SECTION SEVEN VOCAL-EYES' FIFTY SCREEN WINDOWS 7.1: INTRODUCTION In previous sections of this manual we briefly touched on the concept of screen windows. We told you Vocal-Eyes allowed for up to fifty windows to be defined by you, the user, and we showed you how you could read the first ten windows by pressing and holding down the ALT key and then pressing one of the window numbers zero to nine. We also showed you how to read any of the fifty windows by using the any window hot key. Once you press this hot key, Vocal-Eyes prompts for the window to read. At this point, you can type a window number from zero to forty-nine and press ENTER. Once you press ENTER, Vocal-Eyes will voice the specified window. Thus far, of course, all fifty of your windows have been preset to read your entire twenty-five--line screen display. That is unless you are using our predefined WordPerfect environment. Well, having fifty windows that all work exactly the same way doesn't sound very useful, does it? Vocal-Eyes allows you the option of redefining each of these fifty windows to read any text block from a single character up to and including your entire PC screen. In this section of your Vocal-Eyes users' guide we will begin by showing you how to select and define any of Vocal-Eyes' fifty user definable screen windows. We'll introduce you to the concept of the "current screen window," and we'll show you how to select and re-select windows in accordance with your ever-changing needs. After that we'll discuss the four different types of windows: Speak windows, Silent windows, Float windows and Neutral windows. We'll explain the differences between the various window types, and demonstrate the unique usefulness of each as you continue to integrate Vocal-Eyes into your voice computing environment. Vocal-Eyes actually treats the first ten windows (zero through nine) a bit differently than it does windows ten through forty-nine. The first ten windows are called the standard windows and windows ten through forty-nine are call the extended windows. Actually, Vocal-Eyes offers an additional ten windows (A-J) known as the hyperactive windows. The hyperactive windows, however, will be discussed later in section 13. In this section we will discuss the standard and extended windows. 7.2: STANDARD WINDOWS ZERO THROUGH NINE The standard windows, zero through nine, have definite advantages over the remaining forty windows (ten through forty-nine) known as the extended windows. The following subsections will discuss in detail what the standard windows can do for you and how to set them. 7.2.1: SELECTING AND DEFINING THE STANDARD WINDOWS Press and release the ALT key by itself to take you into Vocal-Eyes' Review Mode. Now, press the F8 key located either at the top or along the left edge of your PC's keyboard. Vocal-Eyes will announce your current window, which for now is Window zero. After that it reports the read type of the window. The current read type for Window zero is "Speak," but more about that later. Following the read type, Vocal-Eyes reports the read coordinates for Window zero. Notice that Window zero has been preset to read the entire screen: everything from column one of screen line one to column eighty of screen line twenty-five. Another way of saying this is that Screen Window zero is defined to read all eighty columns of all twenty-five lines of your screen. Finally, Vocal-Eyes voiced the status of hyperactive window A. Section Thirteen will discuss hyperactive windows in detail. Now press ALT-F8 and listen while Vocal-Eyes reports the definitions for all ten screen windows. Notice that, except for the fact that Window zero has been set to "Speak," and all others have been left Neutral, all ten are exactly the same. Each has been preset to read all eighty columns of the standard twenty-five-line PC display screen. Consequently, pressing any window's command key from ALT-0 through ALT-9 should cause Vocal-Eyes to read the entire window, which is exactly what happens. Would you like to try your hand at changing one of your window definitions? Let's say, for example, that you're using WordPerfect, a very popular word processing program that always displays status information- -document name, page, line and column position--on the twenty-fifth screen line. You'd like to be able to read the entire text screen, which is to say everything on lines one through twenty-four but not line twenty- five. Let's define Window eight to do precisely that. Are you currently in Review Mode? If not, press your Review Mode command key to get you there now. Press the F3 key. Did you hear it say "Select Window Number?" Vocal-Eyes is asking which window you'd like to define. Let's define Window eight. Press the 8 key on the top row of your PC's keyboard. Vocal-Eyes will respond: "Window eight." Press the F8 key. Remember before when we pressed this key Vocal-Eyes responded by providing us with the read type and coordinates of Window zero. What happened this time? This time Vocal-Eyes provided us with similar information for Window eight, our currently selected window. Notice, it also gave us the status of hyperactive window A as before. Do this. Press the F4 key. Vocal-Eyes will respond: "Window eight - neutral -Left column number : 1." This number represents the column number of the upper left hand corner of Window eight. Our WordPerfect window should begin reading at the first screen column, so we'll accept this value as is by simply pressing ENTER. As soon as you pressed ENTER Vocal-Eyes responded: "Top line number : one." This number represents the uppermost screen line in Window eight. This is the correct value for our WordPerfect window, so again we'll press ENTER. Vocal-Eyes next announces the column number of the right edge