SECTION FIFTEEN INTEGRATING VOCAL-EYES AND YOUR APPLICATION 15.1: INTRODUCTION Now that you've been introduced to just about all of Vocal-Eyes' wide range of speech features, let's take a little time to "mix and match" them in ways that will best serve you. Often throughout this manual, we have used the WordPerfect word processing program to assist in our examples. WordPerfect is a very popular applications software package, and we feel that, even if you are not using WordPerfect presently, you will be able to take much of what you've learned from our examples and apply it to your own favorite applications programs. In this section of your Vocal-Eyes users' guide we'll take a closer and more detailed look at WordPerfect. We'll concentrate on Version 5.1, though most of what we'll be talking about will apply equally well to Versions 4.1, 4.2, 5.0, and 6.0. We'll begin with the basic, non-talking software itself, and we'll show you, piece by piece, how to build a voice environment that will allow you to use WordPerfect as well as any sighted user. Work along with us, or you can load the WP.SET file we've included on your Vocal-Eyes master diskette. If you're not currently using WordPerfect, read on anyway. You're sure to learn a few tricks that will come in handy when constructing voice environments for the programs you use. We have supplied you with several preconfigured .SET files - WordPerfect included. Remember, when you start up WordPerfect, the autoloading feature of Vocal-Eyes will automatically load WP.SET, WP.KEY, and WP.CHR which have been supplied. Therefore, WordPerfect will be speaking when you first enter it. The discussion that follows does not necessarily cover the techniques we used in creating the supplied .SET files. This section is simply meant to give you an idea of what can be done. Remember, we have already setup the environment for WordPerfect. You do not have to do the following steps to get it to talk. This section is meant to be an exercise. You may want to start with the standard VE.SET or DOS.SET and follow along. You should NOT follow along with the supplied WordPerfect .SET files. Since these have already been customized for WordPerfect, they will not match with the following examples. 15.2: THE PROGRAM ITSELF If you've tried using WordPerfect with VE.SET or DOS.SET already, you've undoubtedly noticed that it doesn't "talk" very well on its own. This presents us with both a challenge and an opportunity: the challenge to get it talking and the opportunity to make it talk only when there's something we really want to hear. Do you have WordPerfect loaded into your PC's memory? Do you have VE.SET loaded as your current .SET file. If so, take a moment to enter Review Mode, or use one of your read full screen hot keys to look things over. One of the first things you're likely to notice about the program is how empty the screen seems. There's a smattering of information way down at the bottom, but other than that the screen seems entirely blank (if you're using WordPerfect 6.0, you'll find a menu at the top as well). Type a word or two into WordPerfect and examine your screen again. You will notice that the words you just typed will appear in this previously blank area of the screen. There will be exceptions, as you will learn as you spend time working with WordPerfect, but for the most part this is how your screen will appear: your text occupying the top twenty-four lines of your screen and WordPerfect status and program information occupying the twenty-fifth. 15.3: CREATING THE BASIC WINDOWS As we learned in the last topic, the WordPerfect screen can be divided into two parts: the first twenty-four-line text window and the twenty-fifth line, which displays status and program information. The first thing you'll want to do in constructing your voice environment is to create two screen windows: one to read lines one to twenty-four and a second to read line twenty-five. Enter Review Mode and create both of these windows now. Define Window zero to read the first twenty-four lines and Window nine to read screen line twenty-five. Set both windows to "Neutral." Why did we choose these particular windows to set? Well, since WordPerfect doesn't use DOS screen service to display its information, we don't need to concern ourselves with making sure we place our "Silent" windows in front of our "Speak" window. We can use the "Neutral" setting for both of these WordPerfect windows. We choose to use Windows zero and nine for the simple reason that for most, right- handed users, the ALT-0 and ALT-9 keys are convenient to reach. If you are left-handed, you could just as easily have selected Windows one and two. Alternatively, you could have used the Hot Keys menu to reassign your "read text window" and "read status line" window keys to ALT-T and ALT-S for