SECTION FOUR INTRODUCING THE VOCAL-EYES VOICE CONTROL PANEL 4.1: INTRODUCTION One of Vocal-Eyes' strongest features is the ability it gives you to customize your PC's voice response in an almost infinite variety of combinations. This lets you fulfill your individual needs and preferences. In this section of your Vocal-Eyes user's guide we're going to introduce you to the Vocal-Eyes Voice Control Panel. We'll show you how to access the control panel via the CTRL-\ key combination and take you on a brief tour of its main menus. Finally you will learn how to use a couple of them to set how your PC's screen and keyboard speak. 4.2: ACCESSING THE CONTROL PANEL Accessing Vocal-Eyes' Voice Control Panel is as easy as pressing CTRL-\. First, press and hold down the CTRL key. If your keyboard has two CTRL keys, you can press either of them. Now, while holding down the CTRL key, press the "\" key. Release them both together. Did you hear the ascending tone, followed by the words "1 Screen?" You have just popped up the main menu of Vocal-Eyes' Voice Control Panel. This menu not only voices but is also displayed on the screen for sighted users. Press the DOWN ARROW key. Did you hear Vocal-Eyes voice "2 Keyboard?" Press DOWN ARROW several more times. You should hear: "3 Hot Keys, 4 Cursoring, 5 General, 6 Files, 7 Help, 8 Exit." Press DOWN ARROW one more time. Vocal-Eyes rotored back to the top of the main pull-down menu and voiced "1 Screen" again. Try pressing the UP ARROW key. What happened? Press UP ARROW several more times. This is used to move backwards through the menu options. You can also use the LEFT and RIGHT arrows to move around in the menus. Once again for those of you who do not like to move your hands off of the home row, you can use the BACKSPACE and SPACE BAR to move from entry to entry. The BACKSPACE will move to the previous entry and the SPACE BAR will advance to the next entry. A bit later in this section, you will learn how to jump directly to any entry in the menu. This allows you extremely fast access to any of the many useful features. Press the ESCAPE key. Did you hear the descending tone. Use one of your ALT-0 through ALT-9 Read Window hot keys to read your PC's screen. The Control Panel is no longer displayed on the screen. The Vocal-Eyes Voice Control Panel, like Vocal-Eyes itself, is tucked away in a corner of your PC's memory. It doesn't interfere with DOS or any applications program you may be running. Unless, of course, you want it to. The Vocal-Eyes Voice Control Panel can be accessed at any time during your PC work session. DOS or your applications software will be placed into a computerized version of suspended animation and remain so for the entire time you're inside the control panel's easy-to-use pull-down menus. Then, when you use the ESCAPE key to exit the control panel, DOS, or your applications program, is wakened and allowed to resume functioning. Neither your program nor its data has been affected in any way. Your program doesn't even know it was suspended. Does all of this sound familiar? That is because it works very much like the Review Mode. There is one important difference however. When Review Mode is requested, it is activated immediately. The menus however, are not popped up until DOS is not busy. The reason for this will become clear later on, however, the main reason is because of a function in the menus which requires the use of DOS. If DOS is busy, the function could not be used. Most of the time, the menus will pop up instantly and this will never be a problem. A very good example of this can be shown as follows. If you have a directory which contains several files, use the DIR command to list all the entries. While it is displaying the entries, press the ALT key to enter review. You will notice review mode was entered immediately. Go ahead and exit review. Now issue the DIR command again but this time, try and enter the menus. You will notice the menu does not pop up until the directory is completed. The reason again is because DOS was busy listing the entries to the screen. The menus waited patiently until DOS was finished and then popped up. If you are in Review, as we said before, you can also enter the menus. Even if DOS is busy, the menus will pop up. However, when you try and issue the command which requires DOS, you may get the error "Unable to access disk, DOS is busy." If Vocal-Eyes let you access the Control Panel at the wrong time, the results would be disastrous. Don't worry too much about all of this. It is simply mentioned here to let you know how Vocal-Eyes is watching out for you at all times. Many times, you will not even realize the trouble it is going to...and of course that is the way it should be. 4.3: THE HELP OPTION If you ever have any questions about any of the Voice Control Panel options, you can either refer to Appendix D or better yet, why not select the "7 HELP" option. This menu option will bring up a submenu of five choices, Menu, Review, VE Cursor, Command Line, and Serial number. The Review option will display exactly the same help information as did pressing F1 in Review mode. Feel free to request Review help in either location. The VE Cursor has not been discussed as of yet. Suffice it to say, the VE cursor is simply another way of reviewing your screen, similar to Review mode. The main difference however is the VE cursor is interactive whereas Review will suspend your underlying application. Much more will be discussed about the VE cursor in section 10. The Command Line option lists and briefly explains the parameters, or specifications, that can be used when Vocal-Eyes is run from the DOS prompt. These are explained in detail in Appendix E. The first option on the Help menu deals directly with each and every menu option. This can be a great way to get fast information about a particular option. Regardless of which help option you choose, the information is displayed in the same format. You can press Page Down to display the next screenful of information or Page Up to display the previous page. Pressing the space bar will re-read the current page. Pressing Escape will cancel help and return you to the help submenu. As with the Review help, if you have interruptability enabled, you can very quickly get to the screen which contains the information you are concerned with. Please use this help information as needed. It should answer all your basic questions regarding all the menu options. If you still require assistance, you may refer to this users' guide. Also Like the Review help, the information displayed is loaded from a disk file called "VE.HLP". Only if this file is in the original drive and directory from which Vocal-Eyes was loaded will this feature work. Since there is such a large amount of information, we decided to read the help information from disk when you request it instead of allocating a large amount of your RAM. If the file is not available or DOS is busy, Vocal-Eyes will speak "Help is unavailable" and beep. Make sure the VE.HLP file is in the correct location and try the help option again. The last option on the HELP menu, "Serial Number," simply displays and reads your unique serial number. This number has been registered to you. There are times when you will need to know this serial number. If you choose this option, Vocal-Eyes will say "Vocal-Eyes serial number" followed by the actual serial number in the form: VE x.x-xxxxxxxxx. 