of our screen window as column eighty. We want our WordPerfect window to read all the way to column eighty, so once again we'll press ENTER. Finally, Vocal-Eyes announces a bottom line number of twenty-five. But, as we've already mentioned, our WordPerfect status line is on line twenty-five, and we don't want that line to voice as part of Window eight. The lowest screen line we want to hear is line twenty-four. So, go ahead and type 24 now and then press ENTER. There--you've just redefined Window eight. Press the F8 key to hear your new window coordinates read back to you. Press the ALT-8 command key to hear the first twenty-four lines of your PC's screen read to you. Notice that Vocal-Eyes stops at line twenty- four. Line twenty-five isn't a part of Window eight. NOTE: You may have used the Voice Control Panel's command key submenu to reassign the command keys that read any or all of Vocal- Eyes' ten user definable windows. Or, you may be using our pre-defined WP.SET file which we provided on your Vocal-Eyes master disk. In our discussions here, however, we shall continue to use the default values, ALT-0 through ALT-9, for the sake of consistency. But wait a minute. What if you want to read your WordPerfect status line? Well, why not set a second window to read that line only? Here's how. Are you still in Review Mode? Press F3 to select a new window. We'll type 9 to select window nine. Press F4 to begin the definition process. Press ENTER to accept the default value of column one for the left edge of your window. Now, instead of pressing ENTER a second time to accept line one as the upper edge of our window, first type in the number twenty-five and then press ENTER. Press ENTER twice more to accept column eighty and line twenty-five for the right and bottom edges of our window. Press F8 if you like to verify that the changes were made. Now, press your ALT-9 read Window nine command key. Now, when you're working in WordPerfect, you can press ALT-8 to read the first twenty-four lines of text or ALT-9 to read your WordPerfect status line. Of course, you can still use your "read window" hot keys to read windows zero through seven. Naturally, you are not limited to creating windows at the top and bottom of your PC's screen display. You can mark out any size rectangle from a single character on up by simply noting the column and line coordinates of the upper left and lower right edges of the rectangle and then entering the coordinates as the four choices in the F4 Define Window key. You could, for instance, define a window to read only the middle of your screen by selecting a window via the F3 key and then entering values such as twenty for the left column, 5 for the top row, sixty for the right column and twenty for the bottom row. Go ahead and practice defining a few windows. Leave Window zero alone for the moment, as we'll have a lot more to say about this window later in this section. 7.2.2: ANOTHER WAY TO DEFINE STANDARD SCREEN WINDOWS Suppose you want to define a window that will allow you to use your ALT-9 command key to read a menu that appears in the lower right-hand corner of your screen. The menu always appears in exactly the same screen location, only you're not sure of the exact coordinates. You could enter Review Mode and navigate around with your cursor keys until you find the edges of your desired window and then use your space bar to ascertain the column and row numbers and then use these coordinates to fill in the prompts at the F4 Define Window key. There's an easier way to do this, though. Try this. Enter Review Mode and use the F3 key to select a window to define. For this example, lets use window 9 (Remember, we're leaving Window zero undisturbed for now). Now use your cursor keys, or any of your read command keys, to move your cursor to where you want to place the upper left-hand corner of your new window. Press the F5 key. Did you hear Vocal-Eyes say "Upper left?" There-- with one keystroke you have defined the left column and top row of your new window. Use your cursor keys to move down and to the right until you reach the lower right-hand corner of your desired window. Now press the F6 key and listen as Vocal-Eyes responds: "Bottom right." You've just defined Window 9. Press the F8 key if you'd like to verify what you've done. Press ALT-9 and listen as your program's menu is voiced. Perhaps you made a mistake. Perhaps you meant to include one additional screen line at the bottom of your window. Does this mean you have to redefine the entire window? Not at all. You could press the F4 key and make the changes. But what if you wanted to move the review cursor to the new bottom right and press F6? Go ahead and try it. What happened? When you try and move down past the last line of your current window, Vocal-Eyes simply beeps at you. Its saying you can't go beyond your defined window. There is a way around this however. You can press F2 if you wish to temporarily switch to the full screen. This key will be discussed more in detail later in this section. For now, when you press F2, Vocal-Eyes will say "Full Screen." You are now free to cursor anywhere you want. When you get the cursor to the new bottom right, press F2 again. This time, Vocal-Eyes will say "Window nine." It has switched back but your cursor is still where you want it. Now simply press F6 to set the new bottom right. Now that you know a bit about what the F2 command key does, what would happen if you tried to move the cursor above the current top left setting and press F6 to set the bottom right? Or the other way, what if you moved the cursor below the current bottom right and pressed F5 to set the top left? Well, Vocal-Eyes will not let you do that. It will simply say "Invalid Window Setting" and ignore the command. Also, if you press the F4 command key to type in the coordinates directly, you must enter valid corners. For example, you cannot have a left column number of ten and a right column number of five. Nor could you have a top line of fifteen and a bottom line of three. If you attempt to make an invalid setting, Vocal-Eyes will beep and place you back at the Left column number prompt. You must correct the problem before you can exit these settings. 