NVDA is really
very good as a free screen reader. It comes with its own inbuilt speech
synthesiser called E Speak although it works equally well with any Sapi 4 or
Sapi 5 voice. I use it with Neo Speech to get a very nice human sounding
result. Although I use Jaws I use NVDA for 2 things.
1. As a backup if
Jaws crashes on my system. I can normally recover speech and at the very least
find a way of restarting my PC.
2. You can
download a version to work on a USB pen. The great advantage that NVDA has over
the commercial packages is that it does not rely on video intercept and
therefore does not need to be installed on any system. The Jaws USB pen version
will have to install a video intercept manager before it will work. I believe
Window Eyes has the same problem. Because NVDA uses unique technology you can
hold a portable pen version with its own speech which will run off a pen drive
on any PC, even if you do not have administrator rights. In other words you can
plug it in any PC and it will work. They warn you that it is still in
development but personally I found it very stable. They are currently
developing it to include a feature for NVDA users across the world to
communicate in real time.
Whilst NVDA is generally a very good free screen reader there are a few areas in which it is outperformed by this alternative. In particular whilst NVDA will work fine with the free Outlook Express mail client, it crashes when you attempt to open an email in the enhanced Outlook application bundled with Microsoft Office. Thunder works absolutely fine with Outlook however and does a reasonable job with other standard office applications. Thunder lets itself down badly however when it comes to the internet. It cannot use normal browsers like Internet Explorer or FireFox and you will be much better using NVDA in these circumstances. NVDA is actually currently optimised to work best with FireFox but apparently Microsoft has given a grant for the developers of NVDA to increase compatibility with Internet Explorer. The only way you can use Thunder on the internet is to use the Webbie text browser. However installations of NVDA and Thunder appear to co-exist without problems on a PC. On my PC closing one application and starting another is very quick and straightforward. If I did not have Jaws I could use a combination of these screen readers without too much hassle. Basically I would use Thunder for Outlook and Email and NVDA for everything else. The product is free but you have to complete a registration to download.
Click here to enter Screen Reader.Net, download Thunder and Manuals
If you cannot afford the very expensive Jaws Screen Reader, you can download the software and use it in demo mode. In demo mode the applications can work for 40 minutes. You then have to restart your PC in order to run Jaws again. The crucial point is not to download an actual demo version of Jaws. The demo version of Jaws is time limited and after I think 30 days will stop working. Instead you should download the full installation file from the Freedom Scientific web site. On the start up of Jaws after installation you will be invited to activate your Jaws installation. Simply exit out of this and Jaws will continue to run in 40 minute demo mode. Crucially this demo is not time limited.
There are several reasons why you might want to install a demo version of Jaws even if you cannot afford to purchase it at the moment.
Links to all the key Freedom scientific resources are provided on the Jaws User Pages.
Click here to enter the Jaws User Home Page
In the section above I have suggested that by installing the demo version of jaws that you may gain access to the Eloquence synthesisers. Looking at the NVDA mailing lists it appears this access may not be automatic in all versions of Jaws. . It seems that installing different versions of Jaws may or may not give unrestricted access to Eloquence. My suggestion is to install an older version of Jaws, like 8 or 7 to see if this gives access to Eloquence.
I am afraid I do not want to un-install my copy of Jaws to test all this out. On the NVDA lists it has also been suggested that installing the demo version of Hal will give you access to commercial voice synthesisers, though again this apparently works in some circumstances and not in others.
Another suggestion for getting free voices is to install the trial version of Omnipage Pro, which apparently gives access to good quality voices. I have also heard that it is possible to get voices virtually identical to Eloquence through an installation of Via Voice. It has been suggested that the via voice synthesisers are freely available for download. The following link to an IBM download page provides the free download but I have not myself tried these out as I already have Eloquence as part of Jaws.
http://www-03.ibm.com/able/accessibility_services/download.html
Finally I believe that Google are developing a suite of free text to speech synthesizers but personally I think they are horrible. The following link will help you decide for yourself. http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-knol-testing-text-to-speech/4779/
If
you are ever in a situation in which you need access to a screenreader and you do not even have a NVDA pen drive with you can
utilise a screenreader from Serotek
providing you are on a PC with internet access. To start with you need to press
the windows key plus R first of all. Type Narrator in the dialogue box and the
basic Windows screenreader will start. Press Windows key and R again and type
in www.serotek.com
This Serotek page will start talking to you and give you instructions on
launching System Access to go by pressing alt plus S. This will bring up a dialogue
box. You need to either tab to run or press alt r to run the system Access to
go application. This will install a
small download. Narrator seems to be
closed automatically by System Access which is a nice touch. System Access will initially start in browser
only mode. Pressing control home to go to the top of the page will let you find
an activate System Access link which will give you a full screen reader on all
parts of your PC. This will continue for as long as you have your internet
connection. You will be able to use this screen reader throughout the PC in
Emails, other web pages and word-processing programs etc. This part of the
Serotek suite of programs is completely free.
