere to those. So that’s what that’s about. If you’re wondering. So if I down arrow here to create an account, we need to confirm you meet the minimum age requirement. And so that’s what it’s referring to here. I am 18 or older. Radio button checked. So the first option is I’m 18 or older and that is checked by default. But our other options, I’m going to leave it checked. But if I press the letter F boxtrot to navigate through these form fields, I am at least 13 and younger than 18. Radio button not checked. So that you know you’d be between 13 and 18. I am younger than 13. Radio button not checked. And again, these are radio buttons, so you can only select one. So you press space on the one you want to select. But I am over 18 is already selected. So I’m going to press the letter F foxtrot again, continue button. So we have a continue button. All right, so we’re going to press space space Register vispero portal. All right, we’re to the next page. Register vispero portal and I’m going to press H for heading again and let’s see what our next page asks. Let’s get started. Heading. All right, let’s get started. Email address. Okay, so now I can navigate through this field like I would or form like I would any other. I’m going to press the letter F boxtrot Email address edit enter and I’m going to enter there and activate forms mode. So now I’m going to type my email address and it’s going to actually send me an email that is going to have a link in it to move to the next step. So when you type in your email address, make sure it’s one that is a working email address and make sure it’s one that you can check easily because you’re going to need to do it to proceed and you’re going to need to do it on the computer, you know, where you’re actually creating the account. Okay, so I’m going to type my vispero address here udegger at this required. Okay, so it says it’s required. I can verify that it’s there by pressing jaws key up arrow to read this line. Email address set it required to it occur@visparo.com. okay, I’m in a tab register vispero portal Continue button to active and I’m going to press space on continue space. Loading page. Loading complete. Register Vespero. All right, it took me to the next page and so I’m at the top and I’m going to press the letter H for heading. Let’s get started. Heading Level 1. The email ludocur@visparo.com is already associated. Oh, wait a minute. Okay, I need to type a different email. I need to type it a different way here. Sorry about that. But okay, but if it tells you that this actually was a happy accident. Because if it tells you that the email ludacur@visparo.com is already associated with a portal account. So if you type in an email address and you think, oh, do I already have a portal account? What you could do in that case is go to forgot password and you could retrieve your password email address edit space. All right, let me do this a different way here. Udiker+22.com Register Vispero Portal Continue button. Enter loading page. Okay, now let’s see what it tells us. Verify your email. Heading level one. Here we go. An email has been sent to ruitaker+20twospero.com with a link that can be used to finish setting up your account. If you verify your email and finish setting up your account on a different device, link return to the home page to sign in. Okay, so I was, I. What happened was it went to the next page. I use the letter H to navigate to the first heading and I read that information with down arrow. So what that’s telling us is, okay, it sent us this email and so we can go over and get that link from this email, but it tells us if we are setting up this account on a different device and we’re accessing like for example, if we’re accessing our email from one computer but we’re setting it up on another computer, we can go back to the homepage and sign in. Okay, so I’m going to go over here to my open email tasks. Jaws screenshot Inboxy Whitaker at inbox Unread Vispero Portal. There we go. We have an email from Vispero Portal. I’ll press enter enter. Thank you for being a Vispero user. Please open the link below to verify your email address and complete setting up your Vispero account. Verify. Okay, so we should have a verify link here. Link Verify my email. And I Did hear it say link. So I’m going to press enter on that link. Enter verify my email link. Link Verify my email. To activate, press enter. Opening new tab. Loading page. Register Vispero. All right, so it said opening new tab. So it opened this page in a new tab. So let’s see what we have on this page. Register Vespero. I’m going to press the letter H. Register with email heading level one. So now it says register with email. If I down arrow here, first name star. Now it’s going to start asking us for information. So everything that says star is required, just like on any other field. So I’m just going to press F here for F Foxtrot first name star to get to this first form field. That’s a lot of Fs there. Enter. Okay, so first name. I’m going to type my first name. Right? First name Star Edit required. Elizabeth. B H Blank. I didn’t actually say my whole name. I don’t know. Elizabeth B L, Z A B Y H. Oh, that’s why Y. If I spell it correctly, then it will say it correctly. Elizabeth. There we go. All right, I’m going to press tab to navigate to the next field. Last name Star Edit. Type my last name. Last name Star Edit required. Whitaker. Okay, I’ll tab again. Password Star Password Edit required. Okay, I’m going to take a moment here now. I’m tabbing through this field, this form, but there’s some information that I really want to