7.2.3: THE STANDARD SELECTED "ACTIVE" WINDOW Now that you've defined a window to read a small corner of your PC's display, you've probably noticed that many of your read command keys are no longer functioning like you think they should. They may not voice the information you expect, or perhaps they don't seem to be working at all. Here's why. Earlier, when you entered Review Mode and pressed F3 to select Window 9, you actually did two things. First, you alerted Vocal-Eyes that you wanted to redefine Window 9. Second, you instructed Vocal-Eyes to make Window 9 the "active" window. With Window 9 the current active window, Vocal-Eyes now looks at the tiny rectangle you defined as Window 9 as though it were your entire PC screen--at least as far as your various read command keys are concerned. If your applications cursor happens to lie within this window, your read character, word, line, sentence or paragraph command keys will work so long as there is indeed a character, word, line, sentence or paragraph inside Window 9 to be read. If there isn't, or if your applications cursor lies somewhere outside your active Window nine, then Vocal-Eyes may not have anything to read and pressing one of your read command keys may produce unexpected results. Of course all of your read window command keys will still function just as you'd expect them to. Your CTRL-L read line command key may only read left to right from the side edges of your currently active window, but pressing ALT-0, for instance, will still instruct Vocal-Eyes to voice your entire PC screen display assuming window zero is setup for the full screen. At first glance this may not seem entirely logical, but consider the following: Certain applications programs tend to display their menus along the left- hand edge of your PC's screen. Naturally, when working with such a program, one of the first things you'd want to do would be to define a screen window that would contain the entire work area but not the part of the screen that contains the menus. This would be your active window, since most of the time your cursor would reside somewhere within its boundaries. Now, say you're editing a line of text or data. You'd like to hear the line read back to you, so you press your read line command key. What would you prefer happen at this point? A: Vocal-Eyes reads the entire screen line, both the portion of the line that contains your work and also the part of the line that cuts through your menu, or B: Vocal-Eyes reads only the portion of your current line which lies within your currently active window; i.e., your text only. Here's another example. Let's say you're working with WordPerfect. You've defined a window to read the first 24 screen lines, and you've made this your active window. Now, you've got a full screen of text you're working with. Your cursor is down near the bottom of your screen. You'd like to hear your current paragraph, so you press your read current paragraph command key. Now, do you want WordPerfect's status line information, which is displayed on screen line 25, to be voiced as part of your current paragraph? Certainly not. And since you've chosen an active window that doesn't include line 25 it won't be. So how do you make a window "active?" Just enter Review Mode, press F3 and then press the number of the window from zero through nine that you want made active. Pressing F3 and then a number from zero through nine was also the first step in redefining a window, you will recall. If you want to switch the active window but you don't want to have to go into review each time, you can use the "Select Window" hot key. If you look at option sixty in the Hot Keys submenu, you will notice this function has been set to undefined. If you wish, assign this command a key. Maybe ALT-W? Use whatever you wish so long as it does not conflict with one of the other hot keys or with one of your applications hot keys. Now, whether you are in review mode or not, pressing the key will instruct Vocal-Eyes to ask you what window to switch to. As we said before, this works exactly like the F3 key in Review Mode. What if you didn't want the window you created to read your program's menu to be made active. You just wanted it there handy whenever you wanted to hear your menu voiced via the ALT-9 read window command key. The window you created to contain your work is actually Window one. That's the window you want active. So go ahead. Make window one active now by pressing F3 or pressing the Select Window hot key if you assigned it a keystroke, and then press one. You can make any window active anytime you like. All you have to do is enter Review Mode, press F3 and then press the number of the window you want made active. Or, as we said before, whether you are in Review Mode or not simply press the Select Window hot key followed by a number zero through nine indicating the desired window. Also, if you are in Review Mode when you select a different window, Vocal-Eyes will move the Review cursor to the last location it was when the window you selected was last used. In other words, each time you switch to a different window, Vocal-Eyes first saves the current Review cursor position with your current window. It then activates the selected window and gets the new cursor position for that window. This can be very