low vision focus: an overview of zoomtext...

LVF The Zoom Text Magnifier

Seminars@Hadley

Low Vision Focus: An Overview of ZoomText Magnifier Reader

Presented byCathy Gettel

Moderated byDoug Anzlovar

You’re listening to Seminars@Hadley. This seminar is Low Vision Focus: An Overview of ZoomText Magnifier Reader, presented by Cathy Gettel, moderated by Doug Anzlovar.

Doug AnzlovarWelcome to today's Seminars@Hadley. My name is Doug Anzlovar, and I am the Vice President of Education and Training at the Hadley School. Today's seminar continues our series offered to our Low Vision Focus at Hadley program. Our topic for today is an Overview of ZoomText Magnifier Reader. Now, let me welcome today’s presenter, Cathy Gettel. Cathy joined Ai Squared in 1999 as a tech support specialist. After five years in that position, she moved to sales as the Dealer Network Manager. Cathy is also a trainer for ZoomText and Window-Eyes

©2014 The Hadley School for the Blind of 45


University, and the project manager for the ZoomText Mac. A natural troubleshooter who loves helping people, Cathy fell in love with the IT industry on day one. She's honored to serve people around the world who are low vision or blind. Cathy?

Cathy GettelThank you, Doug, and welcome to everyone who is attending this seminar today. I hope that I can give you some new information. I have to say, I'm more used to working with low vision than totally blind people, so if I'm not describing things well or not giving you what you need in terms of description, please shoot Doug a note, and he can let me know that. Since we merged with GW Micro back a year, year and a half ago, it's been a learning curve for those of us on the low vision side of the house, and I'm sure the same is true for our friends in Indiana – learning curve for them as well.

I know when I'm out training with Jeremy Curry, who is an awesome Window-Eyes trainer, he always calls people who can see well sighties. I am in fact a sightie. I wear glasses. I wear actually bifocals most of the time. I have special computer classes. I have an eye disease that the doctor explained it to me as if someone had taken wax paper and wrinkled it and then tried to straighten it out. So I do know a little bit



of what people are going through who have vision impairment, but I'm not at that level of the legally blind stage or even close to it at this point. So Doug read my little bio and gave you a background for me. Like he said, I've been at Ai Squared for about almost 16 years and love working here, love working with the people.

So with that said, again, thank you for coming. Ai Squared appreciates your attendance and your interest in our products. Doug, can you move to the next slide please? But while I'm waiting for the slide to appear, I just want to explain that today, I'm actually going to go through the slides first. And then I'll talk in more depth. Reason being, I want to keep the slide presentation fairly generic. It's mostly explaining what the ZoomText user interface looks like and what it's about. And then I'll go deeper into the actual contents of the program and what ZoomText can do.

Right now on the screen, we're looking at the ZoomText user interface. The Magnifier Tab is in focus. So what does that mean? Well, if you think of something about the size of a three by five card, it's actually not those perfect dimensions. But the ZoomText user interface is longer than it is tall. So it's a rectangle that fits on the screen. It doesn't run in full screen mode. It just sits there being a rectangle. It



has three tabs across the top – Magnifier Tab, a Reader Tab, and a Tools Tab. Depending on which Tab you have chosen, that gives you a different set of icons. Obviously, the Magnifier icons have to do with magnification, the Reader Tab, those icons have to do with reading, and then the Tools Tab is a bunch of things that we put there that didn't fit particularly well in either of the other tabs. Back when I first came here, ZoomText had Level One on the first tab, Level Two on the second tab, and we had a Level Three Tab that was grayed out.

So it was always a curiosity when we were going to put level three in the project, and we were going to do some OCR, we were going to do different things, and this and that. And we finally got to the point where we said we don't have the bandwidth. So we took the Level Three Tab off the product. Some of you may remember that, scratching your heads going where did it go or scratching your head saying why is it there. So when we put the Tools Tab on, Ben Weiss, who is the owner and founder of Ai Squared, owner for a long time and the founder of Ai Squared, was thrilled that we had finally added our Level Three Tab. So just a little piece of history there. Under the Title Bar where it says ZoomText 10.1 currently, that's where your icons are that I've been describing. To the left of that, there's a square icon that does not fit on



any of the tabs. In other words, the square icon is always visible no matter what Tab you've chosen.

And if I were to use my mouse and click on that icon, I could disable ZoomText. When ZoomText is enabled, that icon is blue for Magnifier Reader. That icon is green for Magnifier only. When the product is disabled, that icon is gray. And as with anything in computing, there is more than one way with ZoomText. So if you're not a mouse user and you want to disable ZoomText, you can’t find that blue icon, you’re going to do Alt Delete, and to bring ZoomText back, you want to do Alt Insert. Now, why would I want to disable this product if I'm using it? I'm low vision, I need it, I'm using it. Well, I need somebody from my office to look at something on my screen. And when they come over, they're very disoriented by the magnification. So I can quickly do Alt Delete. That takes the magnification out. It disables speech. But it leaves ZoomText running. So after my colleague has looked at the screen and gotten the information they need, I can pop Zoom Text right back on with Alt Insert, and not have to restart the program.

Between the Title bar and the icon I was just speaking about that enables and disables ZoomText, we have the menu system, the Menu bar. On the Menu bar,



there's File, Actions, Magnifier, Reader, Tools, Settings and Help. So if you’re listening closely, you heard me say Magnifier, Reader and Tools two different times – first when I was explaining what the tabs are, and second when I was explaining what the Menu bar has on it. So if you're describing something to a student or to someone else who’s trying to use ZoomText and you’re helping them, you want to be clear about whether or not you want them at the menu system or on one of the tabs. So if you say click the Reader Tab, and they go to the Reader Menu, you are in two different spaces, and you're not going to communicate well. Doug, can you give you the next slide please?

