SECTION NINE A POTPOURRI OF FEATURES 9.1: INTRODUCTION Well, would you believe there's still an entire potpourri of useful features we haven't covered yet? Here they are, in no particular order. 9.2: THE VOICE CONTROL PANEL'S "GENERAL" MENU So far we haven't talked much about the 5: General menu on your Vocal- Eyes Voice Control Panel. Let's do that now. Are you currently in the General submenu? If not, why not use your menu hot key to go there so you can follow along. 9.2.1: VOICE ON/OFF Would you like to turn your keyboard, screen and Review Mode voice all off with a single press of the ENTER key? Perhaps its time to relinquish the PC to your sighted business partner. No need to re-boot and take a chance of losing valuable data. Simply switch off your PC's voice by pressing ENTER at the Voice On/Off prompt. Press ENTER a second time to toggle the voice back on again. If you turn the voice off here, Vocal-Eyes is still running in the background, it's just not speaking anything. If you are handing your machine over to a sighted user, there are actually better ways of disabling Vocal-Eyes. You can for example, remove Vocal-Eyes completely from memory. This would be as if Vocal-Eyes were never loaded. Or, you could issue a command to Vocal-Eyes which would completely disable it. Although Vocal-Eyes would still be in memory, it would be doing absolutely nothing. However, by issuing another command, you can start it right back up. These two methods will be discussed later. 9.2.2: HOT KEYS ON/OFF Occasionally you may wish to disable all of your voice hot keys temporarily. Perhaps you're working for the first time with a new applications program and you want to see what keys control what program functions without having to use your bypass hot key before every keystroke. Or maybe you're sharing your computer with a sighted friend. We just showed you how to turn off all voice features with the General menu's Voice On/Off selection. If you've tried it, however, you may have noticed that even though your voice has been turned off, your hot keys are still active. They just don't talk. Naturally, if you're turning your PC over to a sighted colleague, you'll want to deactivate your hot keys as well as your PC's voice. Pressing ENTER once at the Hot Keys On/Off prompt will turn off all hot keys except two. Can you guess which? That's right. Your menu hot key and your review mode hot key. After all, if you disabled the menu hot key along with all the others how would you ever be able to turn your hot keys back on (actually, there is a way. Simply load another .SET file using the VE /F1FILENAME command.) ? Also, you are still able to enter review mode. You will notice while in review mode, all of your hot keys are active again. Once you exit back to your application, the hot keys will be deactivated. You've probably already guessed how to toggle your hot keys back on. That's right-- simply return to the Hot Keys On/Off prompt and press ENTER again. 9.2.3: CURSOR KEYS ON/OFF This works exactly like the above Hot Keys toggle. Only this option will enable or disable all Cursoring keys. Setting this to off would be like undefining all Cursoring keys. Restoring this back to on will allow all existing Cursoring keys to function as normal. 9.2.4: Cursor Tracking This option brings up a submenu of nine choices. Within this menu you can get very specific as to what Vocal-Eyes should consider as the cursor position. For example, many programs use a particular character printed on the screen as the cursor position instead of the standard PC cursor. They may even use a particular color. You can also get very specific as to what Vocal-Eyes should consider a light bar. All these features are considered more advanced and will therefore not be described in detail here but in section 14. 9.2.5: LIGHT BAR TRACKING ON/OFF/AUTO In the last section, we introduced you to the Light Bar on/off/auto hot key. We showed you how to set this hot key and we spent a lot of time describing how it worked. Sometimes you will be creating .SET files for programs you know use light bars in a way that will require that you keep up with them from the word go. You could start up your program, then use your hot key to turn on light bar tracking. But why not use option five on the General menu to set this feature to start up automatically as soon as your .SET file is loaded? You can still use your light bar tracking hot key to toggle these features anytime you like. Either way will accomplish the same task. However, you can use the menu to set the default mode. Notice if you toggle light bar mode with the hot key, the menu choice changes as well. This is also true if you toggle using the menu option, the hot key toggle will also be effected. To reset the light bar mode, simply cursor down to the appropriate General menu entry and press ENTER to rotor through the three settings. Don't forget to save your .SET file so the changes will be there the next time you use it if you wish. Also, remember each of the standard windows zero through nine not only contains the light bar color but also the light bar mode. Switching to a different window will directly effect the current light bar color and status. 