handy if you are switching back and forth between windows but you want your cursor to remain where it was for each of the windows when you switch back to them. Here are a few more things to keep in mind regarding the currently active window. First, if your currently active window contains less than the full screen, any time you enter Review Mode you will still be confined to the same window. For example, if your active window is limited to the first 24 lines of your PC's screen and you enter Review Mode, striking CTRL-PgDn or CTRL-DOWN ARROW will move you to the bottom left-hand corner of your currently active window, which in this case would be column 1 of line 24. If your currently active window begins at column twenty-five, then pressing 10CTRL-C would move you to the tenth column on the screen, not the tenth column of the window. Each of the character, word, line, sentence and paragraph commands are relative to the full screen regardless of the current active window settings. If you need to be able to access the entire screen display, you can do one of two things: You can select another window to be the currently active window, one which contains the full eighty-column twenty-five-line display. Or, as we mentioned briefly before, you can simply press the F2 key from within Vocal-Eyes' Review Mode. Pressing this key causes Vocal-Eyes to toggle back and forth between a full screen display and your current window. Thus if your currently active window is Window one, pressing F2 once will toggle you to a full screen display and then pressing it again will reestablish Window one as your active window. If you leave Review Mode while still toggled to the full screen, Vocal-Eyes will automatically switch back to the selected window. By default, as we just mentioned, Vocal-Eyes will confine your movements to the coordinates of the active window. You can switch back and forth between the active window and the full screen by pressing F2. If you wish, you can tell Vocal-Eyes to do the exact opposite. This would mean whenever you enter Review mode, the full screen will be active instead of the currently selected window. You can still press F2 to toggle between the two but the default is the full screen. You can even tell Vocal-Eyes to make either the full screen or the currently selected window active based on what you last used when you exited Review mode. Therefore, you have three choices as to what window should be active when you enter Review mode -- Current Window, Full Screen, and Previous Setting. The setting is made in the General menu. You can enter the menus by pressing CTRL-\. Now move to the General option and press ENTER. Move down to option eight-- Review Window. Pressing ENTER will rotor among the three options. Lets examine each option individually. Current Window: When you enter review mode, the currently selected window will constrain your movements and readings. Full Screen: This option will always give you the full screen when you enter review mode. This would be like entering review mode and pressing F2 for the full screen. Previous Setting: When you exit review mode, Vocal-Eyes will remember whether you had the full screen or the selected window active. Then, next time you entered review mode, you will have the same setting. The setting last used in review mode is also saved with the .SET file. So when you load a new .SET file and you enter review mode with option 8 (Review Window) set to Previous Setting, Vocal-Eyes will use the window you last entered review mode before the .SET file was saved. Use whichever of these three settings works best for your environment. Occasionally, an applications program will move your cursor physically off the screen. If this happens and you enter Vocal-Eyes' Review Mode, be advised that your Review cursor will move to the upper left-hand corner of your currently active window or the full screen depending on your setting for the Review Window discussed above. Vocal-Eyes will also voice "Cursor Moved." Also be advised if your applications cursor is outside your currently active window and you enter Review Mode with the currently active window instead of the full screen, you will be limited in your cursor movements. For example, lets say your active window's top left is set at line one column one and the bottom right is set at line ten column eighty. Now lets say your applications cursor is on line twenty-three. When you enter Review Mode, you will not be able to press the down arrow since you are already below the bottom of the current active window. However, you will be able to press the up arrow. Notice that once you move up, you still cannot move back down. Once you get the Review cursor inside the active window, you will be limited only by its coordinates. This all may sound more complicated then it is. The more you use Vocal-Eyes, the more you will understand all the intricacies. Occasionally, in Review Mode, you may wish to read the currently active window. Only you've forgotten exactly which window that is. You can do one of two things here. You can press F8, at which time Vocal-Eyes will announce the currently active window and its various parameters. Or, alternatively, you could press the F9 key. The F9 key is the "Read Current Window" key. It works anytime in Review Mode, no matter where on the screen your cursor is located or whichever of the ten windows is active. When you save your .SET file either in the RAM locations or on disk, Vocal-Eyes will save which window you had active when it was saved. That way, when you load a .SET file back in, Vocal-Eyes will make the same window active which was active when you saved the .SET file. This will give you even more control. The more you use Vocal-Eyes, the more you will appreciate this feature. 