Okay, this is the same user interface, but now the Reader Tab is in focus. So we have different things on the Reader Tab. On the Menu Tab, I'm sorry I meant to go through this before we switched, but you have a place to change the Power, the Type, Color, Pointer, Cursor, Focus, Desktop, Web, and Text Finders. And we'll go into some of that in more detail later in this program. The Reader Tab, we have a Speech icon, a Rate icon, we have Echo icons for typing and Mouse, and we have an icon for Verbosity – how much or how little do we want ZoomText to speak. Then there's the section on reading. We have AppReader, DocReader, Reading Zones, and SpeakIt



Tool. Those are all different ways in which we can get ZoomText to read things to us. Next slide please?

I'm not going to wait for that slide. I'm going to go ahead and talk about the Tools Tab. So on the Tools Tab, we have Camera icons. There's a Full icon and a Docked icon. We have a Listening section which has a Recorder and a Background Reader icon. And finally, we have the Reading section which has an Image Reader icon. Image Reader is not within the ZoomText program. It is actually a separate program. However, if you have purchased both of them and you click on the Image Reader icon in ZoomText, it starts Image reader. And then you go to that user interface to work on Image Reader. If you don't know about ZoomText Image Reader, that is our OCR program on the PC side. So this is just for those of you who can see the screen, this is just an image of the ZoomText user interface with the user interface disabled. And you'll see that rather than that icon being blue, the one I talked about before, it's now gray so that if somebody comes up to the computer and tries to increase magnification, they’re going to see that icon and know immediately oh ZoomText isn't even on. I need to turn it on first. That's why I'm not seeing any magnification. Next slide please.



So everybody knows how to interact with a menu system, but I just want to take a minute to talk about interacting with the ZoomText icons. So I'm on the Magnifier Tab, and I click on the Color icon. A menu drops down that says Normal, Scheme, Custom, Settings. There happens to be a checkbox lighted to the left of the word normal. Next slide please.

If I click on the word Scheme, it shows me the schemes that ZoomText gives a person when they purchase the product. The color schemes we give by default are Invert Brightness, Reverse Video, Yellow on Black, Blue Dye, Black and White, White and Black. So if I wanted to choose a new scheme for running the colors on my screen, I would go ahead and choose it there by just selecting one of those. If I did that, that checkbox that I spoke of earlier that is right now to the left of the word normal would be to the left of the word scheme indicating that we're running one of the schemes. Next slide please.

As I said, anything on the computer, there's always one, two, three or more ways to accomplish the task. This next slide is pointing out that you can change the color enhancement or many other things in ZoomText from the keyboard. So to cycle the color enhancement between the last scheme chosen and normal, which is



no enhancement, you use Control Shift C, C as in cat or C as in color. Next slide please.

And the last way to do something with the ZoomText user interface is go ahead and click on the menu. So if I want to find where to change my colors, I go to Magnifier in the menu, go down to Color Enhancements. And it has an ellipses after it. So I know that there is a dialog box under that. So I'm going to click on Color Enhancements. And Doug, if you could show us the next slide please.

So now we're looking at the enhancements dialog box with the Color Tab in focus. And I have the dialog box on the screen, and the title of that dialogue box is Enhancements. You’re going to hear that again when we get to the next slide. So remember that the title of this dialog box is Enhancements. The tabs on this dialogue box are the Color, Pointer, Cursor, Focus, and Font. Those are all enhancements that you can change within ZoomText. And you would use this dialog box to interact with the schemes or to create a custom scheme. So maybe you sort of like our black and white, but you’d rather have navy blue and white than black and white. So you can actually do that. That’s kind of an advanced topic and we’re not going to describe how to do it, but I wanted to let you know



that that’s something you could do from within this dialog box. Next slide please.

So remember I told you that the dialog box we were just looking at was titled Enhancements. Right now on the screen, there is a section of the ZoomText user interface that is highlighted, and that section says Enhancements. That section rides right over the top of four of the five tabs that we talked about what we had that dialog box open. So the icons under Enhancements on the ZoomText user interface are Color, Pointer, Cursor, and Focus. The one that’s missing is X Font. So if you wanted to change something to do with X Font, you could only accomplish that through the menu system because that is not exposed on the icons on the toolbar. There are shortcuts to go to any of the dialog boxes. If I were to hover over Zoom Windows or Finders or any of the headings on the Reader or the Tools Tab, the same thing would happen. And if I was a mouse user and I clicked on that Enhancements link that sits over the Enhancements icons, it would open the dialog box. So that would be a quicker way than going to click on the Color Tab and going down to Settings or going to the Menu and choosing Magnifier, Color Enhancements, I could just click on that word Enhancements and then move between the tabs and enhancements in the manner that I choose.



Okay, this is one of the last things we’re going to talk about in the seminar, but I just wanted to show you now where you would find it on the ZoomText menu. So if you go to File, that’s where you can find things like configurations and defaults and actually saving application settings and the advanced topics like that, and also the your exit. I’m actually done with the slides. When Doug puts this seminar recording up on the Hadley web page, the slides will be with the recording so that if you wanted to listen to this again or have one of your students or a colleague listen to it, the slides are there.

So in the outline, I put Introduction – What does ZoomText look like? And we just talked about that in quite a lot of detail. The Magnifier Tab, what will we find on the Magnifier Tab? Zoom Windows, Enhancements, and Finders. In Zoom Windows, we have two options. That’s where we choose the power that we want ZoomText to be at, the magnification level. And that’s where we choose the type. Do we want ZoomText to be full screen? Do we want a lens that we would move around the screen with our mouse or with a keyboard? Do we want ZoomText to be docked so that we have a 1X view and a magnified view both onscreen? And if we choose that, there are four ways to dock it. You can dock it at the top, at the



bottom, to the right, to the left. There is also a Line Zoom that would match the line of text that you’re looking at. So if you’re in a document that has a 20 point heading, that line is going to be tall enough to show you the magnified view of that 20 point heading. And then you drop down into subheading, it’s 15 point. It’s going to narrow that band a little bit. And then you drop into the main part of the document and it’s in 10 point font. Again, that gets narrowed. So you’re only looking at one line at a time, and it’s changing to be the size of the text in that particular line. That’s Line Zoom.