9.2.6: CHARACTER DICTIONARY ON/OFF Vocal-Eyes offers a character dictionary. This feature will be described in section 11. For now, keep this option in mind. You can use it to temporarily disable the current character dictionary. 9.2.7: KEY LABEL DICTIONARY ON/OFF Like the Character dictionary above, Vocal-Eyes also offers a key label dictionary. Again, this feature will be described in section 11. You can use this option to temporarily disable the current key label dictionary. 9.2.8: REVIEW WINDOW This option was described in section seven. It allows you to determine what will happen with your windows by default when you enter REVIEW mode. You have three choices --Current Window, Full Screen, and Previous Setting. Lets examine each individually. Current Window: This will constrain all your cursor movements to the coordinates of the currently selected window when you enter REVIEW mode. Full Screen: This will allow you to cursor around the entire screen regardless of the coordinates of the currently selected window. Previous Setting: This will constrain your cursor movements to the setting last used when you exited review mode. For example, if when you last exited review mode you had the full screen active, it will be the default the next time you enter review. If however, you had the currently selected window active, it will be used when you next enter review mode. Feel free to set this to your personal choice. 9.2.9: SET BELL POSITION Earlier, we promised to show you how to reset Vocal-Eyes' "typewriter" bell to a different column position, or to disable this feature altogether. Well, this is where the Set Bell Position selection on the General menu comes into play. Cursor down to Option 9 on the General menu and press ENTER. You will be prompted for a new column position for your "typewriter" bell. Type in the number from 1 to 99 of the column position where you'd like Vocal-Eyes to beep to alert you that you're near the end of a line. Press ENTER to complete the selection. To disable the bell altogether, simply type a zero for the new column position. What if you don't know the exact position? There is another way to set the bell. In your application, find the place where you want the bell to sound. Enter review mode. If you don't have light bar tracking on, your cursor will stay in the same place and you can simply press ALT-B to set the bell. Vocal-Eyes will respond by saying "bell position set for column xx." That's all there is to setting and disabling Vocal-Eyes' "typewriter" bell. Don't forget to save your settings! 9.2.10: HYPERACTIVE STATUS ON/OFF Since we have not discussed hyperactive windows yet, this feature will not be described until section 13. 9.2.11: ASCII Field Name Separator Remember you could setup a Cursoring key to read the field name, field data or both? You can also assign a hot key to read the field name and a hot key to read the field data. These would normally be used in a data base application although you will probably find uses in other applications as well. We mentioned Vocal-Eyes makes a few assumptions when it is asked to read either the field name or data. Vocal-Eyes assumes the application's cursor is sitting somewhere on the field data. Also, the color of the field data must be different from the color of the field name. Finally, the field name must be to the left of the field data. If all of these conditions are true, Vocal-Eyes is capable of distinguishing the field name from the field data. However, there are some application programs which do not distinguish the field name from the field data by color. If this is the case, using the above technique, Vocal-Eyes has no way of knowing where the field name ends and the data begins. This is why we have added the ASCII Field Name Separator option to the Vocal-Eyes general menu. If you are using an applications program which does not use colors to separate the field name and data, it probably is using a consistent character immediately after the field name. Most commonly this is the : (colon). No matter what this character is, as long as it is consistent, Vocal-Eyes can be told to look for this character and treat it as the separator between the field name and field data. Regardless of what the character is, you must know its ASCII value. If it is a colon, the ASCII value is 58. If it is not a colon and you are not sure what the ASCII value is, move the review cursor to the character and press the Attrib/ASCII hot key (Option 38 in the hot keys menu). Vocal- Eyes will tell you the ASCII value. Now simply press ENTER on option eleven (ASCII Field Name Separator) and Vocal-Eyes will prompt for the ASCII separator. This should be a number from 0 to 255. Simply type the ASCII value and press ENTER. Now Vocal-Eyes will use this technique for determining the field name and data instead of the color approach described above. By setting this value to zero, the default, Vocal-Eyes will not look for an ASCII zero character but instead use the color approach above. Any value from one to 255, however, will instruct Vocal-Eyes to use that character for determining the field name and data. 9.2.12 Fast Review Throughout this manual, you have been using the ALT key to enter review mode. Only if you press the ALT and let go without pressing any other keys will review mode be entered. For example the keystroke ALT-A would not enter