7.2.4: THE "SPEAK" WINDOW Before proceeding further, we need to go back for a second to discuss the way DOS and various application programs display their information on your PC's screen. You may recall from Section 3 of this manual that DOS and many other programs use the DOS screen service to write, or display, their information onto your screen. We told you that this type of program would talk interactively, which is to say anything that is sent to the screen would automatically be sent to your speech synthesizer for voicing. We gave you an example of this type of "interactive" display with the DOS DIR "list directory" command. We'll try some things with window types that will help to demonstrate this concept. Why not return to DOS for the moment so you can follow along? Enter Vocal-Eyes' Review Mode and press ALT-F8. Recall that this key calls up a listing of the first ten of your Vocal-Eyes windows along with their screen coordinates. Notice also that nine of the ten windows have a window type of Neutral, whereas Window zero has a window type of "Speak." A "Speak" window is a window that captures and voices everything that is written onto your PC's screen via the DOS screen service. If a program speaks interactively, it probably does so because one of your ten standard windows is a "Speak" Window. Notice that Window zero has been defaulted to include the entire eighty-column twenty-five-line screen display. Consequently, when DOS or another program sends data to your screen through the DOS screen service Vocal-Eyes voices everything sent to your screen immediately as it's sent there. Notice window zero does not have to be the active window for it to speak data. More on this later. Try this. Enter Review Mode and use the F3 key to make Window zero your active window. Now, press the F7 key. Press it several times to rotor through the various window types. Select Silent or Neutral. Exit Review Mode and return to DOS. Now, type DIR. Notice that DOS no longer speaks interactively. What happened? Did Vocal-Eyes prevent DOS from working? Not at all. Use your ALT-0 read Window zero command key to read your screen. See? Everything's there, just as you would expect. What happened when you changed the window type to something other than a "Speak" window was that you instructed Vocal-Eyes to no longer look for data being written to the screen via the DOS screen service. Your interactively speaking program no longer speaks interactively. Of course this can be very easily fixed. Simply enter Review Mode and press the F7 key until it says "Speak." Go ahead, Try it now. Does DOS speak normally again? There will be times when you may not want the entire eighty-column, twenty-five-line display screen to speak interactively. For example, you might want to hear the file names when you type DIR from the DOS prompt but not the files size or date of creation. Here's one way you could accomplish this. Enter Review Mode and use the F3 key to select Window zero as your active window. Press F4 to redefine your window's coordinates. Enter the coordinates 1, 1, 12, 25. Now, exit Review Mode and type the DOS 'DIR' command. What happened? Vocal-Eyes has effectively narrowed the "interactive" display of DOS to include only the left most 12 columns of your screen. Use your ALT-0 read window command key to reread the screen. Notice that this command key also now only reads the left part of your screen. Now lets redefine window zero back to the full screen. Do this by entering review and pressing F4. Enter the coordinates 1, 1, 80, 25. Here's another example. dBXL, the database management program, often displays status information on the top line of your screen. This information has an annoying habit of continually re-voicing itself with each keystroke of data you enter into the program. Why not redefine your "Speak" window to exclude this line? dBXL will still speak interactively, it just won't include screen line one as part of the fun. One final example. Suppose you're working with a program that displays important information in the top and bottom thirds of your screen, but a lot of unnecessary clutter in the middle third. You could define two "Speak" windows: one with coordinates to read the top third of your screen and another with coordinates to read the bottom third. Vocal-Eyes will allow you to define as many "Speak" windows as you like. Keep in mind, however, that should you define two "Speak" windows to read the top and bottom thirds of your PC's screen but inadvertently leave a third "Speak" window defined to read the entire screen, Vocal-Eyes will wind up voicing your entire screen display. Vocal-Eyes won't voice anything twice just because you've got two "Speak" windows that overlap, but it will combine all of your "Speak" windows and voice everything inside the largest possible boundaries. 7.2.5: THE "SILENT" WINDOW There's another way you could have instructed Vocal-Eyes to voice only the top and bottom thirds of your interactively speaking program display. You could have done it by employing what's known as a "Silent" window. A "Silent" window is pretty much what it sounds like. Think of "Silent" windows as pieces of dark paper you can cut to size and attach to the front of your PC's screen in order to block out part of the display. Say, for example, you're working with that program we mentioned in the last topic that fills the middle third of your screen with a lot of unnecessary punctuation and graphic characters. As we mentioned before, you could create two "Speak" windows, one to read the top third of the screen and a second to read the bottom third. But here's another way to accomplish the same thing. Enter Review Mode and Select a window to make "Silent." For our example we'll use Window