Excerpts from Deborah Armstrong Software Update Testing, May-June 2021.
Alternate Media Specialist - at De Anza college in Cupertino.
" This is my second look at the InsideOne, and since the overhaul of its firmware, it has improved greatly. It's far more speedy and responsive. For example, when using the sliders previously, a gesture would sometimes "not take". That is, I would make the gesture, but the tablet would fail to respond, likely because it was performing another task. This no longer occurs. All gestures are recognized and rapidly acted on ".
" JAWS which used to run slowly on the tablet is also much faster. The cursor routing works especially well and panning which used to have glitches works to read onscreen messages that it used to be unable to scroll through ".
" The three ways for executing the tab key also responded with more speed; previously I'd occasionally find my gesture to invoke a press of TAB simply did not work. This is no longer true ".
" The "Control" utility for switching between NVDA and JAWS and shutting down the tablet also is more speech-friendly. This is good for people just learning Braille who depend more on the speech. And for learning Braille, the tablet is superb. JAWS has something called "Braille study mode" which works perfectly on the tablet and lets a beginning user practice with just the Braille they know. In NVDA, the user can set the Braille table to uncontracted, also making Braille easier to learn in small steps.
The tablet also performs much better online. Previously it was slow enough that when NVDA or JAWS had to keep their offscreen model refreshed, the lag made the experience frustrating. Even with a fast connection, the tablet's latency interfered with surfing the web. This is no longer the case.
The audio has greatly improved. It’s no longer muffled or quiet and indistinct-- It’s still a small, tinny speaker, but all tablets have small tinny speakers. My experience with Windows 10 leads me to believe that some updates affect the audio driver; on my machines and on those belonging to friends, several Windows updates have made the audio unusable until they rolled back to a previous version of the audio driver.
The InsideOne is especially appropriate for people who do a great deal of cloud computing due to its small storage size. I tried it with google docs and was able to easily create, proofread and correct a document using speech and Braille with both NVDA and JAWS. Many students use google classroom, which works well with Edge or Chrome. Sighted students often use a Chromebook which does not work as well with Braille or speech. Though a Chromebook does have Braille support and built-in speech, the InsideOne is vastly superior ".