review mode because the "A" was pressed before the ALT key was released. Before we continue our talk about the new fast review options, it should be mentioned that you should, if at all possible, use the fast review for entering review mode. Only if you are using macros should you use the review mode hot key (option fifty-two in the hot keys menu). There are many technical reasons for this. Although both would probably work, we strongly suggest you use the fast review. Notice the default setting is either ALT. This means if your keyboard has two ALT keys, either can be used to enter review mode. What if you don't like using the ALT key or worse yet, it is also being used for another purpose with your applications program? Vocal-Eyes allows you to setup the fast review key to the following options: Undefined, left control, right control, either control, left shift, right shift, either shift, left ALT, right ALT, either ALT, or the Scroll-Lock key. A setting of "right ALT," for example would mean only the right ALT key would enter review mode. Pressing the left ALT would not enter review mode. Those of you who prefer to leave the SHIFT, CONTROL, and ALT keys alone, can use the Scroll-Lock key. Although you can use the SHIFT, CONTROL, or ALT keys, remember, Vocal-Eyes will not use them to enter review mode unless you press the key and release it without pressing any other key. For example, a SHIFT- Z or CONTROL-Y or ALT-F1 would not enter review mode because a key was pressed before the SHIFT, CONTROL or ALT was released. If you are not using a 101-key keyboard, than you should not set this to right control or right ALT since your keyboard does not contain these keys. However, all of the other settings will work fine. As you can see, this gives you great flexibility over what key or keys should be used to enter review mode. The default is either ALT key. Go ahead and set this value to whatever you feel most comfortable with. 9.2.13: SOUND EFFECTS INTERNAL SPEAKER/OFF/SOUNDING BOARD During your work thus far with Vocal-Eyes you have encountered several instances in which your PC's bell was sounded. Such bells can be pretty distracting at times, and there are many work environments where such noise is considered downright offensive. Here is a list of all the possible tone and beeps Vocal-Eyes is capable of: 1) When you enter and exit the Voice Control Panel 2) The capital letters option 3) The key click option 4) If you override the CAPS LOCK key by pressing the SHIFT key 5) If you have silenced the voice and the applications program is ready for more input 6) Cursoring up and down in Review Mode 7) The typewriter bell option 8) The error or beep tone 9) The screen activity tone Perhaps you'd like to turn these tones off. Well, here's your chance to do just that. Select Sound Effects on the General menu and press ENTER to disable Vocal-Eyes' many beeps and bells. Sounding Board users-- you have an extra option as to how Vocal-Eyes handles your bell. You can instruct Vocal-Eyes to sound all bells through your Sounding Board synthesizer. Go to the Sound Effects selection on the General menu and press ENTER twice to do this. Now, plug in your headphones and you can work just as quietly as your sighted neighbor. 9.2.14: SET SOUND DURATION If you have instructed Vocal-Eyes to send your beeps and bells to your PC's internal speaker, you might want to set the duration, or how long, these sound effects should last. The reason for this is the vast difference in speeds among today's computers. For example, what might sound like a very nice tone on a 16MHz 386 machine would be a very long drawn out tone on a 4.77 MHz 8088. Or what might sound good on a 4.77 MHz 8088 machine would sound extremely short on a 66MHz 486. If the tones seem too long, decrease the Sound Duration option. If the tones are too short, increase the value. Press ENTER at the Sound Duration prompt and enter a number from one to ninety-nine. Press ENTER a second time to complete the entry. Setting the duration at one produces short, crisp tones, whereas setting the duration to ninety-nine produces longer, more sustained tones. Experiment with this option until you find the setting that works best for you. 9.2.15 Cursor Delay Occasionally, you may be working with a piece of applications software that runs extremely slowly. For example, you may be using TELIX or PROCOMM or some other telecommunications software package to access a remote computer. You press the DOWN ARROW key and, before the character has time to be received and acted upon by the program running on the remote computer, Vocal-Eyes has already voiced the current line instead of waiting for the cursor to be moved to the next line and reading it. The cursor delay is the amount of time Vocal-Eyes waits between the pressing of a cursor key and the implementation of the voice feature attached to it. This feature can be set to any number from one to ninety- nine, with each added number causing a slightly longer delay. If you're having trouble with software running too slowly to keep up with Vocal- Eyes' voice features, try increasing the cursor delay from its default value of three. To increase, or decrease, Vocal-Eyes' cursor delay, press ENTER at the Cursor Delay prompt. Vocal-Eyes will ask you for a new