Another thing we have is Overlay, and in Overlay, it’s like a lens window. It can be I think up to a quarter of the screen. Maybe we changed it so it’s bigger. Actually, I’d have to double check on that. I’m not positive. But Overlay is limiting because you can’t move it so that you can see what’s under it. So the Overlay window I think is very seldom used. The surveys we’ve done show that 98% of our users use either full screen or lens.

Enhancements – the Color Enhancement is something that I already talked about. Pointer Enhancement – I can make a point to a bigger, I can make the pointer a different color, and I can put a locator on the pointer. So if I have trouble finding the



pointer, even if it’s big and yellow, I still sometimes have trouble locating it on the screen. I can make a sonar image come around the edge of the pointer so that it has concentric circles and they’re flashing, the biggest circle lights and then the next circle lights and then the smallest circle lights, and then it goes back to the biggest, etc. And there are a couple of other locators that I can put on the pointer. And the choices for that that I can have that locator on all the time. That might be a little bit distracting. I can have it on only when the pointer is moving or only when the pointer is stationary. So the pointer is parked somewhere on the screen. I have my hand off my mouse. And then I need to use the mouse again. So I go and I am looking for that pointer, but I can’t find it. Because its stationary right now, it would have the sonar blinking because that’s how I set it up. As soon as I move it, that sonar goes away. And the last option for the locator on your pointer would be to do it only when a key is pressed, and that can be your Control or your Alt or one of your dead keys. So I can’t find my pointer. I hold down the Control key, the sonar, or one of the other locators comes on. Now I have the pointer. And let go of that key, and I’m good to work without the distraction of that locator.

The Cursor – what is Cursor Enhancement? Well, when you’re editing a document, if it’s hard for you to



find the pointer, then I bet it’s even more difficult to find the vertical cursor, the blinking bar that tells you in a field or in a document where your next character is going to go. And when I’m typing along, I might really not care where that cursor is. It’s just going to put the letter where it belongs, and I have faith in my computer. But when I notice that I spelled my name wrong, it would be pretty embarrassing to send something out that had three T’s in Gettel. So I need to make sure that I’m deleting one of the extra T’s and not one of the E’s on either side of that set of T’s. So Cursor Enhancement can make it easier for me to find where my cursor is. It’s going to make it look like the same shape that it is already. But it’s going to be bigger and bolder, and it will be colored rather than just that black line that you see usually. Same thing with cursor – I can change the size, the color, and I can put a locator on it.

Focus Enhancement is when you have a red rectangle drawn by ZoomText, or it could be some other configuration. A might not be a rectangle. It might be an underline or I can’t remember the other options – highlight, that’s it, underline or highlight. What has happened over the years between when Windows first came out and the way Windows is now know is that Microsoft has created things that look dare I use the word sexy. They’re contemporary and



they’re cool and they’re sexy, but they’re really hard to see because when they do a menu system, they do a light blue background, and the object that has focus is one or two degrees different in hue or contrast. The color difference just isn’t there, so you don’t get the contrast. And it’s difficult to see what object on your screen has focus. Back in the original days of Windows, the object that had focus, the OK button or the Yes of a Yes/No button, Cancel button, had a pretty discernible dotted line around the outside of it so that you could tell, hey, this has focus. If I hit spacebar right now, this is what’s going to happen. And that line has gotten finer and finer and fainter and fainter, thus making it harder and harder to see. So within ZoomText, this Focus Enhancement puts a red line around the object with focus so that you can discern what object has the computer focus, is going to be executed, what command is going to be executed based on what has focused.

And finally, the last item under the Magnifier Tab is the Finders. We have a Desktop Finder, a Web Finder and the Text Finder. I had a lady call me the other day and she said I just installed ZoomText, and my web is not working. And what she thought was that she could click on the Web Finder and it would start the Internet Explorer or her internet browser for her. No, that is not what happens. In fact, if you don’t have a browser



open, that icon is actually grayed out. So when you open a browser, that icon becomes live and then you can open the Web Finder and get a list of links for a list of headings. With the Web Finder open, you can navigate by heading, by link, by text, by form, by picture, all of the general HTML markup sections or commands, I’m not picking the right word there. I’m definitely not an HTML person. The Desktop Finder and the Text Finder a very specific use cases. Desktop Finder, I know when I was in tech support back when the Control Panel first started being put into sections rather than having every single icon showing, and this was also in the old days before we could remote into somebody’s computer and do it ourselves. So I wouldn’t know whether they were looking at a bunch of icons or whether they were looking only at half a dozen headings. So using the Desktop Finder was a quick way for me to find something in someone’s Control Panel or to help them do that.

The Text Finder – people will say well my program, whatever program I’m in, has a finder. So why do I need the ZoomText Text Finder? One place that I use it is I have six or ten contact groups in Outlook for all of my dealers, and I have been split into dealer type and geography. So I have my preferred dealers international, my preferred dealers in Canada, my



preferred dealers in the U.S. And if I have one of those boxes open, the Outlook find command doesn’t work. So I can put on a ZoomText find command and find the dealer or the company I’m looking for instantly. The other thing our find command does is when it finds the word, it puts a little – my monitor keeps going to sleep and it distracts me, I’m sorry about that – it puts a little toolbar above the word so that you can start AppReader or DocReader.