4.4: THE "SCREEN" MENU Use the CTRL-\ key to call up the Voice Control Panel. Where are you in the main pull-down menu? Notice that it's the same place you were when you exited the control panel. If you're not at the "1 Screen" option, use your arrows, space bar or Backspace keys to move there now. Press ENTER. What happened? Did you hear Vocal-Eyes voice "1 Voice = On?" You've just entered the Screen submenu. Press UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, BACKSPACE or SPACE BAR several times to examine the many options in the submenu. We'll discuss the nineteen menu choices in turn. 4.4.1: SCREEN VOICE ON/OFF Use your cursor keys to move to option 1: "Voice On." Press ENTER. What happened? Did you hear Vocal-Eyes announce "1 Voice = Off?" Press ENTER a second time. Turning the Voice option to "Off" does exactly what it says: it turns your PC's screen voice off. Perhaps you're using a program that already sends screen output to your synthesizer. Or maybe you're more interested in getting your data typed in quickly than you are in listening to a program that wants to talk your ears off. In either of these instances you might want to turn the screen voice off. Of course if you do turn screen voice off you will still hear the characters you type. Also, all of your speech hot keys--read character, word, line, sentence, paragraph, etc.--will still voice normally. You can always use ALT-0 through ALT-9 to read your screen. If you have the screen voice set to off, all you need to do is access the Screen submenu, locate option "1 voice off" and press ENTER. The voice will switch immediately back to the "on" position. Pressing ENTER repeatedly at this submenu prompt will toggle you back and forth between the "on" and "off" settings. The default value, which is to say the value this feature has been set to, is "On." 4.4.2: SPEECH RATE Most speech synthesizers offer at least two different rates of speech. Some synthesizers, such as the Sounding Board, offer as many as ten. Using Option #2 on the Screen submenu you can set the rate at which your synthesizer voices text written to your PC's screen. Use your cursor keys to select option 2 on the Screen submenu. Press ENTER to change the rate at which screen text will be voiced. You will be prompted to enter a new speech rate from zero to nine. Rate zero is the slowest rate, whereas Rate nine is the fastest. Users of the Sounding Board and other synthesizers which support 10 speech rates can select from among all 10 rates by typing in a number from 0 through 9. If your synthesizer only offers two different speech rates, however, consider the numbers zero through four to be the slow setting and five through nine the fast. Three-speed synthesizers can consider zero through three as the slow setting, four through six the medium setting and seven through nine the fastest. For a complete list of what your particular synthesizer offers, refer to Appendix F: Speech Synthesizers. At the "Rate (0-9): x" prompt, simply press the desired rate number followed by ENTER. If you type the number incorrectly and have not pressed ENTER, you can press the BACKSPACE key, retype the number and then press ENTER to accept the correct value. You can cancel the entire process with a press of the ESCAPE key. If you press ENTER before typing a number, the previous setting is used. When you make a change to the screen voice rate you'll hear the change immediately as Vocal-Eyes reads the new rate setting and then the current menu selection, "2 Rate = x" where x is the current rate setting. If you're not happy with the change, simply press ENTER and type the new setting. Experiment with the screen rate setting until you find the speech rate that is most comfortable for you. Soon we'll show you how you can save your new setting so that it will be there every time you run Vocal- Eyes. 4.4.3: SCREEN PITCH AND VOLUME Cursor through options 3, 4 and 5 of the Screen submenu. Notice how they offer you the ability to alter the pitch, tone and/or the volume of text which appears on your PC's screen. We'll discuss pitch and volume first. The Sounding Board, and certain other speech synthesizers, support ten different levels of both pitch and volume. Would you like to change either the pitch or the volume of your screen text? If so, cursor down to the appropriate menu choice and press ENTER. As was the case with the screen rate option, you will be prompted to enter a number from zero to nine. The number zero represents the lowest pitch, or the quietest volume, your synthesizer is capable of producing. The number nine represents the highest pitch, or loudest volume. Again, your synthesizer may not support all ten levels of volume or pitch. 4.4.4: SCREEN TONE Along with 10 different levels of pitch, volume and rate, the Sounding Board is capable of voicing text in 26 different levels of tonality, ranging from a needle-thin "robot-like" voice to a deep-throated growl. These different levels are represented by the letters A to Z, with A being the deep-throated growl and Z the thin nasal sound. DECtalk users will notice that the Tone setting can be used to switch between the possible nine voices. Cursor down to the Tone menu option and press ENTER. Notice that here you are prompted to enter a letter from A to Z. The default value for this setting is a moderate "I." If this setting is not to your liking, try supplying a different letter value and then pressing ENTER. As was the case with the other screen voice settings we've discussed thus far, your synthesizer may not offer the full 26 tone settings. Many offer no tone control at all. 4.4.5: THE PUNCTUATION SUBMENU Cursor down to option 6. Press Enter. You have now entered the Punctuation Submenu. The first thing you will hear is: "1 Textual = Off." Cursor down, if you like, and examine the other options in this submenu. Each option will be discussed in turn. 1 Textual On/Off/Dictionary Only This option controls the voicing of the standard, textual punctuation set, including the comma, the period, question mark, exclamation point, semicolon and colon. By default all of these punctuation marks will not be voiced. Set this option to on by pressing ENTER twice if you want these punctuation marks to be voiced. Pressing ENTER the first time calls up the "Dictionary Only" option. You can use this setting to have any group of general punctuation spoken without voicing the entire set. You could, for example, instruct Vocal- Eyes to voice the period and the comma, but not the colon, semicolon or any of the others. You could also, if you desired, alter the pronunciation of the punctuation marks. You could, say, use the "Dictionary Only" setting to instruct Vocal-Eyes to voice "Full Stop" whenever it encounters a period, or "Wow" in place of each and every exclamation point. We'll be talking a lot about creating and installing dictionaries in section 11. 