text and status, or CTRL-T and CTRL-S, or any key combinations that make sense to you and that are not currently assigned to other hot key functions. Have you got your "Read text" and "Read status line" windows in place? Go ahead and type some text. Use your read character, word, line, and your new "read text window" hot keys to monitor your progress. Press F10 to save your work. Press your ALT-9 "Read status line" hot key to read the status line. Notice that now you are being prompted for a name to give your saved file. Your ALT-9 hot key came in pretty handy here, didn't it? Perhaps, but wouldn't it be even handier if Vocal-Eyes had let you know automatically that there had been a change on the status line? "Aha!" you say. "I can setup a hyperactive window" and then it will read the window every time there's a change on my WordPerfect status line. Go ahead and give it a try. Set Hyperactive Window A to "Hyperactive" with the coordinates of left one, top twenty-five, right eighty, and bottom twenty-five. Set up the window to trigger on any change and set the first command to read window A. Now try returning to your text and typing in a word or two. Notice that now, every time you enter a character, the WordPerfect status line changes to reflect your new column position and rereads your "Hyperactive" window yet again. Obviously this won't do. The problem is we are monitoring the entire line twenty-five. If WordPerfect is going to change something on the status line, it will probably also change whatever is in columns one to five. Therefore, change the window A coordinates to left one, top twenty-five, right five, and bottom twenty-five. Now what happens? As you type, you are no longer getting the status line read as the cursor position changes. Try pressing a function key like save document. What happened now? That's right, Vocal-Eyes only read the first five columns of the status line. This is because you setup window A to read window A if anything inside changed. We need to have it read window nine instead because it is setup for the full status line. This way, Vocal-Eyes will only monitor the first five characters of line twenty-five but read the entire line if something changes. Try typing some more text. Notice that Vocal-Eyes is no longer bothering you with a lot of useless repetitions of your status line. Try pressing F10 or some other function key that causes a change to your entire status line, however, and Vocal-Eyes jumps right in there and let's you know exactly what's going on. Did you press F10? Go ahead, then, and type in a new file name. Again, no useless repetitions of the status line. You heard it once when you needed to hear it. Of course you can still use your ALT-9 hot key to read or reread the status line anytime you like. 15.4: THE WORDPERFECT CURSOR ADDRESS Regular WordPerfect 5.1 and 6.0 users probably already know that the program uses inches instead of column numbers to designate your current cursor position. Versions 4.1 and 4.2 use column numbers, but they begin with column position, or "POS" ten, which places the left margin of your text right up against the left-most edge of your display screen. Suppose, for instance, that your cursor is in a position that Vocal-Eyes' read address hot key tells you is "C10 L12." Pressing your ALT-9 read status line hot key, on the other hand, causes WordPerfect to announce your current position as Pg 3 Ln twenty-one POS twenty. WordPerfect lets us know where we are in our text, whereas Vocal-Eyes can only determine our position on the current screen. How can we instruct Vocal-Eyes to announce our cursor location using the WordPerfect format? Easy, we'll simply construct a window to read the part of screen line twenty-five that contains this information. We'll select Window two for this purpose, and we'll define it with the following coordinates: forty, twenty-five, eighty, twenty-five. Now, whenever we want to know our WordPerfect cursor address, all we have to do is press ALT-2 to read that window. But why not take things one step further? We're already used to pressing CTRL-A to hear our cursor addressed voiced. Why not go into the Hot Keys menu and assign CTRL-A to read Window two? Remember, though, before you can do this you have to "free up" the CTRL-A key by cursoring down to the read address hot key setting and pressing the DELETE key to undefine this key or press a different keystroke for this feature. Now, any time during your work with WordPerfect, pressing CTRL-A will still announce your current screen location, but it will announce it in the WordPerfect Pg Ln POS format. 