So the next section of the talk – what will I find on the Reader Tab? Well, there are three sections on the Reader Tab – Speech, Echo and Reading. Under the Speech Tab, I have a Speech icon which enables me to shut off or turn on speech. I have a Rate icon with a spin bar that allows me increase or decrease the rate. And then under Echo – Typing Echo and Mouse Echo – Typing Echo, when I’m typing I can either have ZoomText echo every character, every word, both, or none. So if I’m a slow typist and I want to verify that I’ve typed the letter that I wish to type, I might set it to character. So when I type C, I hear C, and A, T, H, Y. When I hit the space bar, I hear Cathy. That would be if it was on characters and words. If I type fast, it’s not going to be very useful to hear C-H- Cathy because it will cut itself off. It knows it can’t save the whole A or the whole T in between, so it knows to cut itself off rather than just kind of stutter at you. So if I’m a fast



typist, I’m probably going to have it on Typing Echo for either words or none. Perhaps I’m filling in something that’s very foreign to me, a password or something. I might want it to echo everything so that I know I’ve typed it exactly correct. Because how many times have you typed in an incorrect password one time, two times, three times, and you’re locked out of your account. It’s kind of a pain.

Verbosity is where I would say I am an expert, and I want ZoomText to speak minimally, or I am a beginner and I want ZoomText to speak as much as possible. The third option is I’m intermediate user and I want ZoomText to kind of go in the middle. If I’m an expert user and I click on the file menu and one of my programs, it will say file open. If I’m a beginner, it will say file, menu, open. For shortcut, use Control F. So it’s giving you a lot more information when you’re a beginner that it does when you’re an expert.

Reading tools – ZoomText has some amazing reading tools. We have AppReader, DocReader, I’m going to skip over Zones for the moment and SpeakIt Tool. Many people will say when do I use one and when do I use another. Well, it’s really a personal decision. It’s a personal choice. Some people are just hooked on one and they only use that. Other people like Morrie Hill is one of our employees here, she’s a



product advocate. She worked in tech support for a long time, and she’s a ZoomText user. And she has certain situations where she uses AppReader, other situations where she likes DocReader. And finally, third situations where she’s really impressed by SpeakIt Tool. So if you’re one of those people that wants to use all of them and use the best tool for every job, here’s a way to think about it. Like I said, nothing is written in stone, nothing says well because Cathy said I should use DocReader, I have to use DocReader. That’s not the way it is. You can use what works best for you. But AppReader is good for reading documents, reading email, things that have a lot of text and not a lot of images.

DocReader – some people prefer DocReader on web pages because the DocReader strips out the images. AppReader just by its name – app being short for application – AppReader keeps you in your native application. So if I want to read something in Word and I turn on AppReader, AppReader is going to highlight each word as it speaks it and I’m looking at my Word document on the screen. If I were to do the same thing and read a Word document with DocReader, it would take that text and put it in a completely different environment. When you’re in DocReader, you can no longer see your start button or your menu across the bottom of your screen.



DocReader kind of takes over the screen if you will. Same thing – you can highlight each word as it’s read. But with DocReader, all the images are gone. So if I’m using it on a web page, the images are gone. I’m looking only at the text. And the website may have used some really funky new text that some 18-year-old or 14-year-old programmer thought was cool. With DocReader, I can put that in a font of my choosing, a font which I’m able to read more readily. I can change the size of the characters. I can change the color of the characters. They’re going to come in all one color versus having everything different colored on a web page. Some people will say why do they put white text on light green. It’s really hard for me to see that. Well, throw it in DocReader and now it’s all black and white or white and black or however you have your DocReader set.

DocReader has two different ways to use it. You can use it as a teleprompter where you see text top to bottom of the screen, or you can use it as ticker mode where you have just one line of text going across the top. There’s a setting in DocReader that says I want my text to be centered justified. And whenever I use ticker, I always put it center justified so that the word is in the center of the screen rather than way at the end which it’s kind of silly for me to read all the way across and then hang right at the edge of the right



bezel. If I’m in ticker, there is a 1X view below the ticker. So let’s think about this. I’m going to have it in ticker mode so that I could have the text black with the white background, and I’m only seeing the text. But then below that, if I have enough vision that I can get some sense of the web page, then I can see it in 1X and I can move what’s being read, I can change what’s being read simply by taking my mouse and clicking some place in the 1X view. So that’s an interesting option as well. One more thing I want to say about AppReader. When I’m in AppReader, say I’m at 4X, ZoomText is going to read maybe the first five words of the sentence, and then it’s going to have to shift the screen so that it can read the next words because it cannot see them all at the same time. You’re at 4X, you’re not seeing the whole width of your document. With DocReader, we’re going to reflow that text so that it fits between the edges of your monitor. So with AppReader, I’m going to get side to side movement as well as upward movement as I’m reading down through a document. With DocReader, I don’t get any side to side movement. So if you have somebody that’s having a little seasickness because AppReader is just too much for them, they may want to try DocReader. They don’t get that side to side movement.



Okay, lastly is the SpeakIt Tool. And with SpeakIt Tool, I’m going to take my mouse and highlight just by clicking on the screen, holding down the mouse button and dragging my mouse, highlight something. For those of you who can see the PowerPoint image right now that’s onscreen, “An Overview of ZoomText Magnifier Reader” takes two lines. So I’m going to highlight both of those lines, and the minute I release the mouse, ZoomText is going to read those words, “An Overview of ZoomText Magnifier Reader.” So SpeakIt Tool is kind of the quick and dirty way to read something. If it’s a program that you’re not used to, you’ve never used it before, SpeakIt Tool is awesome. You can click on the word ZoomText, and it’ll read just that word, or you can highlight a group of words and it will read all of them. The caveat to that is it has to be text. In the bottom of the PowerPoint that’s on screen right now is the Ai Squared logo and tagline. It has our green and white logo, and then beside it, it says “Ai Squared, We’ve got accessibility covered.” If I were to try to read that with any of my tools, but if I were to try to read that with SpeakIt Tool, it just wouldn’t read it because that’s an image. It’s a picture of words, and ZoomText can’t read a picture of words any more than it can read a picture of a sunset. We just don’t see any text. That’s when our other program that I talked about a little earlier, the ZoomText image reader comes into play where you



can get something OCR’d, use optical character recognition to get those characters recognized, and then Image Reader can speak it.