one. Now, press F7 until you've rotored to the "Silent" option. Press F4 to begin the window definition. Enter 1 for the left column number and 8 for the top line number. Enter 80 for the right column number and 16 for the bottom line number. There--you've just defined a "Silent" window to block out the middle third of your PC's screen. Exit Review Mode and try using your program. What happened? Oops! Something must have gone wrong, because our entire screen is still voicing interactively. Here's what happened. If you recall, Window zero is our "Speak" window, while Window one is our "Silent" window. Now, Vocal-Eyes always consults its windows from lowest to highest: i.e., from Window zero through Window nine. Window zero was the first window Vocal- Eyes consulted. It said to read everything from top to bottom. Window one said not to read the middle third of the screen, but since window zero fit the criteria first, Vocal-Eyes did what it said and stopped looking at the other windows. In other words, you told Vocal-Eyes not to speak lines 8-16 after the fact. Here's what needs to be done to make our example work properly. Our "Speak" window needs to be moved to a window with a higher number than our "Silent" window. You can do this in two steps. First, Press F3 and select Window zero. Press F7 twice to turn this window into a "Neutral" window. Now, press F3 again and select any window with a number higher than 1. We'll choose Window nine, in case there turn out to be other portions of the screen we'd like to silence. Press F7 enough times to turn Window nine into a "Speak" window. Press F8 to hear the window definition. Is Window 9 a full screen window? If it is, then you're done. If it isn't, press F4 at this point and redefine the window with the coordinates: 1, 1, 80, 25. Exit Review Mode and try your program again. Congratulations--this time it worked perfectly! You can block out, or make "silent" any portion of your screen that can be defined with a "Silent" window. You can create several such windows to silence as many different portions of your screen as necessary. Remember, however, that "Silent" windows will only work if two things are happening: 1: Your program is one that speaks interactively. 2: Your "Silent" windows are placed ahead of your "Speak" full window. "Silent" windows have no effect whatsoever on the ALT-0 through ALT-9 read screen command keys. Our example "Silent" window will block out the center third of the screen when the program is displaying its information interactively, but if you use the ALT-9 command key to reread the screen what you'll hear will be the entire contents of window nine. Likewise you could, if you liked, use your ALT-1 command key to read the portion of your screen you made "silent." The read screen command keys will always read the entire defined window, and they will work no matter what window "type" you have selected. 7.2.6: THE "NEUTRAL" WINDOW A "Neutral" window will not voice automatically like a "Speak" window will when used with DOS or some other voice interactive program. Nor will a "Neutral" window block out a portion of the screen display, as will a "Silent" window when it's placed numerically ahead of a "Speak" window. A "Neutral" window is, well, sort of neutral. Set a window to "Neutral" when: 1. You don't want to make the window speak interactively. You would use a "Speak" window to do that. 2. You don't want your window to block a portion of the interactive "Speak" window. You would use a "Silent" window to do that. Now, to sum up what we've learned thus far about window types: 1. Use a "Speak" window for DOS or other programs that use DOS screen service to display their information. A "Speak" window will speak interactively, but you can also use your read window command key to reread the window. 2. Use a "Silent" window to block out a portion of the "Speak" window. Remember, though, that , if your windows overlap, your "Silent" window must be in front of, which is to say it must have a lower number than, your "Speak" window. 3. A "Neutral" window has no effect on neither the "Silent" nor the "Speak" window. You must always use a command key, or the F9 key from within Review Mode, to read a "Neutral" window. 4. "Speak" and "Silent" windows only operate as described when you are working in DOS or other applications software that uses DOS screen service for video display. In software that does not use DOS screen service, silent and speak windows effectively become "Neutral" windows. To make these programs talk you must either a.) use your ALT-0 through ALT-9 read screen command keys, or B.) make use of Vocal-Eyes' special "Hyperactive" windows. Hyperactive windows will be discussed in section 13. 7.2.7: ONE MORE LOOK AT STANDARD WINDOW PRECEDENCE As we said above, the order you define your windows is very important. The idea behind how to setup your windows can be a bit tricky. After reading this section, we hope you will fully understand how to most efficiently setup your windows. Remember we are assuming you are using an applications program which sends its output through the standard DOS services. If you are using an applications program which writes directly to the screen buffer, such as WordPerfect, it really doesn't matter how you setup your windows. All speak and silent windows will work as if they had been setup as neutral. Lets look at what Vocal-Eyes does when it receives a character being displayed on the screen through the standard DOS services. Vocal-Eyes first gets the cursor position of where the character was printed. It then starts looking at window zero. If window zero is set to neutral or float (we will talk more about float windows later), it will not even be considered. Vocal-Eyes will immediately skip to