15.5: ASSIGNING VOICE FEATURES TO CURSORING KEYS You'll probably want to keep the default settings for the ARROW keys: i.e., read current character for the LEFT and RIGHT ARROW keys, read current line for the UP and DOWN ARROW keys, and read current word for the CTRL-LEFT and CTRL-RIGHT ARROW keys. Additionally, you'll probably want to have your DELETE key read the current character and the BACKSPACE key read the prior character as these voice features best reflect how WordPerfect uses these keys. What would you like your TAB and SHIFT-TAB keys to read? You'd probably like to have them announce your new cursor position, but as we've just discussed the Vocal-Eyes screen position rarely if ever matches the more useful WordPerfect cursor address. Of course this situation can be easily rectified if we recall that we can instruct Vocal-Eyes to voice any of our fifty windows whenever we press a key such as the TAB key. We've already set screen Window two to announce our WordPerfect cursor position. Now all we have to do is select the TAB key on the Cursoring menu and then press the SPACE BAR or the BACKSPACE key enough times until "Speak window" comes up. When we press ENTER on this option Vocal-Eyes will prompt us for the window to speak. We type the number two followed by ENTER. Now, every time we press the TAB key, Vocal-Eyes will read Window 2 and thereby announce our true WordPerfect cursor location. Do the same thing for the SHIFT-TAB key. And while you're at it, why not go ahead and instruct Vocal-Eyes to read Window two whenever you press the PgUp or PgDn keys as well? Surely you'd like to keep track of where you are when you use these keys to move through your document page by page. Or if you prefer, you could assign the PgUp and PgDn keys to read window zero, the first 24 lines on the screen. This would read the first 24 lines of each new page when you press either of the two keys. And as long as we're talking about cursoring keys, there are a few others you might like to set to work well with WordPerfect. CTRL-END is the WordPerfect command to delete from the cursor to the end of the line. Why not set this key to read your line? This way pressing CTRL-END will instruct WordPerfect to delete to the end of your current line, and then Vocal-Eyes will read the line for you so you can see how it's been changed. Or, if you wish, you can set CTRL-END to read from the cursor position to the end of the line. This way, it will read the new information WordPerfect carried up. Read the entire line or from the cursor to the end, whichever you like best. What about CTRL-DELETE and CTRL-BACKSPACE? These keys will delete the current word. How about setting these to read the current word? This way, Vocal-Eyes will always speak the new word under the cursor. You have forty-six possible cursoring keys. You might as well try and use them up. Remember when we showed you how you could make any key a cursor key by simply finding a key on the Cursoring menu you weren't using and then typing in the desired key? Well, WordPerfect uses the key pad + and - keys to scroll through your document one screen forward or backward at a time. Why not replace a couple of unused cursoring keys with the gray + and - minus keys, and then press ENTER enough times to cause each of these keys when pressed to read your text window zero? And as long as we're talking about scrolling through your WordPerfect text, don't forget to set your Read To End hot key to read your entire document at the press of a single key. Why not assign this feature to the ALT-D key, the "D" standing for "document read?" Now while in the WordPerfect document, you can press ALT-D. Vocal-Eyes will start reading your entire document from the current cursor position to the end. If you wish to stop the reading, simply press the ESCAPE key. The reading will stop and your cursor will be on the first character of the last word you heard assuming you have a synthesizer capable of indexing. If your synthesizer does not offer this ability, your cursor will be a few lines below where you stopped. Remember, the Read To End hot key will only read the data within your currently active window, so make sure window zero is the current active window. In fact, you may want to leave window zero the active window all the time. 15.6: THE WP.KEY KEY LABELING DICTIONARY We've included a key labeling dictionary on your Vocal-Eyes master diskette that covers all of the WordPerfect function key commands. It's called WP.KEY, and you can load it into Vocal-Eyes by copying it onto your Vocal-Eyes start-up diskette or into your Vocal-Eyes hard drive subdirectory and then issuing the following command: VE /kwp Of course, if you have Autoloading enabled, all you need to do is put the file where Vocal-Eyes can find it before entering WordPerfect. Would you like to see what's in this key labeling dictionary? Go ahead and load the actual text file into WordPerfect now. Remember, however, that all Vocal-Eyes dictionaries have been saved as pure ASCII text files. You can load and save