The limited functionality of Narrator means that you would only really use it in emergencies and there are better free options – see NVDA etc above. . There is one intriguing fact about Narrator though. I have heard that anybody who has access to a Windows 2000 machine has a far superior version of narrator with the capacity to access any sapi 4 or 5 voice installed on their system. In later versions of Windows this application was downgraded so that only the horrible Microsoft Sam voice could be accessed. Apparently though you can copy the narrator.exe file from a 2000 machine and it will work fine as a replacement for the narrator.exe file which comes with XP. Remember to back up your existing narrator file if you do this. Narrator.exe is normally located in your Windows folder, probably under the System32 folder. If anybody has access to this version of narrator I would be very glad to receive a copy of it, perhaps by email it in a zipped file to low_vision_survival@yahoo.co.uk . If I can find a copy I will provide a link here to it.
Using Microsoft Office becomes much more accessible with the Office sounds Scheme installed. This modification to Office will provide sound feedback for a number of Office events including opening a document, saving a document, successfully sending a document to the print cue, deleting a block of text in Word and so on. It is a bit unintuitive. If you simply install it nothing appears to happen. You need to go to the Tools menu in Word and then Options. Make sure you are in the General Tab, and then tab down until you hear provide feedback with sounds. Press space here and the Office Sound scheme should start to work. The good news is that making this alteration in word will change the sounds setting in all your Office application. I find this scheme very useful indeed. Especially if the computer is a bit flaky. For example if I hear the print sound and the printer does not start I know immediately that it is an issue with the printer and not Word. Similarly if a very large document is opening in Word I can use the document open sound to reference when this document is completely loaded. The scheme alerts me to when a spelling mistake is auto corrected and if I accidently delete a word or phrase.
Click here to download the Office Sounds Scheme
This is the perfect partner for the Office sounds. Andre’s scheme is a replacement Windows Sound Scheme specifically designed for people with visual impairment. Sounds are very personal but I would definitely miss this if I did not have it. Andre’s scheme provides much more feedback than the normal Windows scheme. For example, it provides a click every time a process or application is loaded at start up. This is very useful as it is normally better not to start using any other Windows applications until all the clicking has stopped, indicating that windows has completely loaded. Another useful feature is the sound which confirms a completed loading of a web page. This is highly recommended. I struggled to find a link to Andre’s page on an internet search. If anybody can send me a link I will post it here. In the meantime I have provided a direct link to his sound scheme file to download here.
Click here to download the Andre Louis Sound Scheme
I
have found this software of great use over the years. There is a lot more that
you can do with it than you might originally think.
For
example as a by-product of its ability to import and read different file types
it is an excellent PDF reader. It also
has an excellent file splitter utility which is great for making manageable
sections out of large book sized documents. Using this I normally convert say a
Project Gutenberg E Book into 60-70 chapters which make reading this on an mp3
player very much easier.
For
those unfamiliar with the product it can reads from a variety of sources in a
voice of your choice. You can set it to monitor the clip board and you can also paste -type directly into
the window reading of the program. It
opens document like Word or PDF files
directly. You can also allow it
to operate with Internet Explorer and either Outlook Express and Outlook Email
programs. I do not use it in these programs as I rely upon Jaws although it is
possible to convert a whole load of emails into mp3 files to take away and
listen to on your mp3 player.
It
is this capacity to convert text into mp3 files that is the really powerful
feature of this program. You can set it to convert at up to 150 time’s normal
reading rate which can make short work of converting a text file into an audio
book. The developers warn you might want to slow this down if your computer is
not that powerful as it might cause a crash. I have had no problems
though. If you convert a large text file like a book I
recommend you use the file splitter utility and set the program to multiple
article modes. This will convert a batch of dozens of split text files into
separate mp3 files for you.
I
have used this program to create my own audio presentation and audio
descriptions to burn onto audio cds. The
control of voices is excellent. You can for example set commands in the text
files to instruct the program to switch voices whilst reading. The program will
detect any voices you have on your PC. It rooted out for example some English
UK Voices that Jaws has obviously installed. Strangely I cannot access these
voices with Jaws itself as I believe they were installed with a demo
installation of a higher Jaws Product.
Text Aloud finds and uses them without problem. I understand the latest
version can access I-Tunes but I have not upgraded.
You
can download a trial version which lasts for 30 days. The actual product cost
£22, which for what it does is an absolute bargain. It is far superior at what
is does than, for example, Kurzweil which includes a few of these features in
its utilities. Kurzweil costs over £600 though.
Click here to visit
NextUp.com
I am grateful to Roopakshi Pathania who has emailed me from India to point out that there is a free alternative to Text Aloud that I was not aware of. I copy below part of the email I received.