setting. Type in a number. Actually, Vocal-Eyes handles numbers from one to seventy differently than it handles numbers from seventy-one to ninety-nine. For standard applications programs like word processors, data base programs and spreadsheets, a setting between one and seventy will most likely work fine. However, because of potential slow responses when using telecommunication programs, Vocal-Eyes uses a different technique for numbers above seventy. We suggest you first try a setting between one and seventy. If setting the value to seventy still does not correct the timing problem, try settings above seventy, going in small increments of about four or five. For each value above seventy, Vocal-Eyes will wait one eighteenth of a second before doing what was requested for the particular Cursoring key. For example, a value of ninety-nine would first wait twenty-nine eighteenths seconds or 1.6 seconds before acting on the specified commands. It is twenty-nine eighteenths seconds because ninety-nine minus seventy equals twenty-nine. Again, this is mainly for slow- responding telecommunication programs where the cursoring keys seem to speak the information you left rather than where you are. You will have to play with this value to get the best response. 9.2.16: SET TRIGGER DELAY Another option that may be especially useful when running telecommunication applications is the "trigger delay." To help explain exactly what this feature is for, lets consider your standard printer. When you send text to a printer, it normally will not begin to print the information until it has received a complete line of text. Therefore, if you said print "Mary had a little" and stopped, nothing would be printed but the printer does contain the information. The printer would sit there forever waiting for the rest of the line. Once you send it a RETURN character, the printer recognizes that it now has the complete line and prints it out. This works very much like your voice synthesizer. If you are at the DOS prompt and press ENTER, you get the current drive specifier and your cursor is positioned immediately after it. Vocal-Eyes sent the text to your synthesizer but it also is waiting for the complete line before it actually starts to speak. Here's where the trigger delay value comes into play. If the trigger delay value has elapsed since the time the last character was sent to your synthesizer, Vocal-Eyes will send a RETURN to the synthesizer causing it to speak the text which has been received but not spoken. You can see if you set this value too low, Vocal-Eyes could cause some words to be broken up. This is because it is sending RETURN characters to the synthesizers not at line breaks but at semi-random places. A way to get a good feel for this feature is to set it for the highest value of ninety-nine. Then, at the DOS prompt, press ENTER and wait. The new prompt was not spoken for about 5.5 seconds. Now set the value back to its default of two and again press ENTER at the DOS prompt. This time, Vocal-Eyes only waited two eighteenths of a second. The delay value tells Vocal-Eyes how many eighteenths of a seconds to wait before sending a RETURN to the synthesizer which will cause all unspoken text to be spoken. Again, normally you will not have to worry about this feature unless you are doing telecommunication work at low BAUD rates. To increase or decrease Vocal-Eyes' trigger delay, press ENTER at the Trigger Delay prompt. Vocal-Eyes will ask you for a new setting. Type in a number from one to ninety-nine. As was the case with the Cursor delay, you will want to increase the trigger delay gradually, so you can keep Vocal-Eyes running at optimal speed for your applications software. 9.2.17 Route/Write Delay Because not all application programs respond at the same rate, it may be necessary for you to tell Vocal-Eyes to slow down a bit while routing the applications cursor or while sending data from the clipboard to the underlying applications program. The clipboard feature will be discussed later in Section Nine. If you issue the command to read to the end of the document and Vocal- Eyes stops before reaching the end, or during routing of the cursor you get the error "unable to route" or while sending the data from the clipboard to the application you are loosing data, try increasing this value until you no longer have the problem. You can adjust this value from one to ninety-nine. The lower the number the faster Vocal-Eyes can accomplish its task but because of the underlying applications program, you may have to slow Vocal-Eyes up a bit so the application can keep up. Try to keep this value as small as possible in order to allow optimum performance. Note: If you attempt to route the cursor to a region of the screen which is not accessible, such as a status line or a page-break line, Vocal-Eyes may say, "Unable to Route." Altering the Route/Write Delay will have no effect on this problem, since Vocal-Eyes is genuinely unable to route to these areas. 9.2.18: HYPERACTIVE CHECK DELAY Since Hyperactive windows will not be discussed until section 13, the discussion of this feature will be held until that section. 