window one and start the check over. Assuming window zero is set to either speak or silent, Vocal- Eyes will check to see if the cursor position of the character on the screen falls inside the coordinates specified for window zero. If it does, Vocal- Eyes will then speak the character if window zero was set for speak or not speak the character if window zero was set for silent. At this point, Vocal-Eyes is done. It will not look at the other windows. However, if the cursor position did not fall inside window zero, the entire process is then repeated with window one. This process will continue until a match is found or there are no more windows. If the cursor position does not fall inside any of the ten windows which are either set for speak or silent, Vocal-Eyes will not speak the character. Therefore, you can see how important it is to order your windows in the proper sequence. If you leave window zero set for the full screen and also have it setup to speak, it will not matter how the rest of the windows are setup since every character on a standard eighty-column by twenty- five-line screen will fall into window zero, thereby causing Vocal-Eyes to speak the character and stop searching the other windows. 7.2.8: A BRIEF LOOK AT FLOAT WINDOWS Float windows will be discussed in detail in section 14: Advanced Options. However, we will give you a brief overview of what they are designed for. A float window does exactly what its name implies-- it "floats." There are times when the information you want to hear is not in a fixed location on the screen, Instead, it is positioned relative to something else, such as your cursor. Try following along with another example. Go to DOS and issue the DIR command again. Silence the voice immediately by pressing the CONTROL key. This time you don't want to hear all the files listed, only the total number of files. This information is given at the bottom of the list. How will you get this information? You could go into Vocal-Eyes' REVIEW mode by pressing the ALT key, move up two or three lines, read that line, and then exit REVIEW by pressing the ALT key one last time. This could be a tedious process if you plan to check this information in very many directories. If you knew that all of your directories were long, you could assume that this information would always appear on line twenty-two or twenty-three of your screen (depending on the version of DOS you're using). But what will you do if you sometimes find seventy-five files and sometimes three? The information is always displayed the same distance from your cursor. Hence, a float window is ideal for this situation. The reason the windows are called float is because some of the coordinates float depending on the length and position of the light bar, position of the cursor, or some other feature of the screen (see Section 14 for details). 7.2.9: A FEW MORE WINDOW COMMANDS Here are a few more window commands you may find quite useful at times. Like all other window commands, they are accessed by pressing one of the function keys. Here's what they do. 1: ALT-F3 Pressing this key is similar to pressing the F3 key by itself. Both cause Vocal-Eyes to prompt you for the number of the window you'd like to be made active. The difference is, when you press ALT-F3, Vocal-Eyes will also look at the read status of all ten windows and, except for your "Float" windows, it will cause all ten windows to revert to a "Neutral" setting. Also, it will set the status of the newly selected window to speak regardless of its previous status. Say, for instance, that you have Window 9 defined to read the first 24 screen lines. Additionally, you have Windows 1 and 2 defined as "Silent" windows in order to block out a lot of unnecessary graphic characters that appear on the left and right edge of your screen. Suddenly, your program has flashed to a different screen that uses the entire eighty-column display for important information. You have Window 8 defined to read the entire screen. This window would be perfect for your new program screen, but before you can use it you have to A.) select this window to be your new currently active window, and B.) change the read status on Windows 1, 2 and 9 to "Neutral" so they won't interfere with your Window 8 full screen voicing. You could do this the long way, using the F3 key to select each window in turn and then F7 to rotor the screen type to "Neutral." Or, alternatively, you could simply select your new screen window by using the ALT-F3 key. This key does three things when pressed: First, it allows you to select a new active window. Second, it sets the status of the new window to "speak". Third it rotors the read status of all other windows to "Neutral"--with the exception of any "Float" windows you may have defined. Remember the ALT-F3 key. It may save you a lot of time and trouble. 2: ALT-F7 When pressed, the ALT-F7 key will pop up a box which asks for more specific information about the currently selected window. Some of the options can be defined other places and others can only be defined here. The options are: Status: Window foreground Attribute: Window background Attribute: Window to chain read: Speak and spell: Light bar status: Light bar foreground Attribute: Light bar background Attribute: The status option is the only one we have discussed so far. Pressing F7 can also be used to set the status of the currently selected window. Section 14 will cover each of these options in detail. 