LVF The Zoom Text Magnifier

Seminars@Hadley

Low Vision Focus: An Overview of ZoomText Magnifier Reader

Presented by

Cathy Gettel

Moderated by

Doug Anzlovar

Youre 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 Anzlovar

Welcome 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 todays 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 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 Gettel

Thank 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 cant find that blue icon, youre 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 youre 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 whos trying to use ZoomText and youre 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, theyre 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