9.2.19: REVECTOR CHECK ON/OFF Some applications you run may make Vocal-Eyes disappear until you exit them. After exiting, Vocal-Eyes will work as always. These are not very friendly programs. Therefore, Vocal-Eyes has to get tough! With this option enabled, Vocal-Eyes will continually check to see if someone has tried to bypass it. Once this is true, Vocal-Eyes will attempt to reposition itself so it can get control again. If you are executing a program in which Vocal-Eyes disappears until you exit your program, try turning this feature on. Those of you using 3270 emulators may find this means the difference of being able to use the 3270 or not. You should be very careful with this feature. It is a one time shot. It can only be used once per session with Vocal-Eyes. Once you turn it on and it revectors itself, it can not unvector itself. Therefore, you can not turn it off. This feature should only be used as a last resort. If you ever enable this and execute an application program, you may want to reboot your machine after exiting the application program. Note: If you are using an applications program which switches to a graphics mode, Vocal-Eyes will not shut down but what you hear may not make any sense. For example, reading the current line while in a graphics mode is not going to give intelligible results. Turning revector checking on for these types of programs will not have any effect at all. No matter what you try and do, Vocal-Eyes will not operate well in a graphics mode. Normally, you should leave this setting to its default off position. 9.3: THE REVIEW MODE FIND COMMAND Occasionally, you'll want to move to a certain screen location while in Review Mode. You don't know the exact column and row numbers of the screen position where you'd like your review cursor to be moved to, but you know the word, extended ASCII graphics character or screen attribute that's displayed there. This is where Vocal-Eyes' "Find" command comes in handy. Following is an explanation of how it works. 9.3.1: THE "F" FIND COMMAND First, enter Review Mode. Now press the "F" key. Did you hear Vocal- Eyes respond "Enter pattern to find?" Say, for this example , you'd like your review cursor moved to the first character in the first occurrence of the word "STATUS." Simply type status from this prompt and then press ENTER. Vocal-Eyes will look for the first occurrence of the word "status" and move your review cursor to the appropriate screen position. Vocal- Eyes will also respond by reading the new column and row position to which your cursor has been moved. If the string was not to be found in the window, Vocal-Eyes will beep and the cursor will be exactly where it was prior to issuing the find command. Because you terminated the string with the ENTER key, Vocal-Eyes automatically started the search at the top left of the current window or full screen if it is selected regardless of the current location of the review cursor. Vocal-Eyes' Find command is case insensitive-- which is to say it doesn't care whether you type in your search string in upper- or lowercase characters. Vocal-Eyes will search for both. The Vocal-Eyes F Find command will search the currently active window only. If you would like the entire screen to be searched, don't forget to press the F2 Full-screen toggle key first if your currently active window is not already setup for the full screen. Remember, you can specify what window should be active, full screen or the currently selected window, using the Review Window option in the general menu. Also, in the above example, we didn't have to type in the entire word "status" in order to have found its first occurrence on the screen. We could just as easily have typed in stat, ST, or simply S. Of course typing STAT would also have instructed Vocal-Eyes to search for words such as statistics, estate, or statistical. Typing ST would have found all of the above, as well as words such as street, strong, stern, or even first. Typing an "S" by itself would, following the same logic, instruct Vocal- Eyes to search for the next "S" it can find. The idea here is to make your search string only as long as necessary to find the word you're looking for, but long enough to avoid words which contain similar strings but that you're not interested in finding. In the above example we pressed the "F" key, then entered the string we wanted Vocal-Eyes to search for. We concluded the command by pressing ENTER. Completing a search string with a press of the ENTER key causes Vocal-Eyes to initiate what is known as a forward search from the top left of the window. Vocal-Eyes searches from left to right, then moves down to the next screen line, where it searches from left to right again. Down a line, left to right, down another line, and so on and so forth until Vocal-Eyes either locates the desired string or reaches the lower right hand corner of your active window. We weren't really sure where our cursor was placed in relationship to the first occurrence of the word "status," so by pressing ENTER we knew we stood a pretty good chance of finding it. There is another way we could have concluded our search string. We could have pressed the > key instead. Typing F status > would have initiated a forward search for the word status exactly the same as if we'd typed F status ENTER except the search would have started from the current review cursor position instead of the top left of the window. What