know here. And this is what are the requirements for this password? So I’m just going to stop right here and I’m going to turn forms mode off by pressing Numpad plus or caps Lock semicolon if you don’t have a numpad virtual PC cursor. And because they’re important, that’s important information to know. What are the requirements? What do you need to know to type in your password or to create a password? Password star. So if I press up arrow it says password star. Now I can down arrow here. Must contain at least eight characters including a number and a letter. Okay, so there are our requirements. Must contain at least eight characters including a letter and a number. Password Star Password space. All right, I’m just going to type in a password here and I’m going to tap confirm Password Star Password Edit required. All right, so I’ll confirm. I’ll type in that very same password and I’ll tab again. Register Vispero Portal continue button. Okay, so now we are going to press space on continue space. Loading Save your password. Okay, I don’t want to do that, but Google Chrome is asking me if I want to save my password. Register Vespero. Okay, now we get into some pieces of information here are going to be required and some aren’t. I’m going to walk you through all these just to explain what they are. You will have choices of what information you would like to provide or not provide. All right, so I’m going to press the letter H for heading. Finish account setup. Heading level one. Okay. Finish account setup. Great. That means we’re almost done. Down arrow. To help us offer better support and continue improving our products, we’d like to learn a bit about how you use them. Your remaining fields are optional. Okay, so let’s read that one more time. Sorry. To help us offer better support and continue improving our products, we’d like to learn a bit about how you use them. Your country is required, but the remaining fields are optional. Okay, now it says your country is required. As of right now, we only have registration available in the US but we are going to be adding more countries. So that’s why that information is there. But by default, if we press the letter F, Foxtrot country star combo box collapsed. Required. United States. So that’s already selected. So if you do not want to enter any more information, you do not have to, but we’re just going to quickly walk through this and then we’re going to finish and then we’re going to sign it. Okay, so I’m just going to keep pressing F here. Phone number edit. So you. You could enter your phone number if you chose to. What describes your primary use of the product? Combo box collapsed. All right, that’s a combo box. How do you use the product? I’m going to press the space bar here. Space register vispero Portal. Please select dot, dot, dot. And I’m just going to down arrow through the few options here. Work to move to an item. So we have work. Home to move to an item. School to move to school. Now you have. You can only select one of these, so you’d want to just maybe select your primary. You know, where do you primarily use Jaws? And the one, the option you select that? Well, okay, the options that come next are going to depend on what you select. So if you select home, it’s going to give you a list of, you know, things you could do at home. Like to use it for shopping or entertainment or email or documents, things like that. If it’s work, if it’s school, it’s going to give you some different options but I’m going to choose home home to move to an item and I’m going to tab here register vispero portal what describes your primary use of the what describes your primary use of the product combo box Home select all that apply Group education schoolwork Checkbox not checked. So here you would just tab through all of these and check the one or the or the opt options that apply. So you know, I could if I let’s say I’m a student space check. I could just check that I could keep tabbing here. Communication email social media Facebook so communication social media information browsing browsing things like that. Microsoft Office products Word Excel Office products Entertainment music, movies games Checkbox not chat entertainment. Oh, I’ll check that one. So again, you have a choice here and this isn’t we’re not trying to gather a lot of information about you. What we’re trying to do is make sure that you get the information you’re looking for and all the features that you want and just learn more about how people are using our products. That’s really all this is about shopping and finances online shopping Other checkbox not checked and so other did you purchase the product Would give you an opportunity to enter space check. Please specify there’s a field if you choose other there is a an edit field that will come up here and then you could type other ways that you use jaws. I’m going to uncheck that though. Just select all that space not check. There we go. Okay, the next question, the final one here. Did you purchase the product combo box? Please select dot, dot, dot. And again this is optional. You don’t have to choose whether you purchased it or someone else did. If you’re, you know, rehab agency or school or whatever it may be. Yes, no. So I’m just gonna have it on no here and I’m going to tab who provided your product combo box Please select state or federal government agency. So here you could select where it came from. Nonprofit organization educational institution. So I could select whatever I want there. Who provided your product combo box checked Educational institution Create account button. And