Screen reader Application hang

Jonathanjk — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:37:56 GMT

We are seeing issues whereby JAWS Screen Reader ‘hangs intermittently’ creating a full grey screen in windows with spinning eggtimer once clicked the application closes and creates a windows hang event.

limited dump logs have identified a potential root cause of cortex, global protect or potentially DEM agent.

is there a way to see what if anything these aspects are blocking or interfering with?

Re: Screen reader Application hang

BPry — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 01:08:52 GMT

@Jonathanjk,

While I can't say the number of people I have using JAWS is large, it has grown in preparation for the WCAG 2.1 enforcement for government material. I haven't had any of them report any issues like what you're describing, so I would say that GlobalProtect likely isn't your issue here. I also wouldn't expect the DEM agent would possibly cause this sort of issue (or really GlobalProtect for that matter) and would suspect that Cortex XDR is going to be your most likely out of the three to cause issues.

Assuming that you have someone who can reliably reproduce this intermittent hanging, I would do the following to try and narrow things down:

Temporarily remove Cortex XDR on the machine and have them go about their JAWS process as they would normally (not sure if you have people working on screen-reader remediation efforts or actually needing JAWS for accessibility). See if it hangs still or if the issue goes away.
Additionally I would prepare a completely fresh machine to do the same test but without any of your environments customizations applied. This means not joined to your domain so it doesn't get any of your policies, not connected to GlobalProtect, no Cortex, nothing of the sort. See if the issue is actually with the work that they're doing in JAWS. It's possible that whatever documents they're reviewing just can't be processed by JAWS properly and is causing application instability regardless of anything you have on the machine in question.

topic Screen reader Application hang in General Topics

Screen reader Application hang

Re: Screen reader Application hang