Let’s talk about tools. How are we doing on time? It’s quarter of three. We’re doing really well. So on the Tools Tab, there is Camera, Listening and Reading. The ZoomText webcam has been out for quite a while and it’s one of those things that people either love it or hate it. Somebody will buy it expecting it to OCR. It doesn’t do that. It’s simply a camera. What it’s going to do is take an image of whatever you point the camera at and display it on your screen. You can have it full screen or you can have it docked such that you have the bottom part or top part of your screen, your normal computer information. You have the opposite part of your screen, what you’re looking at, with that little webcam. Say I have somebody’s business card and I need to put their contact information into Outlook. I could position my little webcam, the ZoomText camera, over the business card, and then setup the camera so that it’s showing the business card on top and Outlook on the bottom. And then I can read. Because I can’t read the business card. Come on, it’s way too small. But if I magnify it with this webcam, that I could read the person’s name, fill it in in Outlook. Their email address, fill it into Outlook. Their phone number,



again, fill it in. So that’s one way in which somebody might want to use the ZoomText Camera.

Listening tools. We have two listening tools – the Recorder and the Background Reader. Our recorder allows you to record a document, and it records that pages per second. It’s pretty fast, and it does it in the background. So you can be doing something while recorder is recording. But the illustration I like to use for the ZoomText recorder is my boss walks into my office at 5 to 5:00 and says we’re having a meeting first thing in the morning, 8:30, right when you get here, to discuss the paper that was delivered 20 minutes ago. So everybody is going to take this document home and read it. Well, I can either print it out, but it’s a long document, and then I’m going to have to get home and read it under my CCTV and that really stinks. I don’t want to do that. I could lug my computer home, but it’s heavy and I don’t want to do that. I could stay late at work and read it with ZoomText, but then I miss my bus. So what I’m going to do his record the document with ZoomText, grab my iPhone, synch that recording to my iPhone, put my phone in my pocket, catch my bus. After dinner at home, pull out my phone and listen to ZoomText speaking that document it to me. You can record it as an mp3 or mp4 or whatever it is that iTunes does, or you can record it as a couple of other options. I don’t



remember exactly what they are but it’s a pretty multi-use feature. You don’t have to synch it to iTunes. So if you don’t have an iPhone, you can synch it to some other file extension, some other file format, and put it on your phone or put it on your Daisy Player or whatever you have for an electronic carry-all thing, and presumably your iPhone or your Daisy Player, whatever you’re synching this file to is smaller than your laptop. So it’s handy year. It’s easier to bring home.

Background reader – the readers that I talked about already all tie up your computer completely. So if I’m using AppReader, DocReader, if I’m having SpeakIt Tool speak to me, I cannot do anything else at the same time. Maybe I want to hear a document and have Word open such that I can take some notes with it at the same time. So I can read that document in Background Reader and have Word open and be typing while I’m listening. Let me say that again because that’s a pretty cool thing. I can be listening to something in Background Reader, and typing notes in Word at the same time, or I could be listening to something and looking at the pictures on my computer. I don’t have to just sit there and stare at the screen or sit there with my eyes closed and listen to ZoomText read to me. I can be doing two things at once. So that’s a really cool feature and that’s been



out for a couple of years. But I have the sense that it’s underutilized. I’ve listened to – one of our tech support people has dyslexia, and he often talks about using this. And it’s one of his favorite tools. And from the sense of what he’s saying to people, I get the feeling that not a lot of people know about this Background Reader, and therefore not a lot of people are getting the benefit of this really cool feature. So I always try to talk about it and give it a little bit of a rah rah when I’m doing seminars, webinars or conferences, what have you.

So the next thing we’re going to get into, 7 minutes of 3:00 by my phone, is productivity. How can ZoomText enhance my productivity? Well, there are a few ways. There are configuration files. There are application settings, the Windows login, Dual Monitor, touchscreen. Configuration files – let’s talk about that first. I don’t know how many times I have, back when I was in tech support, spoken to a user who says I turn on my computer, ZoomText comes on automatically, I have to change it from 2X to 6X, and I have to change my speech rate every single morning. That’s because they don’t know that if they go to File and choose Save as Default, whatever changes they’ve made to ZoomText will be saved, so that’s pretty cool. You don’t have to change things every morning. You can just have ZoomText save those settings so they



automatically come into play whenever ZoomText starts. Well, what about the person who uses 3X in the morning, and has speech rate set at 175, and every afternoon comes back from lunch and has to bump up it up to 4X, and drop speech rate down to 145 because their eyes are getting tired and they can’t work at the same parameters that the worked at all morning when their eyes were fresh? Well, the default can be 175 speech rate and 4X. I can set a special configuration to take effect. So I’m going to go to file menu and choose File, Save Configuration, and I’m going to name it Afternoon so that I remember. So what I do is when I get back from lunch, I make those two changes. I do File, Save Configuration, name it Afternoon. The next morning, ZoomText comes up, and it starts in the default method. After lunch, I change it to the Afternoon configuration and it changes my settings. Now, changing to the settings, you might want to do it yourself. It might be faster. However, maybe you have 7 things that are different in the afternoon, or 8 things. You can save time. Maybe you use the computer and your husband uses the computer and you’re both low vision. You can have Cathy on one configuration and Court, which happens to be my husband’s name, on a second configuration, and we can get our own configuration simply by choosing file, open configuration, and choosing our name, Cathy or Court. Kind of like when



you get into the car and you press one if you’re driver one and two if you’re driver two, and the seats change and the mirror changes and the steering wheel tilts. Yeah, sort of like that.