now you’re to the create account. So you wouldn’t have to enter any of that information once you select or once you make sure that us is the country that is selected which of course right now that’s the only country there there is listed here. Then you just go to the create account button and press space space loading page register Vispero Portal register. And if we press the letter H here age navigation navigate Hang on register again. Age link Return to home page. Navigate. Okay, it’s not a heading. Sorry about that. Link return to home page. List of 1 items. Elizabeth Button collapsed. List end navigation region end main region Heading level one registration complete. There we go. I don’t know why that wasn’t taking focus, but it did say heading level one registration is complete. All right, so again, as you walk through this, it probably won’t take you near that long. I just wanted to show you what all was there. Okay, so now we’ve created the account, I’m going to press Alt F4 to get out of the portal. Alt F4 Verify your Vispero account message. All right, let’s escape that account. Sign in to move to an item. Now you notice here that as we’ve been creating this account, jaws is working as it always does. So this account sign in dialog is still running here waiting for you to create the account or sign in. So it’s, you know, it said it would give us an hour, which it did. And you can request more time, by the way. Okay, so we’re back over to that dialog. I pressed alt tab until I got back over there. Now I need to sign in. So I’m going to press tab to move to where the email address should be entered. Account sign and document Email edit required has pop up and I’m going to enter my email 22 at. Okay, email edit required uitaker+22@visparo.com I’ll tab Password Password edit required. And I’m going to enter my password that I created and I can either tab to where it says sign in using email or I can just enter here, save your password, save your password, save your password, close your password, will auto fill the next time and will be saved to your device. Username username user heading level 1 sign in complete. Okay, so focus was still on that previous jaws was still focused on that and that save your password then came up. But no, that’s really not that important. So basically what it says here, heading level one sign in complete. It said sign in complete. Now if I down arrow, you may close this window and continue using Jules main region. Main region end. So I’m going to close the window alt F4 alt F4 in boxy. All right, I’m going to go over here to the jaws window with insert J and it told us that everything is signed in. We’re all good. But if you want to verify that, you can actually go to help with alt h hotel alt command, search and and up arrow to check License and account submenu. License and account submenu. Right arrow to expand that. Manage license submenu. And then down arrow manage sign out. And it says sign out. So that tells me I’m signed in. You don’t have to do that. I just wanted to show you this menu bar. So that is how we create and sign into our new vispero account. With that, I’m going to stop sharing my screen and see if you all have any questions. Howard, good afternoon. Very interesting. I have a basic question. What happens if two different computers are using the same language license? Does each computer have to set up an account so they get the update information? That’s a great question. If you’re signed into. Yeah, I did. Personally. Yes, I, I can answer that. I did have to. So I had, you know, I had two different laptops that were using the same license, and when I installed it, it, it asked me to sign in. That’s all. So when you, when you update that other computer. Yeah, it’ll just ask you to sign in. My wife and I are both using the same license. So if I create an account on my computer, can she just sign in for the same credentials? Absolutely, yes. So we don’t need two accounts, just one per license. Yeah, yeah. It’s not, it’s not tied to your license. It’s actually tied to the user. So if you guys are just both using those same computers all the time, that’s fine. But for example, let’s say she went somewhere else and was using a computer, she could still use that account to sign in, but it’s, it’s more tied to the user, not the license. But yes, you can do that. To answer your question. Okay, up next is Chris, does selecting all these, these options, is that going to affect what you get notified about? Since you did say it was optional, I was like, okay, I mean, I don’t think it’s going to affect it, but just to confirm, it’s not going to, like, affect what you will be like, notified about within the settings that, like the settings, message center or whatever else. Right? I would, I would assume not. No, you are correct. It will not. And one thing. Okay, there was a box that, I don’t know, I think it whizzed right past it. I probably tagged many times that said, do you want to be notified? Check or it’s unchecked. Do you want to be notified about features and marketing? You know, things like that? Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. But no, you’re no it will not affect what you’re notified. That’s what I thought, given that was optional. Okay, cool. Great question though. Great question. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, I thought I would just want to clarify that in case others were like, what the heck? All right, Yep. Because of the work and all that. All right, good. Yes. Okay. Up next is Judy. What I would like to know is sort of a two parter. How does this differ if you have owned Jaws Professional and you paid for it yourself? Also, the second part of it is if your license is paid up through 2028, which mine is, are. Is that going to be honored? Okay, so yes, the license will be honored, but you’ll still have to create the account and sign in anytime you run JAWS 2026 for the first time. And that’s our current version that’s out. You’re going to be required to sign in. But it’s just a sign in process. It’s not going to affect your license or how anything. But yes, your license will be honored. But is there a difference between the sign in procedure for Jaws Professional and what you just did for the home? Oh, no, sorry, no, there is no difference. No matter what version of Jaws you’re running, there is no difference. It’s the same exact process. Thank you, Carla. My one question was just answered, but something you just said suggested another question. Okay. Because the question I had was the Pro account. All right. So the other question that I have is the box that you just whizzed by. Okay. That said something about do you want to be notified about marketing and updates? Okay. If critical updates come down the line and you’ve failed to check that box, will you still be notified about, you know, like feature updates or. I guess what I’m asking is would you advise us to check that box or not? And what are the advantages of doing each? Okay, so yeah, that’s a great question. So that is actually the last field that you get to before you get to create. And I think Jaws was reading a lot of extra stuff and I pressed Control so it didn’t read that if you check that box, that just means that you’ll get emails about what’s coming. But it, what it doesn’t mean is that you won’t be notified within the software about updates or in Message Center. All that stuff is still taken care of within the, in the software. But it just means that, you know, do you want to receive our emails that come from marketing about, you know, maybe new features that are coming or something like that? That’s all that means so if you don’t mind those emails. We’re not going to send a ton of emails, by the way, so it’s not going to flood your inbox. So if you want those notification emails, then you can check that box and we’ll add you to the list. I hope that answered your question. Up next is David, a couple of questions. When we come to the next upgrade, JAWS 2027, will you need to log in just to get in there or once you’re logged in having done it in 2026, no login when the upgrades come? That’s the first question. And then secondly, once I have my vispero account, is there any particular reason why I would want to periodically go in and see something on that page related to my account on the portal? On the portal page, yes. Okay, so as to your first question, I don’t know the answer to that yet. I don’t think we’re, we’re still figuring that out because we are going to make some changes to make the sign in process even easier than it is now. So I don’t know if you’ll be required to sign in or not. My guess is if you’re updating Jaws and you’re already signed in, then probably not. But I really don’t know what that might look like. But we will make sure that you all know the answer to that. The second question or second answer to your second question. We are in the process of moving the Freedom Scientific portal and combining all of those. So and we are going to be adding things to that portal. So as of right now, if you go to that portal page and you sign in to your account, you’re not really going to see a whole lot, but you will be seeing more in the coming weeks. So yeah, there will be more that you can see there, more reasons to go there. Okay, thank you, Christy. Can you repeat the steps of being able to find out what your license, you know, when, when what license you have and when it expires? So in Jaws, you’re going to go to the JAWS window with insert J or if you don’t have an insert key, it’s control shift caps lock J. Okay. Huh. That takes you to the Jaws window. You press alt H to go to help. Okay. You’re going to go up to, you can go to check for updates and that will tell you if you currently have any updates. Okay. Or you can go to license and account submenu, you can go to manage license submenu and that gives you a couple of options and. Or you can go to manage account online. So if you want to check for updates, though, that’s your first option there when you press alt H and you move up. Okay. Yep. And that’s how you would do it. Okay, thank you. Guy is up next. You were mentioning that home license is only available in the United States. And I am Canadian and I am registered with a home license. Now I was wondering, does that affect when you register? Because I haven’t done the registration yet. Okay. Yes. So the home annual license, you guys do have access to that. Yes. But what’s available in the United States is the registration. So, no, you will not be asked to create that account and sign in to the portal. And I know that’s confusing because with your home annual license, you. You do have a portal account, but when you install 2026, as of right now in Canada, you will not be asked to sign in. Okay. Because I guess I go too many times in the United States. I understand. That’s why I get confused. It is confusing. We’ll wait for the registration then. Yes. All right. Thank you. You’re welcome, Marcy. Hi, Liz. Thank you so much for the presentation. Sure. Love it. Which email that or which way does Vispero recommend that a new account be set up? Because I know if the Google is used, then