them using WordPerfect, but be sure to save them as ASCII, or DOS text, files. If you're using a version of WordPerfect lower than 6.0, be sure to use the CTRL-F5 menu to load and save these files. WordPerfect 6.0 users should be sure to choose ASCII as their format when loading and saving. Would you like your computer to say something other than what's currently in the key labeling dictionary? Go ahead and change it. All you have to do is to erase the line that tells Vocal-Eyes what to say and replace it with the word or words of your choice. Misspellings are perfectly proper in a key labeling dictionary, as some times a misspelled word will sound more like the word you want than its proper spelling. Remember, if you have autoloading enabled, Vocal-Eyes will automatically load not only the .SET file but also the character and key label dictionaries. If you name the .SET, .CHR, and .KEY files the same as the program you are executing, Vocal-Eyes' autoloading will load them. The /k and/or /c command line parameters are not necessary. 15.7: CHECKING YOUR SPELLING WordPerfect has excellent spell-checking capabilities. The problem is, it tends to display misspelled words in reverse video and then your alternate spellings on the bottom part of the screen. At least these appear to be problems at first glance. To hear the alternate spellings voiced, why not define Window eight to read screen lines fourteen through twenty-four (WordPerfect 6.0 users will want to use columns three through forty-three of lines fourteen through twenty-three)? Now, whenever WordPerfect flags a word for possible correction, all you have to do is press ALT-8 and you'll hear all the suggested spellings for your misspelled word. Why not go one step further and setup window eight to speak and spell? This way, Vocal-Eyes will first speak an optional word and than spell it. As far as reading the flagged misspelled words, which WordPerfect displays in reverse video, this is what light bar tracking was born to do! Do you currently have a completed document on screen? If so, press CTRL-F2 and select either page or full document spell check. When WordPerfect finds a word it thinks is misspelled, enter Review mode and move your cursor to that word. The quickest way to do this would be to move the Review cursor to the top of the screen and press S to search for the first character with a different attribute than the one currently under the cursor-- that's right, the misspelled word. Press B to set the color for your light bar tracking. Exit Review Mode and try your read bar hot key (don't forget to define one if you haven't already). Did you hear your misspelled word announced? Press the read bar hot key again. Vocal- Eyes spelled the word this time. Press the read bar hot key a third time. This time, Vocal-Eyes spelled the word phonetically. Press ALT-8 to hear WordPerfect's suggested corrections. Press the letter preceding the word you want substituted for your corrected word, or press one to skip once, 2 to skip all occurrences, etc. How about turning light bar to on and telling Vocal-Eyes to use the current light bar as the cursor position? This way, as you press the previous, current, or next for character, word, line, sentence and paragraph, they will all be relative to your misspelled word. (NOTE: As an example, here is an alternative way of finding the misspelled word so you could set the light bar tracking attribute. First, select option 4: EDIT, from the speller menu. This places your cursor in your text at the beginning of your misspelled word. Use your RIGHT ARROW key to cursor across the word, or your read current word hot key to determine which word is misspelled. Now, press ENTER. This will return you to the WordPerfect speller. You can now enter Review Mode and use the "F" find key to locate your misspelled word. Once you've found it, press B to set your light bar. That's all there is to it. Alternatively, you could have placed a Marker at the word and instead of finding the word, you could jump directly to the marker you just set.) If you wish, try the user attribute hot key instead of the light bar hot key. However, if you use the light bar option, you can spell the word letter by letter or spell it phonetically. This cannot be done with the user attribute option. Also, you can not use the user attribute as the cursor position. Remember, once the light bar attribute is set, you won't have to set it again. Don't forget to save your .SET file to disk so you can load it back during your next session with WordPerfect. We could make things even more smoothly by setting up hyperactive windows to load new .SET files. For example, once you enter the spell checking section, Vocal-Eyes could be told to automatically load WPSPELL.SET. This .SET file can be customized to get the spell checker to work as well as you could ever imagine. Also, you can instruct Vocal- Eyes to load a new .SET file when you enter the list files option or the thesaurus. In fact, you will notice the configurations we have supplied with your Vocal-Eyes for WordPerfect will indeed jump from .SET to .SET. This happens so quickly you don't even realize it is happening. Setting up the environments in this fashion allows you to get total control over what should and should not be spoken and in what order. 