“You mentioned Text Alowd
as a way to convert text to MP3. A free alternative is DSpeech.
http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/
You have to arrow down abit on the web page.”
I downloaded and tried this utility and it is
an excellent free utility which does pretty much all that Text Aloud can do and
more. The only real advantage that Text Aloud retains is its speed. Text Aloud processes the conversion from Text to Mp3 more quickly,
especially when set to 150 times reading speed. DSpeech has a useful
shutdown feature which miminises this problem. DSpeech will allow you to set the automatic shutdown
of your PC after conversion so you can leave your audio book to be created overnight.
If
you have a copy of Microsoft Office you may not realise that you have an
extremely high performing OCR engine. Before I started my Masters degree I
decided I wanted to invest in the best scanner and OCR software available. I
bought a fantastic scanner from Trade
Scanners which although costing over £600 has proved to be absolutely
invaluable. I phoned Trade Scanners to
ask them to sell me their best OCR product, fully expecting to spend a few more
hundred pounds. The guy on the help desk knew my circumstances, hesitated and
then confessed that none of the commercial products could outperform the OCR
which came with Microsoft Office. They did not normally reveal this as they had
software at £600 they could sell me but I think he saw me as a special case and
he felt too guilty to take advantage and complete this sale.
He
was absolutely right. I have subsequently used a number of OCR products
including Kurzweil, Omnipage and Textbridge. None of these approach the
performance of Microsoft Document Imaging for basic OCR. Only Omnipage
outperforms the Microsoft product in one respect. Omnipage is the best software
I have found for the scanning of tables. I now normally use a support worker to
separately scan tables. Using Omnipage
is better than Kurzweil at scanning tables and cost about £20 on EBay as
opposed to the £600 of Kurzweil. Basically
if you get offered Kurzweil free, as part of a DSA or Access to Work assessment
then OK. Otherwise do not waste your money.
You
will find Microsoft Document Scanning buried under the Tools menu of Microsoft
Office in the start Menu. There is a little setting up you should do before you
start scanning. I recommend that you go into scanner options and check the tick
box which says use scanner driver. If, like mine, your scanner is duplex then
let this be sorted out by the native scanner driver and ignore any tick boxes
in the Microsoft settings which refer to the source paper being double sided.
After
this simply press scan and let it do the business. After scanning this
document, Microsoft Document Imaging will open a tiff file of your scan. You
simply go to the Tools menu and select the send text to word option. A dialogue
box will open asking you if you want to send all pages. Press enter to confirm
this and Word will open with your scanned text. I have wasted time scanning
with Kurzweil on various settings only having to resort to returning to this
software to make my books readable. The only annoying thing about this program
is that it creates an htm document in Word. I normally convert this by saving
as a rich text file as my Victor Reader Stream can read these directly. As Jaws
also has problems reading certain fonts I normally convert the entire document
to Arial 12 font as well. However this is quickly done. Jaws also reads better
in normal as opposed to web layout.
The
final powerful feature of this software is that you can use it as a virtual
printer to make readable documents that are other wise completely inaccessible.
For example a graphics based Adobe PDF document. I first realised the power of
this feature when using Adobe Reader full version software. Acrobat detected
that there was no text in the document I was trying to open as it was a scanned
graphics file. It offered to run OCR on it but still reported after the OCR run
that it could not detect any text. Frustrated I went to the print menu and
changed the printer to be used from my physical printer to the virtual
Microsoft Document Imaging printer. This saved my pdf document as a tiff file.
I then closed Acrobat and opened the tiff file I had saved in Microsoft
Document Imaging. I sent the text to Word in the normal way and to my delight a
word perfect version of the previously inaccessible document was opened for me
to read in Word.
Kurzweil
has a similar feature but again in my experience is not as good as the native
office product.
NewsAloud
is a partner application for TextAloud. Like Text Aloud tax it provides the
options to read or save to MP3 files. A
nice feature of the program is that it can be set to read news articles and RSS
feeds with round robin or random voices you enabled. This has the virtue of
making it sound a little like a radio program with different journalists filing
different news reports. The only difficult part of this program is the quirky
use of key strokes which do not appear to relate to any standard. RSS feeds and
News articles appear in a single easily accessible list. Rather than pressing
enter to play them you have to press Control and A. These keystrokes take a
little getting used to.
Importing of RSS feeds could not be easier though
and it is easily the most accessible RSS feed reader I have encountered. I do not currently use this application but
this is nothing to do with NewsAloud. It is simply because I got overwhelmed by
the sheer amount of content being delivered to me and I simply did not have the
time to read it all. You will probably want to edit down the news article
sources to reduce the amount being downloaded. I found I needed to use the Jaws
Cursor to do this.
Click here to enter NextUp.com
This
page was last updated on Wednesday, 20 May 2009.