2 Math On/Off/Dictionary Only This rotor selection is similar to the one described above, only instead of general punctuation this switch controls the mathematical operators: the +, -, *, /, (, ), %, ^, <, >, and =. Leave this setting in the default "on" position to hear all of these marks spoken when read from your PC's screen. Set it to "Off" to silence voicing of these marks. Again, dictionaries will be discussed in a later section of the manual. 3 Miscellaneous On/Off/Dictionary Only This setting controls the rest of your PC's standard punctuation: the @, #, $, &, ', ", ~, \, |, _, `, {, }, [ and ]. Once again, leave this setting in the default "On" position to hear these marks voiced and "Off" to silence their voicing whenever text is being read from the screen. 4 Spacing On/Off/Dictionary Only This setting controls whether or not spaces which appear on your PC's screen will be voiced. Probably you will want to leave this setting in the default "Off" setting to avoid a lot of unnecessary chatter, but give the "On" setting a try if you like. 5 Control Off/Dictionary Only/ASCII/Describe/Say "Control" This setting controls how Vocal-Eyes voices the ASCII control characters from ASCII 1 to ASCII 26. Notice that besides the default setting of "Off" and the "Dictionary Only" setting which we shall discuss later, there are three other settings for you to choose from: "ASCII," "Describe," and "Say Control." Each of these settings does exactly what it says. The "ASCII" setting reports the numeric ASCII value of any control characters that appear on your PC's screen. "ASCII 12," for example, or "ASCII 21." With the "Describe" setting enabled, Vocal-Eyes will describe these ASCII characters as they appear on your screen. ASCII 12, for example, would be described as "Female symbol," and ASCII 21 as "Marker." Setting this value to "Say Control" would cause Vocal-Eyes to announce the ASCII character as a control character. ASCII 12, in this case would be announced Control-L, and ASCII 21 as Control-U. 6 Enhanced Off/Dictionary Only/ASCII/Describe This setting controls how Vocal-Eyes voices the extended ASCII graphic character set from ASCII 127 to ASCII 255 as well as ASCII 0 and ASCII 27 to ASCII 31. If you leave this setting in the default "Off" position, none of these characters will be voiced. Setting it to "ASCII" will instruct Vocal-Eyes to announce the ASCII value for each and every extended ASCII graphic character it encounters. A far more useful option, especially when you first begin working with a new program and want to see how things are laid out on the screen, is the "Describe" setting. Rotoring the Enhanced Punctuation switch to this setting will cause Vocal-Eyes to describe each extended graphic character it encounters. Thus, when Vocal-Eyes encounters the upper right-hand corner of a box, instead of keeping silent about it-- the "Off" setting-- or voicing "ASCII 218"-- the "ASCII setting--it will go ahead and tell you, "Upper right corner." Mix and match these and all the other screen settings as desired. Press ESCAPE until you hear the descending tone that lets you know you've returned to DOS or to your applications software program. Or, alternatively, you can always use the ALT-X "Quick Escape" key combination for a fast exit from this or any Voice Control Panel submenu. 4.4.6: A SPECIAL NOTE TO SOUNDING BOARD USERS Sounding Board users will notice how much more powerful the Vocal- Eyes punctuation features are than the ones that come standard with the Sounding Board software. Consequently, Vocal-Eyes will automatically disable the Sounding Board punctuation hot key. As a result, your Sounding Board punctuation rotor controls will not work with Vocal-Eyes. Your rate, pitch and volume controls will work just fine. You can use either the Voice Control Panel or your Sounding Board hot keys to modify any of these settings. While on the subject of the Sounding Board hot keys, lets talk about how they effect Vocal-Eyes. The Time/Date hot key will voice the time and date using the screen voice of Vocal-Eyes. The Voice On/Off hot key will still shut the synthesizer speech on or off. Vocal-Eyes does not even realize you have shut the voice off. The Rate Up and Rate Down hot keys will toggle the screen voice rate up and down on the fly. For example, you can be listening to some text and press the Sounding Board Rate Up or Rate Down hot keys causing the speech to be affected immediately. If you pop up Vocal-Eyes' menu and look at the current screen voice rate, you will notice it has been effected accordingly. The same is true for the Sounding Board Volume Up and Volume Down hot keys. They, too, will effect the Screen voice volume. As we already said, the Sounding Board Punctuation hot key will be disabled by Vocal-Eyes. The Hyperscan hot key works as expected. Vocal-Eyes does not care if hyperscan is on or off. The same is true for Rewind and Fast forward. Feel free to use these keys as needed. The Pause hot key and the Enable/Disable hot keys also will work just fine. 4.4.7: NUMBERS ON/OFF Going down the Screen submenu, option 7 reads "7 Numbers = On." By default, Vocal-Eyes reads any number on your PC's screen as you might speak them in conversation. The number 123, for example, would be voiced "one hundred twenty three." Pressing Enter at the "7 Numbers" prompt will toggle Vocal-Eyes' number read feature to off. With Numbers set to "off" Vocal-Eyes will read numbers one digit at a time. In our previous example, instead of speaking one hundred twenty three, Vocal- Eyes will speak "one two three." If the numbers option is on, it will also read $2.98 as two dollars and ninety-eight cents, and 3:30 as three-thirty as well as 1990 as nineteen ninety. 