The next thing we’ll talk about is application settings. Application settings are something that you want to change within an application. I always do XYZ when I change from Word to Excel. I always do XYZ when I open the internet. So you’re going to save the application setting for the exception. Most of what I do, I have Color Inversion on, and I’m at 3X. But when I use the internet, I like to take off Color Inversion, and then I need to be at 4X. So I open my browser, I change those two settings, and I say File, Save Application Settings, and ZoomText comes up with a little dialog box that says do you mean you want to save the application settings for Internet explorer. I say yes. I click out of Internet Explorer back to word, and my Color Inversion comes on and my magnification goes down. I Alt Tab back to Internet explorer. Color Inversion disappears, and magnification goes up automatically because ZoomText says we’re back in Internet Explorer again, we need to make that change. You can have application settings for as many applications as you want to.



Windows logon, that’s just allowing you to have magnification and a little bit of speech at the logon so that if you need to have your username echoed or you need to have your password echoed, you’re going to probably want to have your headphones on if you’re doing that, but you can do those things at login. We don’t have X Font at login. The text will be a little bit jagged because that’s a part of Windows that we just couldn’t manage to create X Font in. But you can have Windows logon support if that will make your day easier. I just mentioned X Font, and that word has been kicking around for a long time. Ben Weiss was still here when the team developed X Font and Ben was one of the leaders in actually developing that patented technology. X Font is what makes ZoomText really easy to read because the characters are smooth and crisp and clear. When you look at a computer character, it looks like it’s built with Legos. The O is jagged, it’s stair-stepped. It’s not easy to read, but our eyes just make adjustments. Those of us who can see well can just rip through it. But if you take a badly formed character and you magnify it, you end up with a big badly formed character. Where what ZoomText does is it renders that character smooth and crisp and clear, and it’s easier to read. So that’s X Font, that word that I keep mentioning. That gives you a little definition of that.



Dual Monitor – we’re working really hard on Dual Monitor now. In fact, I was just talking to the product manager and the man, Scott More, some of you may know him, who’s working with the developers on creating our Dual Monitor support, they have some really neat stuff going, incidents where you can do extended desktop on Dual Monitor. It’s amazing to me. When we release Dual Monitor, you’re going to be able to have Monitor A at one magnification, and Monitor B at a different one or completely different settings on the two monitors. It’s really going to rock. It’s going to be good, and that’s due to be released very soon. Dual Monitor I think is in the product right now in beta form, but it’s not completely a finished feature.

Touch Screen – if you get a computer that has a touch screen monitor, whether that’s a laptop or an individual monitor, ZoomText with touchscreen support allows you to put your touch screen so that either ZoomText or your other programs interact with your fingers. So if I reach up and touch my screen and do something to it and I’m in computer mode, it’s going to do the action based on what it’s seeing computer wise. But if I’m in ZoomText mode, it’s going to do things that ZoomText would allow you to do. To switch back and forth, there’s a little icon on the desktop and you just hold that down or you can



just click it to change it from one to the other. I don’t have a touch screen on my desk, and so I don’t know that technology quite as well as I know some of the other things about ZoomText. But I did want to mention it.

Installation and Activation – I want to install ZoomText, but I am totally blind. Can I do it? Well, sure you can because ZoomText, the installation speaks to you. You might have a hard time figuring out the serial number. Hopefully, there’s a sighted person in the area or in the proximity that can help you with that serial number. Our serial numbers are not Brailled unfortunately, but then not everybody who is totally blind can read braille, so that’s not always a solution. But, yeah, the ZoomText installation is large print and it speaks to you. It’s a really straight forward easy installation. Just a few questions and it’s pretty quick to get the product on. When you install ZoomText, it always, always, always installs as a trial. Even if you’ve had a trial on there before, it’ll install, but it’ll say the trial is expired if the time has already run out. Our trials last for 60 days. So if it’s already been 60 days on your trial, the trial may be expired. In any case, all you have to do once you buy the product and you have your serial number is on that dialog box where it says it’s expired, say I have a serial number and I want to activate ZoomText. That’s one of the



radio buttons. Once you choose that, you hit next. You type in your serial number, and then your computer is going to talk to our activation server. They’re going to send the serial number. We’re going to send back a number for your registry. And now your product is activated and it will always work on that computer.

How many times can I activate a single user copy of ZoomText? Well, I can activate it three times. So that means I could actually use three different computers. Maybe at work, I have a laptop and a desktop, and then I have a different computer at home. I can have my copy of ZoomText on all three computers, and activated on each one. The caveat to that is because it’s a single user license, you should be the only person using ZoomText on any of those three computers because you own the license.

What happens if I get a ZoomText on a USB device? That gives me three activations for computers that I’m using all the time so that I don’t have to worry about putting my USB in. But then I’m pretty technical. I’m pretty good on computers, and every time I go to my mom’s or my aunt’s or my sister’s house, they have some computer questions and they want me to hop on their computer and check something out. So if I have ZoomText on a USB, as long as I’ve installed



the ZoomText trial on their computers, and I can do that right from the USB stick, then I can insert the USB, and even an expired trial will run perfectly fine because I have that USB in their computer. So it gives me kind of a temporary flexible activation. I finish at mom’s house, I take my USB with me, and the next time I go to visit my aunt I can plug in that USB in her computer and work on her computer with my ZoomText does well. If I’m a teacher and I need ZoomText, every student in my classroom has a computer. I can go ahead and put the ZoomText trial on those computers. And then using my USB, I can access any of my students’ computers.

Managing activations – so before you take a computer out of service, the best thing to do would be to go ahead and transfer the license back to the ZoomText activation server, which is just a process where you go ZoomText, you go to the help system and transfer activation. The computers talk again, and your ZoomText is no longer activated. You can uninstall it or leave it there. It doesn’t really matter. It’s not going to work. But I was in a hurry. I was giving the computer away. I forgot to transfer my activation. Or what happens even more often is my hard drive died, so I couldn’t transfer the activation. All you need to do is call tech support and we are very understanding. We’re really good about giving you an



activation say that you can continue to use your copy of ZoomText that you paid a lot of money for. We want you to be able to use it and get the most out of it.

