Using the Jaws Dictionary Manager

USING THE JAWS DICTIONARY MANAGER

While the text-to-speech speech synthesizer used by JAWS is sophisticated, it is not able to recognize many of the words you are likely to encounter. For many reasons, JAWS will mispronounce many words and acronyms.

The JAWS Dictionary Manager allows you to change the pronunciation of any word or phrase in one application or in all of them. After you have started the application that you want to customize, press INSERT D to start the JAWS Dictionary Manager. So if you have Microsoft Word open and you open the JAWS Dictionary Manager, notice that the title bar will read Microsoft Word.jdf. This means that any settings you change will only apply for Microsoft Word. If you have Notepad active and open the JAWS Dictionary Manager, then any settings you change will only apply to Notepad. If you wish to change the default settings, you must open the JAWS Dictionary Manager, open the File menu with alt F, and arrow to open default file and press enter. After you do this, the JAWS Dictionary Manager’s title bar will then read default.jdf. This means any changes you make will affect the default settings for JAWS, so the pronunciation for the word or phrase will be pronounced the same in Word, Notepad, Internet Explorer, etc.

Time for some practice.

Here’s the procedure for how to add a word to the JAWS Dictionary Manager:

1. Open the Dictionary Manager by pressing Insert D. Since this is a Word file, it will read Microsoft Word.jdf in the title bar.

2. Press the spacebar on the Add button.

This will open the Add Dictionary Definition dialog.

3. Type the word you wish to change the pronunciation of in the actual word edit field.

4. Tab to the Replace word edit field and type a phonetic spelling of the word. Be creative.

You can use insert up arrow to check to hear if your replacement word sounds correct.

5. Tab to the OK button and hit the spacebar.

When you close the Dictionary Manager, it will ask if you want to save changes.

Press the spacebar on the Yes button.

Go ahead and try changing the pronunciation of some words or names that JAWS doesn't speak correctly by adding them to the JAWS Dictionary Manager. Also, try making this work with acronyms. Change the word ASAP to say as soon as possible. Try the reverse as well. Change TTYL to say talk to you later instead.

Go ahead and practice this until you get the hang of it. Try changing words in one program and then try adding words to the default settings.