4.4.8: Capitalization Alert Tone/Say CAP/Pitch/Off You may want to know which words in a document or on the screen are capitalized. In some cases, upper case versus lower case might carry some meaning. Other times, you may be proofreading a letter or paper and would like to know whether you capitalized words the way you intended. This feature gives you four possibilities. Using the arrow keys or space bar, move to option eight, "Capitalization Alert = off." Press ENTER. You will hear "8 Capitalization Alert=Tone. Did your voice synthesizer emit a short tone before the words Capitalization and Tone? If you are using a synthesizer such as the Sounding Board or DECTalk PC, you should have heard it. If your synthesizer supports the tone feature, you will hear a short tone before words which have the first letter capitalized and a higher-pitched tone before words which are in all caps. The highest pitch is placed before words with mixed capitalization, such as many software brand names or an error on the typist's part. Type a few words and try this out. Returning to option eight of the Screen menu and pressing ENTER will rotor you to the next setting. You will hear "8 Capitalization Alert = Say CAP," pronounced, "8 cap Capitalization alert equals cap Say cap cap CAP." If you read Braille, this will make some sense to you. If the first letter of a word is capitalized, Vocal-Eyes will say "cap" before it speaks the word. If all of the letters in the word are upper case, Vocal-Eyes will say "cap cap" before it says the words. If the capitalization of the word is mixed, however, Vocal-Eyes says "cap cap cap" to indicate this. Try this on the words you typed earlier. Go back to option eight and press ENTER again. This time Vocal-Eyes says, "8 Capitalization = Pitch." This is similar to the "Capitalization Alert = Tone" option described above, but this time Vocal-Eyes indicates the capitalization of a word by using three different pitches. Nearly all synthesizers support this feature. 4.4.9: Format Alert Off/On Have you ever made errors in the number of spaces between two words or between the end of one sentence and the beginning of another? Perhaps you've meant to indent text but have gotten a line or two out of alignment. This is nearly impossible to detect, but the people who read your printed document will notice it right away. If you'd like to proofread your documents before printing them, try option nine on the Screen menu. When on, this feature announces "two spaces" where you've put them after end punctuation and "indented four" where you have four spaces (or any other number) at the beginning of a line. Try moving text around with the tab key or space bar and see how Vocal- Eyes keeps you posted as you read. You will hear XX spaces where there are two spaces or more and indented xxx where there are any spaces at all at the beginning of the line. 4.4.10: Visual Tracking If you cursor down to option ten on the Screen menu, Visual Tracking, and press ENTER, you will enter a submenu as you did when you looked at the Punctuation submenu. Your options here are "1 Visual Tracking = OFF," "2 Foreground = Black," and "3 Background = White." The purpose of this feature is to "highlight" each word as it is being spoken. This means that when you press the read line, read paragraph, read x window, or any other read hot key, each word Vocal-Eyes speaks will be indicated with a different color than the original word. This feature, by the way, can only be used with synthesizers which support the indexing feature. If your synthesizer does not support indexing, Vocal-Eyes will treat Visual Tracking as if you had turned it off in the Screen menu. This feature defaults to off. However, if you have low vision or have a learning disability, it is strongly recommended you enable this feature. This was actually added for learning disabilities. With the visual and audable feedback Vocal-Eyes provides an individual with a learning disability can overcome their normal dificulties. We believe you will be very pleased with this feature. When you first enter the submenu, your cursor is on the number one selection. The default is "off." If you press ENTER you will hear "1 Visual Tracking = User defined." This means that you, the user, get to determine what color the highlight will be. You might use this if you can see certain colors better than others or if the text is displayed in many colors and you'd like to have the highlighted words all match. To set the color to, let's say, red on white, move down to the second menu item and press ENTER. You'll hear "Select foreground 1 Black." You can use your up and down arrow keys to find the foreground color you like. By the way, if you are using a monochrome system, you'll find only black and white combinations. In any case, once you find the color you want, in our example red, press ENTER. Now you'll hear "2 Foreground = Red." Arrow down to option number three and press ENTER to select the background color, white, in the same way. Later we'll talk about how to save these settings for later use. Finally, press ENTER again on option 1. You will rotor the option to "Inverse." This means that the normal background color becomes the foreground color and vice versa. For example, if the text on the screen is white on blue, the highlighted word will show up as blue on white. If you have a setting of inverse, options two and three below will be ignored. Note: If you are performing a function such as a file transfer, visual tracking may cause your transfer to fail. It's a good idea to turn this feature off before you perform the transfer. Because the highlight tracking requires the total attention of the machine, while words are being highlighted, your underlying application program will be suspended. If the underlying program and can not be suspended, make sure you leave this option off. 4.4.11: THE REPEAT FILTER Cursor down to the eleventh option in the Screen submenu. This option allows you to set Vocal-Eyes' repeat filter. Often, programs will repeat long strings of characters in order to decorate the screen, break text into pages, etc. It can be quite annoying, for instance, having to listen to Vocal-Eyes read out an entire 80-column screen line worth of dashes, or 15 or 20 equal signs in a row which have been placed above a list of menu selections. This is where Vocal-Eyes' repeat filter comes in handy. There are three settings to the repeat filter: "Off," "Say Repeats," and "Ignore." With the filter in the "Say Repeats" position, Vocal-Eyes will "look ahead" at text it is about to voice. Whenever it sees an occurrence of several like characters in a row, instead of reading them all, it will voice the character a few times only and then announce the number of times the character is repeated. A line of dashes extending all the way across your PC's screen, for instance, may be voiced as follows: dash dash dash repeats 80 times The next option, "Ignore," would have instructed Vocal-Eyes not to voice the string of dashes at all. Leaving the repeat filter in the "Off" position would instruct Vocal-Eyes to leave all repeating characters alone--in which case the above string of 80 dashes would have been voiced dash by dash from beginning to end. By default, this setting has been left in the "Off" position. Would you like to change it now? Use your UP or DOWN ARROW key to move you to the Repeat Filter prompt. Notice that Vocal-Eyes voices the current setting. Now, press ENTER. Did you hear Vocal-Eyes advance your repeat filter selection one setting? Press ENTER again if you'd prefer Vocal-Eyes to ignore all repeating characters entirely and yet again to return yourself to the default "Off" setting. The repeat filter is a rotary setting. What this means is that every time you press ENTER at the repeat filter prompt Vocal-Eyes will advance, or rotor, you one notch through the various settings until you've seen them all. Then it will circle, or rotor, back around to the first selection and begin again. 