it’s one less password to remember. Because you remember that Google account. Right, Right, that Google account password. But I have mine set up with the new one. But which one is recommended by you guys? You know, we really don’t recommend one or the other just because you can do either and it’s personal preference. So if somebody prefers to sign in via Google, great. Otherwise you don’t. You have both options. Perfect. Thank you. Huh? All right, that’s everybody for now. All right, well, thank you guys very much. That’s it for my presentation. But if you do actually have questions that you think of after today, I do want to tell you a couple of things. One, you can email us@trainingespero.com and once again, Vispero is Victor, India, Sierra, Papa, Echo, Romeo, Oscar. So it’s trainingspero.com and you can go to freedomscientific.com training to see all of our training content. And I do want to mention very briefly here too, that we are in the process, and I know this has very been very confusing over the last several years. You hear us talk about Freedom, Scientific, you hear us talk about Vespero, and we get a lot of questions about what is Vispero. So Vespero is the main company. That’s our company name. And we still had all of those other, you know, names, Freedom Scientific and Optelec and all of those. So what you’re going to be seeing in the coming weeks, we’ve already started this process, is everything is going to be under Vispero. So we’re not changing the products, we’re not changing how anything works. You’re just going to hear the, you know, the company name, Vispero. So there’s some rebranding that’s going on. So I did just want to mention that. So it’s going to be called Vispero Training instead of Freedom Scientific Training. For example, one hand did just pop up. Do you want to take that? Yeah, let’s take that. Okay. Anna SEO. Hi, good afternoon, Elizabeth. Yes, this is, this is a different question. I’m wondering if I can take advantage of you being here to ask. Go for it. I just yesterday received the update saying that there was a March update for jobs for 2026. So I updated, you know, I said, yes, go ahead and download it, then installed it. And at the end I got an error and I don’t know what the set error number was. And so, you know, I said, okay. And I said, try again. So I tried again. And what happened since then is that my computer just totally went berserk. Jaws would stop, wouldn’t talk. I asked my silent wife. She said the screen was black when I I press Control Alt delete would bring the Looking for the test manager. It would, it would work. I mean, the screen would be on for 30 seconds or so and then you shut off again. So there was definitely a problem. So I finally was able to bring Narrator up. I shut down. I bring up again. I started the computer again. The whole thing started again. So for the third time, what I did was shut down again with Narrator, brought it up, Jaws came on and before I did anything, I closed Jobs and then I brought up, I loaded jaws 25 and I have not turned off my computer again because it’s working. So I’m assuming there was something to do with the update and I didn’t have a chance to call support yet because it’s a weekend. But I’m wondering, have you heard anything at all about issues with this update or the installation? No, we haven’t heard anything about that. But that is definitely something you’ll want to talk to Support about because that we do need to be aware of that if other people are experiencing that. It could just, you know, sometimes Windows and updates and Things like that, things happen. But I would definitely reach out to them on Monday about that. Okay, thank you. And again, congrats and thanks for all the work you do and the trainings and everything. Sure. Thank you. You’re welcome. Tyson, you’re up next. And then we got. Yep, I got you guys. Thanks. We got three more after you. Yep, I saw that. Hi, Liz. And again, thank you for the presentation as Tyson. So I got a couple questions for you that more that I was waiting just for you to be done because these are kind of more off topic, but has Vispero thought about implementing, especially with the, with the bringing together the two accounts, implementing passkeys? I know that is something we’ve talked about, and I don’t know where we are in making that decision, but, you know, we, we definitely want to make it as easy as possible and secure as possible. So, yeah, I will definitely ask about that. Okay. And then my, my second is. Is possibly a 2, 2, 2 combined. Question is, is there going to be another next big thing? We are working on that. Yeah, I, I hope so. I really hope so. That is something we weren’t able to do this last November, but I’m hoping that we can bring it back this November. I was kind of keeping my out for that. Yes. So then in absence of make feature requests, because I’ve, I tried to do that through the old way that it states and I get an error message going back. We don’t do this this way anymore. You know, I don’t know what our new address is for that. So if you have a request for a feature or an idea or suggestion, anything, send it to me and then I’ll get that address. I’ll make sure it gets to the proper place and I’ll give you all the correct address for that. Gorgeous. Thank you so much. Sure thing. Love to hear your ideas. So if any of you have any, any suggestions for features. And for those of you who might not know what the next big thing is, it’s something that we started a few years ago where people submit their ideas for features and we have a couple sets of judges who