The last thing I wanted to talk about, and then we’ll have some time for questions, is just a quick overview of licensing. ZoomText has a single user, network, and district licensing. So single user and district are very much the same. In either case, you have to activate the copy of ZoomText. With a district license, district and network both come in increments of five. So if I have a 25 user district license, that means I can install and activate ZoomText on 25 computers. If I have a 25 user network license, this is where the difference comes in. With a network license, I install the ZoomText network piece on one of the computers that every other computer can see. Maybe it’s one of the servers at my college or at my job, whatever. And then from there, I install ZoomText on all of the machines that I want to. Maybe I have 302 computers that I put ZoomText on because I never know where my low vision kiddos are going to sit when they go into one of my labs on campus. But I only have 25 low vision students, so I know I don’t need more than a 25 user license. So what I do in that case is put it on the network. And then the network keeps track of how many licenses are being used concurrently. So once



25 people are using ZoomText on campus on this license, the 26th person tries to start ZoomText and gets a message that there’s no license available. Please see your network administrator. So that’s it for licensing. I just wanted to touch on that lightly because it’s, again, another advanced concept, and anybody that’s using the single user, it just wouldn’t matter to you.

So I’m looking at some of the things that were written while I was speaking. I’m sorry, I was sitting back from the monitor. “Thanks, but I do not have ZoomText.” “Somebody was not hearing me. Cathy is cutting out quite a bit and we’re missing some of her great info. Is this happening to anybody else?” Williams says he’s not having a problem. Doug said the audio is coming through okay. Audio quality is somewhat dependent on internet bandwidth, the software, etc. There’s nothing that can be done to improve it. So hopefully the recording will come out well, and if you did have trouble hearing this seminar, you can go ahead and listen to the recording.

“Why is it when I disable speech and save the settings as default, it doesn’t remain disabled?” Perhaps because you have an application settings set somewhere. I would check to see if you have application settings enabled. On the ZoomText user



interface, you go to Files and Manage Application Settings, and it will give you a list of the programs which do have application settings. Roger, if that doesn’t work I suggest that you call tech support because troubleshooting more than that through this format is really difficult. Are there any other questions? I’m going to relinquish the mic in case someone wants to ask a question verbally.

AlanYeah, Cathy. Thanks for your excellent seminar. I’ve been using ZoomText for about 10 years, so I’ve got an activation question. I may be getting the way things used to work with the way they work now. Back in the day, you got like a license or an activation. You could use it like at work. You could use it on a home desktop. And you could use it on a home laptop. Maybe that’s three. Now that I’m on disability and stuff, I don’t have a work a license or need to use it at work anymore. But I’m wondering can I register a licensed copy on two different desktops as well as a laptop or not?

Cathy GettelThanks for the question, Alan. And yes, you can use your three activations on any computers you wish to. We don’t have any concern or care about what kind of computer it is. And now just before anybody else asks



a question, I’m going to dunk in and answer Roger’s Alt Tab question. He says that ZoomText doesn’t consistently track to the new program when he uses Alt Tab. That’s something that was introduced along the way when Microsoft made changes, and we have tried to keep up with it and to get a handle on that. In fact, to stay ahead, we just haven’t been able to. And it’s something that is in the tech support database, something that they know needs work. I can’t give you a timeline for when that’s going to happen, but I know that it’s something that they’re aware of and it’s in the queue to be fixed.

Doug AnzlovarCathy, thank you for your presentation. This is Doug again, your moderator, and we are willing to entertain more questions from the participants, so I’m going to release the mic and anyone who wants to ask Cathy some questions, please feel free.

ManCathy, you may have touched on this but when I try to save the defaults, they never seem to come back when I log back on. I probably have a computer problem, unless there’s something I might be missing.



Cathy GettelIf you’re having trouble with saving the default, I would definitely suggest that you call tech support. They can remote into your computer and check it out. Maybe there is a problem. Maybe it’s a misunderstanding with how you’re believing that the software works. But I would definitely encourage you to talk to tech support. The guys down are awesome. They are wonderful, and hopefully they can help you figure that out because I would imagine it’s very frustrating. Thank you for the question.

Patricia – Cathy, can you say anything about zones?Sure, I can talk a little bit about reading zones. Reading zones, as I said, are kind of an advanced feature that I sort of hopped over. I don’t know how much they get used out there in the real world. Zones are pixel based. So what I’m saying is – I’m sorry, my alarm just went off – what I’m saying is it’s connected to an area on the screen. So right now, I’m looking at my screen, and right in the middle of the presentation part of the screen it says Cathy Gettel. Underneath that, it says Dealer Network Manager. If I made a reading zone around that text, and tomorrow we came back to this room and someone else was doing this webinar, I could trigger that reading zone and hear Meagan Long – what’s Meagan’s title – Manager of Web Design. And the following day, I could trigger



that zone, and it would say Cathy Gettel again. So reading zones are typically for text that’s always in the same place but changes. Maybe the temperature on a weather site – you do a little reading zone around that, and then you trigger the reading zone and you hear 71 degrees. You don’t even have to be looking at that. You have to be on the site. It’s not like it’ll just find it wherever it is stacked on your computer. But as soon as you bring up the site, you don’t have to visually search for that. As long as the location hasn’t changed, it’ll read the temperature to you. Some people use it for stock market sites because it’ll read their stock report, and I keep saying this, as long as the location doesn’t change. You’ve got to remember that it’s location based. When you trigger a reading zone, you can have ZoomText either just to read it, you can have it scroll to the point where the reading zone is located and read it. You can have it gray out the rest of the screen so you can see better what it’s actually reading. It’s a pretty powerful tool, but again, one of those that’s a little complicated, and I believe it’s underutilized. So does that help you, Patricia?

ManCathy, my question to you is about my screen right now, when I look under the Reading Tab, the AppReader and DocReader are grayed out and I can’t seem to activate them. Is that a tech problem?