4.4.12: THE REPEAT VALUE In the previous topic we mentioned that whenever the repeat filter is in one of the enabled modes, Vocal-Eyes will look ahead in your text and perform the appropriate filtering action after a character has repeated itself a certain number of times. Using the Repeat Value setting you can adjust the number of times a character must repeat before Vocal-Eyes jumps in and says "repeats" or decides to ignore the string completely. By default Vocal-Eyes will allow a character to repeat three times before filtering remaining similar characters. However you can reset this value to any number from 1 to 9. We recommend you do not set this value less than 3 since it is possible for two of the same letters to be placed together in one word. This would cause the word to be split up. Whatever you set this option to, also tells Vocal-Eyes how many times to actually speak the repeated character before saying "Repeats x Times." If you have eighty dashes and the Repeat Value is set at 7, you will hear: dash dash dash dash dash dash dash repeats 80 times Use your UP or DOWN ARROW key to move you to the "Repeat Value" selection. Press ENTER. You will be prompted for the number of times from 1 to 9 that you would like the character to repeat before Vocal-Eyes' repeat filter steps in. Naturally, if you have set the repeat filter to "Off" this setting will have no effect whatsoever. 4.4.13: BLANK LINES Would you like Vocal-Eyes to say "Blank" every time it encounters a blank line when voicing your PC's screen display? Perhaps you've got a document on screen and you need to make sure you've skipped a line between each paragraph. Or maybe you are just checking out the screen layout of a new or unfamiliar program. In any case, to instruct Vocal-Eyes to say "Blank" whenever it encounters a blank line on your screen display, simply enter the Screen submenu and cursor down to option thirteen. Press ENTER to toggle this feature to the "Say Blank" option. Press ENTER a second time to toggle it back off again. 4.4.14: Signal Cursor Position Turning this option on will cause Vocal-Eyes to say "CURSOR" whenever it is reading something which contains the cursor position. The default is off. For example, if you asked Vocal-Eyes to read this line: Mary had a little lamb. and the cursor was on the first "l" of little, Vocal-Eyes would say: Mary had a cursor little lamb. Notice the word "cursor" thrown in before the word little. This tells you the cursor is sitting on the "l" of "little." With this feature enabled, you can tell exactly where your cursor currently resides. If your cursor is sitting in the middle of a word, Vocal-Eyes will break the word at the cursor position and speak the first part followed by the word "cursor" and finally the second part of the word. For example, if the cursor is sitting on the "p" of "computer", Vocal-Eyes would say "com cursor puter." Although you may not want this feature enabled all the time, feel free to turn it on and off as needed. Pressing ENTER on this option will toggle between on and off. 4.4.15 Attribute changes With this option enabled, Vocal-Eyes will speak color changes as it reads the text displayed on the screen. A hot key can also be assigned to perform the same function. More will be discussed about this option in section 8. Pressing ENTER will toggle between on and off. The default is off. 4.4.16 Auto box read This is a very powerful feature. Many programs like to display information on the screen in boxes. Visually this is very appealing and easy to follow. However, because the information is printed over the top of existing data, it can be difficult to only read the box's contents. As you will see in section 8, you could press the read box hot key located in the hot key menu. This is good if you know a box is on the screen and even if you do, it still requires that you press an additional keystroke. If you enable this feature, Vocal-Eyes will automatically watch the full screen for any boxes which pop up on the screen. If more than one box is currently on the screen, Vocal-Eyes will attempt to search out the box of most interest. Once a box has been detected, Vocal-Eyes will automatically read its contents. Error messages, dialog boxes, status messages, anything which pops up in a box can be set to automatically be read by enabling this feature. Once a box appears on the screen, Vocal-Eyes will read the box only once, even if the information within the box changes. However, if another box pops up on top of the original, Vocal-Eyes will read the new one. Once the new box disappears, the original box will be reread, assuming it is still displayed on the screen. More on this feature and the read box hot key will be discussed in section 8. Feel free to give the auto box read a try. We are sure you will find it handy, especially for new and unfamiliar programs. 4.4.17 Screen activity tone The screen activity tone will let you know if your screen is changing when the voice has been silenced. Lets say you are downloading a file through a modem and your communications program is constantly updating the screen as the data is being received. Allowing this data to be spoken could cause your download to take more time or even abort the download. Therefore, you should silence the speech. But with the speech silenced, you don't know how the status of your download is going. Actually, there is a way to know. If you enable the screen activity tone, Vocal-Eyes will emit a small tone about once a second if the voice has been silenced. If the voice has not been silenced, the tone will not be sounded. This way if you hear the tone, you know your screen is changing thereby giving you confidence your download is working correctly without hearing each little detail through the speech synthesizer. This is a handy way of giving you confidence your machine has not locked up but is truly doing something to the screen. Feel free to enable and disable this feature as desired. 