15.8: MAKING USE OF WORDPERFECT'S COLORS Even if you have a black-and-white monitor, you may be able to instruct WordPerfect to display various information in various colors. Your monitor may only display these colors as different shades of gray, but WordPerfect may actually be displaying colors and, if so, Vocal-Eyes will be able to see them. WordPerfect 5.1 and 6.0 users can change colors via the SHIFT-F1 setup menu. Users of earlier versions of WordPerfect will need to press CTRL- F3 and then select option four. Examine this menu and you will notice that WordPerfect can display different types of text in different color sets. You may, for instance, choose to display normal text as white on blue, bold text as bright white on blue and underlined text as black on white. Recall that you have several hot keys that read various video attributes such as highlighted text, reverse video, etc. Experiment with the various color settings until you find the ones that best work with your read attribute hot key assignments. The .SET files we have included with Vocal-Eyes assume you are using the default colors. If you change any of WordPerfect's colors, the .SET files may not function as they should. If you are creating your own .SET file, feel free to change the colors as you see fit. Otherwise, it is suggested you stay with the defaults. 15.9: OTHER SETUP OPTIONS Besides colors, there are many other WordPerfect features you can set that will help in your word processing. WordPerfect 5.1 users will find all of these features contained within the SHIFT-F1 setup menu. Explore the various submenus in the setup menu. Notice that you can set several bell options, such as bell on error, bell on hyphenation, bell on unsuccessful search, etc. WordPerfect also allows for two different backup options: one that will save your last file with a .BK! extension every time you "re-save" your work with the same file name, and a second, "timed" backup that will automatically backup your file as frequently, in minutes, as you'd like. Here's a WordPerfect feature you're sure to appreciate: the ability to display hard carriage returns as any ASCII character of your choice. Whenever you end a paragraph or enter a blank line in WordPerfect, the program inserts a character called a hard carriage return. This character is usually invisible, but you can use your setup menu to change the display of hard carriage returns to any ASCII character. After that, every time you press ENTER this character will appear on your screen to let you know you've ended a paragraph or inserted a blank line. Don't worry, though, the character will not show up in your printed document. WordPerfect 5.1 users can assign an ASCII character to carriage returns by selecting the SHIFT-F1 setup menu and then making selections three and six (hard return display character). Then type the character you wish displayed. You can use the ALT key in combination with the numeric keypad to get extended ASCII characters. Why not use ASCII twenty? This way, assuming you have your screen punctuation's control feature set to "describe," you'll hear Vocal-Eyes say "paragraph" to mark every blank line or the end of every paragraph. Or, if you like, you can place the character into your character dictionary and set the control option to "Dictionary only." You could do it like this: /20 carriage return Now, every time Vocal-Eyes encounters a hard carriage return it will say "carriage return." Sounding Board users may want to setup the character dictionary as follows: /20 CTRL-EB1 Can you figure out what this entry does? Well, with this entry loaded into Vocal-Eyes' character dictionary buffer, it will send all three characters listed on the second line to your Sounding Board every time it encounters an ASCII twenty hard carriage return. The first character, the CTRL-E, alerts the Sounding Board that the next two characters are to be taken as a Sounding Board command. And if you're familiar with your Sounding Board software, you've undoubtedly already recognize these characters as the command to ring the Sounding Board's bell. Would you like your Sounding Board to beep every time it encounters a hard carriage return in your text? Use the WordPerfect setup menu to reset your hard return to ASCII 20, then add the above two lines to your WordPerfect character dictionary.