Cathy GettelNo, sir. That is not a tech problem. The AppReader and DocReader are grayed out when there is nothing on the screen that can be read. So if you open Word, open a document, and then bring ZoomText to the forefront with Control Shift U, then AppReader and DocReader will be in color. They will be available to you because there’s something there to be read. So again, that was Control Shift U for those of you who aren’t familiar with that command, brings up the ZoomText user interface.

ManAnd it reminded me of another question, where can we find a list of these shortcut keys?

Cathy GettelList of shortcut keys – if you still have the documentation that came with your copy of ZoomText, there were two manuals. One is 8 ½ by 11 and it’s pretty thick. The other one is maybe 6 by 8 and it’s flimsier, it’s not as substantial. So the one I’m talking about is the quick reference guide, and the back half of the quick reference guide is all of the ZoomText hot keys. Another place to find them would be in the ZoomText help system, so if you went to ZoomText user interface, chose Help, and then go



down to Contents I think, and then there’s a section for hotkeys. Do we have any more questions today? We’re getting some really good questions here. Eric keeps putting his hand up. Would you like to speak, Eric?

EricYeah, sorry about that. I had a question. When you say you can have them on three different computers, I’ve got a touchscreen Windows 8.1. I’m upgrading a Windows 10, but one of my go-to other old laptops is a 7. Is there any problem intermingling those or using different Windows? And the second question was on the inverted colors, I heard that you guys were working it out where it would not invert pictures. Is that forthcoming?

Cathy GettelOkay, good questions. To the first part of your question, no, Ai Squared does not care what version of Windows you’re using. So if you’re running a computer that’s on Win 7 and one on Win 8 and one on Win 10, your three activations can be put on those three computers. Not a problem at all. The second questions was the smart invert, and yes, you did hear correctly, and yes I hope that will be out very soon. In fact, I thought of that when I was talking about changing the color inversion when I was giving you



that illustration and I thought, no, I better not say it. But since you brought it up, I can answer.

Okay, I’ve got a few people typing in questions. So Lydia says, I signed on a few minutes after the session started. I’m not sure if my mic is working. I’d like to test it at the end of the session prior to signing out. Okay, so we can work with Lydia later. William says, “AppReader and DocReader won’t work in Google Chrome, only in Internet and Firefox. That’s absolutely true. We don’t have AppReader, DocReader support for Chrome at this point in time. ZoomText 10 is not compatible with Chrome in Windows 7.

Doug AnzlovarAre there any other questions for Cathy before we bring today’s seminar to a close? We have just about 5, 6 more minutes. So anybody have any last minute questions? Feel free to ask them now.

AlbertThank you very much, Cathy and Doug, for this. On behalf of Joyce and myself, we’ve appreciated this seminar and look forward to the recording. Doug, will you be sending out an email notifying us that the recording is ready and how to download it?



Doug AnzlovarThanks, Albert, for your questions. Yeah, at the end of today’s seminar, I’ll let you all know how you can access it. Basically, the recording will live in our archives on the Hadley website and the Low Vision Focus website. So more on that in just a few minutes. Other questions for Cathy? Cathy, thank you again for your presentation. If you’ll just hang out for just a few more minutes, I’m going to give you an opportunity to issues some closing comments here after a few announcements from me. So I want to let all of our participants know that this seminar recording and the PowerPoint will be archived on the Low Vision Focus website, www.LowVisionFocus.org, as well as the Hadley website, www.Hadley.edu. The recordings and resource documents are available 24/7.

So each of our popular Seminars@Hadley is also available as a podcast now which you can download and listen to on your computer or mobile device. For those of you who are Twitter users, Hadley’s Twitter hashtag is hashtag, or for those oldsters in the room like myself, it’s the pound sign, SeminarsAtHadley all together, and the S in Seminars, the A in At, and the H in Hadley are all capitalized. So again, #SeminarsAtHadley. The past archived seminars, you would go to the Hadley website, Hadley.edu, search for past seminars, select that link, and then you would


http://www.Hadley.edu/

http://www.LowVisionFocus.org/


be taken to our archive. The archive is arranged by categories, Technology being one, so they would be located under the Technology link.

Thank you again for participating today. We do value your feedback, so please let us know what you thought of the seminar and suggest future seminar topics by sending an email to [email protected]. So thanks for attending today’s seminar and I’m going to turn the microphone back over to Cathy for some closing comments.

Cathy GettelThank you, Doug. And thank you for everything you’ve done to help me get ready for this seminar. Patricia just asked is there anywhere to get training on ZoomText. We do ZoomText University at different cities throughout the country at different times. So you could check our website under the Learning Tab to find out when we’re doing ZoomText University and to see if there’s one near you. The other thing is we do remote training where somebody will log into your computer and work with you for either one or two hours. It’s $99 for one hour, $175 for two hours.

Thank you for the compliment. I really appreciate it. It’s really a bit intimidating to sit here in the Ai Squared conference room kind of staring at the wall


mailto:[email protected]


and wondering if my I’m getting through, if my jokes are – is somebody rolling their eyes or are people grinning. To have absolutely no feedback, no sound, no anything, it’s a little bit tough. So I so appreciate the audience, and I hope that I didn’t bore you to death. I hope you got some good information today. Thank you to all of you for being here. Ai Squared appreciates it.

Doug AnzlovarCathy, thank you again. This seminar was so very information. I’ve been a ZoomText user for 20 plus years going back to pretty much I think your first version of ZoomText for Windows back then. So it’s great to hear how the company has progressed, and has continuously updated the software to stay current with today’s technology and today’s user needs. So thank you again, and kudos to your team. And I always have a special place for anyone who works in technical support, for the companies that do business with the blind and visually impaired. I think they’re all a fairly patient group, and definitely a jewel. So thanks to all of them as well. And thanks all of you again. Have a great afternoon.


low vision focus: an overview of zoomtext...

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