4.4.18 Port intercept This option allows you to tell Vocal-Eyes to intercept information which would have gone out any of the four COM ports or any of the three LPT ports. The available options are off, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, LPT1, LPT2 and LPT3. If you have this enabled for any of the seven ports and data is sent to the port by any applications program, Vocal-Eyes will steal the data and send it to your voice synthesizer using the voice settings for the screen voice. The data will not be allowed to pass to the actual serial or parallel port. You may be using an applications program which does not speak very well on its own but offers the ability to echo information to a serial port or parallel port. Normally the applications program believes there is a printer attached to the selected port. However, by instructing the applications program to send its data through a specified port and having Vocal-Eyes intercept the data through the same port, you now have the data speaking to you as desired. If you setup Vocal-Eyes to intercept LPT1 and you issue a print screen command, Vocal-Eyes will speak the entire screen, even if you have your printer attached to LPT1. Pressing ENTER on this option will rotor between all seven ports as well as a setting of off. This option will not work for those programs which send the data directly to the serial or parallel hardware. Only those programs which send the data to the ports through BIOS can be intercepted and spoken by Vocal- Eyes. Normally this is not a problem, but you should be aware of this. 4.4.19 BIOS TTY Intercept This option allows you to tell Vocal-Eyes if it should intercept the standard BIOS TTY screen write function. You may have noticed that Vocal-Eyes does not require ANSI.SYS loaded on any computer system for the DOS prompt to be voiced. The reason for this is because Vocal-Eyes intercepts this port for voicing by default. You may be asking, "if this is so good, why would you ever want to disable it?" The reason is that certain application programs write information to the screen twice. Visually, this is never detected; however, with Vocal-Eyes, this problem can be very destructive to the voice. Therefore, if you are using an applications program which sounds like every letter is being doubled in a word, try setting this option to ignore instead of intercept. If you set this option to ignore on certain systems, your DOS prompt may no longer speak unless you load the ANSI.SYS device driver. Given a choice, it is usually faster and requires less memory to enable this feature and not load ANSI.SYS. Even if you have this feature enabled, you can still load ANSI.SYS but, unless it is required by your applications program, save memory and don't load it. Don't worry if you don't fully understand the technical reasons for this feature. Just remember, if you run an applications program and you can not understand what is being spoken (it sounds like a strange language), you may want to set this option to ignore. It may make your program speak properly. There are very few programs which require this feature. However, if required, Vocal-Eyes supports it. To return to the main menu while in the Screen submenu, press the ESCAPE key. The ESCAPE key will always return you to the previous menu or if you are already at the main menu, a press of the ESCAPE key will exit you completely out of the menus. 4.5: THE "KEYBOARD" MENU Here's something we think you'll find quite handy when using Vocal-Eyes: the ability to set voice output differently for your screen and keyboard. Let's say, for instance, that you would like to quiet the keys as you type them but hear the information presented on the screen voiced at normal volume. Or you'd like to hear the spaces as you type them, but not as they appear on the screen. No problem for Vocal-Eyes! Just use the CTRL-\ key to call up the Voice Control Panel and then cursor over to the "2 KEYBOARD" option. Press ENTER. 4.5.1: KEYBOARD VOICE ON/OFF When you enter the Keyboard submenu the first setting you will encounter is the Voice On/Off option. This is exactly the same as the Voice On/Off setting you encountered back in the Screen submenu, only instead of silencing the screen voice this setting will silence your keyboard. Sometimes you just don't want to here each letter, number or mark of punctuation as you type them. Press ENTER at the "Voice =" prompt to set the keyboard voice to "off." Nothing you type from this point on will be sent to your synthesizer. Your screen, however, will speak normally, as will your interactive hot keys, such as the CTRL-L line review and your ten ALT-0 through ALT-9 screen windows. Are you ready to turn your keyboard voice back on? It's as simple as entering Vocal-Eyes' Voice Control Panel and pressing ENTER at the Voice On/Off prompt in the keyboard submenu. 4.5.2: SPEECH RATE, PITCH, TONE, VOLUME AND PUNCTUATION Options 2 through 6 of the Keyboard submenu will undoubtedly look familiar to you. They are the same options that you worked with earlier in the Screen submenu. As you will recall, we mentioned then that Vocal- Eyes offers the ability to set the screen and keyboard voices to different rates of speech, pitch and volume, as well as to different levels of punctuation voicing. Notice that many of the punctuation settings have been preset to different values than they were in the screen punctuation submenu. You probably won't want to hear every mark of punctuation that appears on your screen. You probably will want to hear them as you type them, however. With Vocal-Eyes' two separate screen and keyboard voices, you can hear exactly what you want to hear when you want to hear it. Feel free to set these options to your liking. 4.5.3: SPECIAL KEYS VOICING There are many "special" keys that you may or may not want to hear announced. With Vocal-Eyes you can pick and choose as you like. Cursor down to option 7 "Special Keys" in the Keyboard submenu. Press ENTER. You will now be presented with a second, nested submenu describing the various sets of special keys whose voicing you can turn on or off. Below is a list with descriptions. 1: Function Keys - This switch instructs Vocal-Eyes whether or not to voice the function keys F1 to F10 or from F1 to F12, depending on the layout of your keyboard. If this is on and you press the F5 key, Vocal- Eyes will speak "F5." The default is off. 2: Toggle Keys - This switch instructs Vocal-Eyes whether or not to voice the various toggle keys, including the CAPS LOCK, NUM LOCK, INSERT and SCROLL LOCK keys. The default is on. Although INSERT is included in this group, Vocal-Eyes will not speak the current state of the insert key. Each program handles the status of the insert key differently. It is impossible for Vocal-Eyes to know if you are in insert or over type with 100% certainty. Therefore, Vocal-Eyes will simply say 'INSERT' when the insert key is pressed assuming this option has been enabled. 