An aged aunt, who may or may not be slowly loosing the plot, is talking about 'changing her computer' (sic) I think she means installing sight- loss assistive software and has mentioned Guide from Dolphin.
Have you any thoughts, opinions etc. on this bit of software? I see JAWS is also popular on the RNIB website.
Neither seem cheap, but if good it may be worth it, I just hope I have not got to try and teach her how to drive the stuff :-)
Or do you have a better idea?
Many thanks for you time and any thoughts you may have.
Hi tried to send this to you via email as its a bit off topic here, but it appears the address is munged so...
Well, Guide is not a screenreader and cannot help you with any normal application in Windows. What it is is a self voicing set of applications which stand in for the most popular things people want to do, such as email, writing letters, scanning and ocr-ing documents etc. The last time I looked at it the web support was very poor which dolphin claim is being worked on. Now assuming the lady has been using a computer for some years and is familiar with it, one of the main issues no matter what is done will be learning to use the machine with no mouse. For a while of course the magnifier in the Windows accessibility part of the control panel may be able to help by enlarging the screen but then one only sees the bit magnified and the rest is obviously off screen, or you get a lens effect around the mouse or cursor pointer etc. Different versions of windows will have different versions of the magnifier of course If she can afford it, dolphin do various versions of Supernova which have speech and magnification, but its not going to be cheap, often costing more than the hardware. As a test maybe the best half way house that costs nothing is to download nvda screenreader, which is free. It has no magnification but one could use the Windows system. Its voice is crap out of the box, but it can be made to use variants or even the Microsoft o ones. It might save some eye strain once one gets used to which bits of the software it can read and help with and turn the brain off to the rest that can be seen on screen via the magnifier. as with anything like this, its really dependent on the person and how they want to use the computer. I will say this though, no matter what system you choose there will always be web sites and programs that will not play ball with access technology. I use nvda more or less all the time with no screen at all, and this involves learning the windows short cuts, but nvda has mouse support and can
Yes I use it as Jaws the market leader is very expensive and really onlhy makes sense in an employment scenario as they do have lots of scripts to make software which is inaccessible at least usable. also nobody has mentioned Window Eyes. I gather that you can also get this free if you buy a copy of Microsoft Office, but I've not used it extensivily so cannot comment further. There is one other I believe which needs to have constand web access but is a kind of in between product price wise but I don't know what its called and I think has fallen behind. Most people do not realise that Windows itself uses Narator and depending on the operating system its either useless or ok for rudamentary things. Brian
Well, Guide is not a screenreader and cannot help you with any normal application in Windows. What it is is a self voicing set of applications which stand in for the most popular things people want to do, such as email, writing letters, scanning and ocr-ing documents etc. The last time I looked at it the web support was very poor which dolphin claim is being worked on. Now assuming the lady has been using a computer for some years and is familiar with it, one of the main issues no matter what is done will be learning to use the machine with no mouse. For a while of course the magnifier in the Windows accessibility part of the control panel may be able to help by enlarging the screen but then one only sees the bit magnified and the rest is obviously off screen, or you get a lens effect around the mouse or cursor pointer etc. Different versions of windows will have different versions of the magnifier of course If she can afford it, dolphin do various versions of Supernova which have speech and magnification, but its not going to be cheap, often costing more than the hardware. As a test maybe the best half way house that costs nothing is to download nvda screenreader, which is free. It has no magnification but one could use the Windows system. Its voice is crap out of the box, but it can be made to use variants or even the Microsoft o ones. It might save some eye strain once one gets used to which bits of the software it can read and help with and turn the brain off to the rest that can be seen on screen via the magnifier. as with anything like this, its really dependent on the person and how they want to use the computer. I will say this though, no matter what system you choose there will always be web sites and programs that will not play ball with access technology. I use nvda more or less all the time with no screen at all, and this involves learning the windows short cuts, but nvda has mouse support and can make tones and read what is under the mouse as an indication of position etc, but I found this very hard to do without the visuals. If you type nvda into google it should take you to the site and then you can download it. It will ask for a donation, but its not pushy, obviously some of us do support it with money or it would not be possible to make it free. Brian snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com My Google mail account Brian Gaff
----- Original Message ----- From: "The Nomad" Newsgroups: uk.d-i-y Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2015 9:59 AM Subject: Question for Brian re screen readers
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