7.3: EXTENDED WINDOWS TEN THROUGH FORTY-NINE Windows ten through forty-nine are referred to as the extended windows. The coordinates of these windows can be setup very similarly to the ten standard windows. However, the extended windows do not offer all the features of the standard windows. Basically, the extended windows can only be setup to an area which you want to hear only upon request. Many of the commands you used to setup the standard windows are the same for the extended windows with one exception. All of the keys relating to the extended windows are a control combination. Instead of pressing F3, for example, you would press Control-F3. The same is true for F4, F5, F6, and F8. 7.3.1: SELECTING AND DEFINING EXTENDED WINDOWS Unlike the standard windows, the only reason you will need to select an extended window is so you can setup it's coordinates. Instead of pressing F3, which selects a standard window, you can press Control-F3. After pressing Control-F3, Vocal-Eyes will prompt: Select Extended Window: At this point, you can type a number from ten to forty-nine and press ENTER. If you wish to cancel this command, simply press the ESCAPE key. Assuming you typed a number followed by ENTER, Vocal-Eyes will say: "Window x" where x is the number you selected. Remember, selecting an extended window has nothing to do with selecting a standard window. The currently selected standard window will not be changed simply because you selected a different extended window. The only reason you are selecting an extended window is so Vocal-Eyes knows what extended window to set when you issue the Control-F4, Control-F5 and Control-F6 commands. Once the window is selected, you can now setup its coordinates just like the standard windows except the command is a Control-F4 instead of F4 or Control-F5 and Control-F6 instead of F5 and F6. Lets select window thirty and set its coordinates to columns one to eighty of line twenty-five only. First you must enter review mode by pressing and releasing the ALT key. Now press Control-F3. When Vocal-Eyes prompts for the window number, type 30ENTER. Now that the selected extended window is thirty, you can set its coordinates by pressing Control-F4. Vocal-Eyes will speak "Extended window thirty" followed by the current left column number. At this point you can enter the coordinates exactly as you did for the standard windows when you pressed F4. After you have setup the coordinates, press the any window hot key and type 30ENTER. Vocal-Eyes should have read only line twenty-five which is the domain of window thirty. Remember with the standard windows, you could setup the coordinates by being prompted for each position using F4 or you could move the review cursor to the top left and press F5 and finally move the review cursor to the bottom right and press F6? Well, you can do the same thing with the extended windows only, you guessed it, you use Control-F5 and Control-F6. Once you have selected the extended window, you can setup the coordinates by using the Control-F4 method just described or move the review cursor to the top left of the window and press Control-F5. This will set the top left of the extended window. Now simply move the review cursor to the bottom right and press Control-F6. This will set the bottom right. Feel free to use either method for setting the coordinates of an extended window. 7.3.2: CHECKING THE STATUS OF EXTENDED WINDOWS Vocal-Eyes offers a command which will tell you which of the forty extended windows are being used and which windows are not being used. If the coordinates of the extended window are set up for the full screen, eighty by twenty-five, Vocal-Eyes will consider the window unused. If the window coordinates are anything other than the full screen it will be considered used. Because there are so many extended windows, it would not be practical for Vocal-Eyes to read you the coordinates of all the windows. Go ahead and press Control-F8 in review mode. If you have not modified any of the extended windows, Vocal- Eyes will say "windows ten through forty-nine unused." If however, you have modified window thirty as our example above described, Vocal-Eyes will voice: "windows ten through twenty-nine unused, window thirty used, windows thirty-one through forty-nine unused." Notice how Vocal- Eyes groups the windows into used and unused categories. This way, when you press Control-F8 to read the status of the extended windows, Vocal-Eyes can communicate which ones are used and unused very quickly. If you are still not sure why you would use a standard window over an extended window or vis-versa, section 14 will describe all the features the standard windows can provide. If you simply want to set a window to a particular area and be able to read that area, probably an extended window is fine. If however, you only want to read a particular color in the window or you want to use light bars or chain read a couple windows together, a standard window would be needed as section 14 will show. 7.4: READING A TEMPORARY WINDOW Occasionally, you may wish to read or review a part of the screen without having to go through all of the rigmarole of selecting and defining the window before you can read it. This is where Vocal-Eyes' ability to read a "temporary" window comes in quite handy. Here's how it works. Accessing Vocal-Eyes' temporary window feature is as easy as entering Review Mode and pressing the F10 key. Go ahead and try it now. Vocal- Eyes will prompt you for the left column, top line, right column and bottom line numbers in turn. Type in the desired values, pressing ENTER after each. Or you can simply press ENTER to accept any or all of the current-window default values. After you've entered the bottom line setting and pressed ENTER, Vocal- Eyes will automatically read your temporary window for you. The default settings are set to your current selected window coordinates. If you used the F2 key to toggle to the full screen first, the default values will be the full screen. That's all there is to setting and reading temporary windows.