3: Cursor Movement - This switch instructs Vocal-Eyes whether or not to voice the cursor movement keys, including the UP, DOWN, LEFT and RIGHT ARROW keys as well as HOME, PAGE UP, PAGE DOWN, DELETE and END keys. The default is off. 4: Key Enhancements - This switch instructs Vocal-Eyes whether or not to voice the key enhancements, such as the SHIFT, ALT and CTRL keys. The default is off. 5: Escape and 6: Enter - These switches instruct Vocal-Eyes whether or not to voice the ESCAPE and ENTER keys respectively. Both default to off. A NOTE ON THE CAPS LOCK KEY: Whenever you have the CAPS LOCK key enabled, you can disable it briefly in order to type a few lower case letters by pressing either of the SHIFT keys. Vocal-Eyes will alert you whenever you press a SHIFT key with the CAPS LOCK key engaged by sounding a brief tone for each character typed. This should prevent you from accidentally forgetting to disable the CAPS LOCK key and typing words with lower case beginnings and upper case endings. We are sure this will save you at some point. Feel free to try this to hear what the tone sounds like. You must exit the menus, make sure the CAPS LOCK key is enabled and press a letter while holding the shift key down. 4.5.4: VOICING OF CAPITAL LETTERS Option 8 from the keyboard submenu allows you to select what to do when an upper case letter is typed from the keyboard. Vocal-Eyes offers three different ways of alerting you that a capital letter has been typed: Pitch, tone and "Say cap." The default "Pitch" option causes Vocal-Eyes to voice capital letters in a slightly higher pitch than normal text. Select "Tone" and you will hear a brief tone every time a capital letter is entered from your PC's keyboard. Selecting "Say Cap" will cause Vocal-Eyes to actually voice the word "Cap" before any capital letter you type. Of course you can always choose not to be alerted about capital letters. To do this, simply select the "Undefined" option from the Capitals rotary menu. 4.5.5: KEY CLICK OFF/ON Let's say you've turned the keyboard voice off. You don't want to hear each letter, number or punctuation mark as you type them. Still, you'd like some confirmation as you type along that the keys are being pressed hard enough. Here's where the Key Click option comes in handy. Move down to this option in the keyboard submenu and toggle it to the "On" position. Now, use the ESCAPE key or ALT-X to return you to your work. Notice that as you press each key a faint click is generated. 4.5.6: INTERRUPTABILITY Now we come to one of the most useful of Vocal-Eyes' many keyboard voice features: Interruptability. This is controlled by option 10 in the keyboard submenu. We first discussed interruptability back in SECTION 3 of this manual when we got Vocal-Eyes up and running. You will recall from our discussion that this feature allows you to stop the voicing of any character, line, sentence, paragraph or screen by simply pressing any key on your PC's keyboard. We showed you how interruptability helped Vocal-Eyes to keep up with fast typists, and how it helped you silence unwanted speech. unfortunately, however, not all speech synthesizers can handle the heavy work load required by this feature. Your synthesizer may not handle interruptability well. It may start to squawk or hiccup. If this happens, you may wish to use the Interruptability option on the Keyboard menu to turn Interruptability off. With Interruptability turned off, Vocal-Eyes will voice each and every character you type in turn, and it will read any line, sentence, paragraph or screen in its entirety before moving on to the next unit of text to be voiced. Vocal-Eyes will voice each textual unit in turn. Pressing a key will simply add more text into the cue of text to be voiced. But what if, say, you've pressed one of your ALT-0 through ALT-9 read screen hot keys. You've got the information you want, but there's still a lot of your screen waiting to be voiced. Is there any way you can "interrupt" the voicing the way you can by pressing any key with Interruptability turned on? Yes, as a matter of fact there is. It's done via the CTRL-X Momentary Silence hot key. Try this. Cursor down to the Interruptability option and press ENTER four times to turn this feature off. Now, press ESCAPE enough times to return you to DOS or your applications program. Or type ALT-ESCAPE or ALT-X once to "express" exit the Voice Control Panel. Use one of your ALT-0 through ALT-9 read screen hot keys to start the voicing of text. Press the CTRL-X momentary Silence hot key. Did your text stop voicing? How fast did it stop? Different synthesizers will respond differently to the CTRL-X Momentary Silence hot key. Some, such as the Sounding Board, will respond immediately. Others may take a character or two, or produce a "hiccupping" sound when CTRL-X is pressed. There are other times when Interruptability might actually get in your way. Say your working in your word processor, reading your text line by line with the DOWN ARROW key. You wouldn't want Vocal-Eyes to silence the reading of each line if all you've done is press the DOWN ARROW key to read the next line. This is why you have been supplied with five options at the Interruptability prompt: Off, All Keys, Cursor Keys Off, Cursor Keys only, and Control or ALT. With a setting of Off, as we stated above, Vocal-Eyes' interruptability feature is completely disabled. No keys will interrupt, though of course you can use the CTRL-X momentary silence key at any time to silence voice output. The "All Keys" option turns Interruptability on for all keys. This is the default setting. If you wish to silence the voice without issuing a keystroke to your application, press either the SHIFT or CONTROL keys. Since these keys do nothing by themselves, they make an excellent choice for silencing the speech. Once you use a system which does not offer this easy silence, you will really appreciate what Vocal-Eyes takes for granted. The "Cursor Keys Off," selection, on the contrary, turns Interruptability on for all keys except the four arrow keys. These keys will not silence the speech when they are pressed. Thus you can cursor ahead in your text without the fear of missing anything important. The "Cursor Keys Only" is the opposite of the cursor keys off option. Cursor keys only means exactly that-- only the four arrow keys will silence the voice. The "Control or ALT" option gives you the ease of pressing a single key to silence the speech. These keys normally do nothing to the underlying applications program. Selecting this option will allow you to press either control or ALT key to silence the speech. The SHIFT key has purposely been excluded from this option. This is because as you type, the SHIFT key is likely to be pressed as part of your normal text. However, the Control and ALT keys are normally only used for commands. Note: The silence hot key, which defaults to CTRL-X, can only be used if interruptability is set to off or Cursor Keys Only. If you have it set to any of the other options, the silence hot key will