pick, you know, the, the top three. And then we all get together for an event and we have a panel of judges who picks the next big thing. So stay tuned for more about that. Claris, you’re up. I was just wondering if it’s true or not. With the home annual license, is the web Page Explorer coming? Is it in May? Yes. Oh, that’s exciting. Yes. Yes, we’re very excited about that. So, yes, I know. I heard. I saw like on social media platforms that you guys have mentioned at CSUN that the webpage explorer is coming out. And I was like, oh, my goodness. So very cool. Yes, awesome. I look forward to it. Yes, I know a lot of people are looking forward to that. And you know what we’re going to do? Even we’re going to do some more training on it because now that more people are going to have access to it, it’s just going to be that much more exciting. And it is a very powerful feature. So you guys stay tuned for that. Lewis, When I first created the account, Jaws was not speaking. Oh. So I said to myself, aha, maybe it’s not running John’s system tray. So then I fixed the thing and lo and behold, it started up like a charm. All right, so maybe that’s what’s happening with some people. Okay, great, great troubleshooting tip there. Louis, I’ve asked you to unmute again. I do have a question. I work in a major utility company. We have a very strong security firewall and because of that, I still have am not able to use JAWS 2026. I did register, but the validation that I was supposed to receive back, it never came. I contacted the office and I don’t know why, but the person in tech support said that my employer who needs to relax our security model and that’s never going to happen. We are a major utility company and this is something that will force me to go to nvda because obviously we’re not going to compromise our safety. Right? So I tell you what, we’re going to help you out with that. And if you will send an email to trainingsparrow.com I will make sure that gets handled on Monday. Plus Tilde to reach lower hand. Okay, thank you. Yes, you’re welcome. Penny. Hey, Elizabeth, I was wondering if you could just spend a minute to talk about some of the new things in this update and are we going to have an extra update before October? Is this it till October? So we are rolling out updates roughly every six weeks. Not all of them are going to have new features in them. You know, there are a lot of times we will create enhancements or enhance other features, fix things that, you know, may not have been working as they should be. So in this particular the March update with Jaws, one of the main features was we’ve added the keyboard commands that are used in Excel for reading or speaking columns and rows, or they’re used in Word for tables. You can use those in Google Docs and Google Sheets. That’s one of the main things there. And also, and I will mention this, I know a lot of you are using jaws, but if any of you are using Zoomtext or, you know, anyone using Zoomtext, we have just added OCR to Zoomtext. So it’s like the convenient OCR that you use in Jaws, but in Zoomtext, you know, you may have images with text and you want to be able to read that text. So with the app reader tool in ZoomText, you can now. It will. It will now read that to you. So those were the main features there in the March update. We got some more things coming up here in May. And so yeah, there will be a May update. There will be a couple of updates before October. Okay. Yep. Thank you. You’re welcome. David, sorry, me again. Quick question. Maybe you can’t answer it yet, but do you anticipate that there will be discounts this summer during the conventions for purchase of company products? I don’t know the answer to that just yet, but I know we will have information coming out about that soon. So I know we usually do something there. So yeah, just thought maybe I could wheeze it out. Yeah, I really don’t know. No success. Okay. All right. Thanks, Carla. Thanks again for doing this. My quick question is I still have 25, but there are a couple of things that 25 legacy things that 25 doesn’t support and the only way I can get support for them is to go back to an early version. So if I get 26 with the account and everything, will I still be able to revert back to a previous version if I need to for. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. You sure will. I’m just curious, what are some of the things you don’t have to share that if you don’t want to, but what are. Sure. My old office. Oh I see. Until I. And in the new office won’t read my. It won’t let me populate my email like if I send out to a list. So really a big problem. So I just go back to old, you know, an older version and I have no problem with that when I’m doing email. And it. It doesn’t read email as well either. It seems to be stuck new email, which I hate. So that’s, you know, that’s why I have to do that. So. Okay. Well feel free to reach out to us if we can help in any way with that. Feel free. I was told you no longer you will no longer give tech support to anybody. Doesn’t have 26, so that’s one. Well, we will give training to everyone, so if you reach out to me, I’ll get you some answers. Okay. Thank you. You’re welcome. Well, thank you so much, Liz, for coming and presenting. This has been great and very informative. We really appreciate you taking a Saturday to come out. No problem. Happy to. But now you get to go enjoy the rest of your weekend, hopefully. Right? Hey, I enjoyed this very, very much. So thank you guys for having me. Not a problem. And I think that’s it. All right. Thank you all. Thank you.