Windows Emacs and screen readers

[Nikhil Nair <nnair@pobox.com>]

[I appreciate help-emacs-windows might have been the more proper place for
this question; however, the archives indicate that previous discussion on
the topic took place here.]

Hi,

I'm blind, and want to use emacs under Windows XP.  I've tried different
versions (NT Emacs 21.3 both GUI and under cmd.exe, and Cygwin emacs 21.2,
which runs in console mode).

With the two console-mode versions, I had some terminal emulation issues
which stopped me using them fully, but those aren't emacs issues so I'll
leave them for now.

In the GUI version, I couldn't get JAWS (the screen reader I use - version
6.10) to recognise the cursor.  I'd been told that JAWS needs a blinking
bar cursor, so used blinking-cursor.el from wonderworks.com together with
a setting for a bar cursor - but no luck.  From a glance at w32term.c, I
got the impression that emacs draws the cursor graphically, but doesn't
use an ANSI character to represent the cursor, which I believe is what
JAWS needs.

However, I suspect I was reinventing the wheel, as I found some posts on
this list from 3 years ago which talked about the use of the system caret,
and JAWS working well with the GUI version; Ben Key of Freedom Scientific
(who develop JAWS) seemed quite happy with the results.  What I couldn't
tell was whether this behaviour was in version 21.3, or whether I'd need a
later development version; or whether I need to put something specific in
my .emacs file (or on the command-line) in order to get this accessible
behaviour.

Could anyone give me a pointer or two?

Cheers,

Nikhil.