be completely undefined. This means if you press CTRL-X, it will go through to the application. If you think about this, it makes sense. Why press CTRL-X to silence the speech with interruptability when all you need to press is the CONTROL key by itself. Okay, lets say you are listening to a large file being displayed on the screen. You know what you really want to hear is not for a couple pages yet. Why not silence the speech? You might be saying, "how do I turn it back on?" Well, the speech can be toggled on and off. For example, lets say you silenced the speech by pressing the CONTROL key assuming interruptability is on. Simply press the CONTROL key again and the voice will start up at the new location, skipping all text between the time you silenced the voice and the instant you turned it back on. The same is true if you have interruptability turned off and you silenced the speech with the silence hot key CTRL-X. Simply press CTRL-X again and, as before, the speech will start up again. You can toggle the speech on and off as many times as you like. This can be a very handy way of skipping through large passages of text. Lets go through one more scenario. Say you have issued the DOS DIR (directory) command. You heard the entry you were looking for so you silenced the speech. But now, how do you know when the directory has been completed. You could toggle the speech on and off every so often but this might not be acceptable. If you silence the speech, as soon as DOS or your application program is ready for more keyboard input, Vocal- Eyes will issue a blip tone indicating to you that the text is finished being displayed so you can type your next command. Give it a try. Issue the DOS DIR command and as soon as it starts to speak, silence the voice. Now listen for the blip tone. As soon as you hear it, you can assume DOS is finished displaying the directory to the screen and it is ready for your next command. 4.5.7: WORD MODE OFF/ON Perhaps you'd prefer to hear what you're typing word by word. Easy enough. Simply enter the Keyboard submenu and cursor down to the Word Mode option. Press ENTER to toggle on the feature. Press ESCAPE several times or ALT-X once to return to DOS or your applications program. Notice that now when you type you don't hear anything until you reach a space, a mark of punctuation, or until you press ENTER or any of the various cursor keys. Then you hear the word you've just typed. Try word processing with this feature enabled. When you enable Word Mode, you may also want to disable the space from speaking in the keyboard punctuation menu. Naturally, Interruptability has no affect on text voiced in word Mode. That is to say those keys on the standard keyboard will not silence the speech. However, all the other keys will act as they always did. For example, the shift key will not silence the speech since it is used in your normal typing but the control key will silence the speech. So will the function keys and all cursoring keys. You sort of have the best of both worlds. You can type as fast as you like. Vocal-Eyes will say each word without interruption. 4.6: MOVING AROUND IN THE MENUS As you already know, you can use the four arrow keys to move up and down the menus. Those of you who would rather leave your hands on the home row, can use the SPACE BAR to switch to the next higher selection or the BACKSPACE to switch to the previous selection. This is great, especially at first when you are learning all the options. However, as time goes on and you start remembering exactly where certain options are located, you can jump directly to an entry. For example from the main menu, regardless of which option is currently under the cursor, you can jump to the screen menu by typing the corresponding number followed by ENTER. This is why each entry has a number preceding its name. You can do this any time during your visit to the Voice Control Panel. Just type in the number of the menu option you want and then press ENTER. You will be moved directly to that option. If the option is a toggle or rotor option and you have moved to it by typing the number and pressing ENTER, Vocal-Eyes will move you to the option but it will not change the setting. This way, you can very quickly move to an option to see how it is currently set. If the option is not a toggle or rotor option and you type the entry number followed by ENTER, Vocal-Eyes will move to the option and execute it as if you manually moved there and pressed ENTER. For example, from the main menu if you type 6ENTER, the files menu will be displayed. You could have also cursored to the option and pressed ENTER. The easiest way to remember if Vocal-Eyes will simply move to the entry or move to and execute the entry is to consider whether or not the entry contains an = (equal sign). For example, the entry 'Voice = On' contains an equal sign so Vocal-Eyes would not toggle the entry but it would move to it and read the default setting. Let's say you are at the main menu and you want to toggle the Key Click option from Off to On. First you would need to get into the Voice Control Panel by pressing CTRL-\. Then you need to get into the Keyboard submenu by pressing 2ENTER. Since option 9 is the Key Click option, you need to press 9ENTER to move to the option and one more ENTER to actually toggle the option. At this point, the option will toggle to the next state (On in our example.) There is another handy feature which was mentioned briefly. This is the express exit command. If you are in the menus and want to get out, you could of course press ESCAPE the required number of times. However, why not simply press ALT-X? You could for example be in the punctuation submenu which is off of the Screen submenu which is off of the main menu. To exit the menus completely, it would require you to press ESCAPE three times. Why not press ALT-X and exit with one key stroke? Those of you who have the enhanced 101-key Keyboard and whose systems support its abilities can also press ALT-ESCAPE. This works exactly as ALT-X. Use whichever keystroke you feel most comfortable with. 4.7: RESETTING MENU OPTIONS TO A KNOWN STATE There is one more key which is handled specially while in the Voice Control Panel. This is the DELETE key. If you press the DELETE key while on a toggle or rotary option, it will reset it to a known state. For example, pressing DELETE while at the Interruptability option which is off of the Keyboard submenu, will always set this option to All keys. You can simply give the DELETE a try to see what the value will be reset to. You can always use ENTER to toggle back to the original setting. If you press DELETE on an option which is not a toggle or rotary, it will act just as if you had pressed the ENTER key. The ability to set a toggle option to a known state is very important if you plan on using macros with Vocal-Eyes.