do you suppose would have happened if we'd typed "F status . Or you could press the F find command key and press > straightaway, since, as you would have noticed if you're following along, the F Find command key always remembers the last string you searched for and offers it as a default value. You can accept this default by simply pressing ENTER, < or >, or, if you'd like to search for a slightly different string, you can use your RIGHT ARROW key to cursor over the part of the search string you want to keep and then type in the rest. If you begin by typing anything other then the RIGHT arrow, the first string is cleared. For a complete description of editing keys for this an all other input prompts, refer to Appendix I: EDITING INPUT PROMPTS. If all you want to do is find the previous or next occurrence of your search string, however, you don't even have to press the F find command key. Simply press the < or > key. Vocal-Eyes will automatically search in the desired direction for the next occurrence of your string, and, if it finds it, move your cursor and announce the new screen position. If no such string exists, a beep will be sounded. Remember, for either the < or > search features to work, you must have searched for something first using the F Find command. It doesn't matter when you used it. You could, for instance, use either the < or > to search for a string you originally searched for the last time you were in Review Mode. The default find string will be there waiting for you until you use the F Find command to look for a different string. What if you want to include either a < or > character as a part of your search string? Easy enough. Simply precede the character with a press of the ` (grave accent) key. You will recall that the ` is your Review Mode and Voice Control Panel bypass key. Typing F `>, for instance, would instruct Vocal-Eyes to search for the text string . The second >, the one not preceded by a `, informs Vocal-Eyes that you would like the search to progress in a forward direction starting from the current review cursor position. Of course if you wanted to search for the grave accent itself, simply include two grave accent characters in a row. 9.3.2: SEARCHING FOR CONTROL AND EXTENDED GRAPHICS CHARACTERS You will recall from an earlier section that the ASCII character set includes, along with all the standard typewriter characters, a set of control characters designated ASCII one through twenty-six and a set of extended ASCII graphics characters designated ASCII zero, ASCII twenty- seven through thirty-one and ASCII 127 through 255. You can use the "F" find command to search for any of these non-standard keys as follows: First, enter Review Mode and press "F" to initiate a search. Now, when Vocal-Eyes prompts you for a string to search for, press and hold down the ALT key and then enter the ASCII number of the character you want to search for using the number set on your numeric key pad only. The numbers on the top row of the keyboard will not work. (NOTE: On most full-size PC keyboards the numeric key pad is located near the right edge. Small Talk users-- yours is an embedded numeric key pad. Press the FN key to access your key pad.) As an example, let's say you're looking for the extended ASCII graphics character that most pop-up windows use to draw the upper left-hand corner of their box. To find this character, which is designated as ASCII 218, and to automatically move your cursor to it, first, enter Review Mode. Press "F". Next, holding down the ALT key, enter 218 from your numeric key pad. Release the ALT key and then press ENTER, < or >, depending on where you suspect the character lies in relationship to your current cursor location. If it turns out that you searched the wrong way, use either the < or > keys to make a U-turn and search the other way. That's all there is to searching for special ASCII characters using Vocal- Eyes! You can mix standard text with any special ASCII character if you wish. The only limitation is that your search string cannot exceed thirty characters. It doesn't matter what those thirty characters are. 9.3.3: SEARCHING FOR VIDEO ATTRIBUTES In the last section of this manual we introduced you to Vocal-Eyes' color palate. We showed you how to access it by pressing the F1 key immediately after pressing either "A" to set the user definable attribute or the "B" to set the light bar tracking. Well, you can also use the color palate to add colors or other video attributes to your search string. Here's how. Enter Review Mode and press "F" to begin the search process. Now, instead of entering a string to search for, press the F1 key. Cursor down until you locate the foreground attribute you'd like to search for, then press ENTER. Follow the same procedure to select the background color or video attribute you'd like to search for. As was the case when setting user defined attributes and light bars, once you've gained some familiarity with the various attributes and their menu numbers you can choose to simply type in the appropriate number and then press ENTER. Have you selected the foreground and background attributes you'd like to search for? If so, type in the character string you'd like to search for and then press ENTER to initiate the search. Entering a 5 for foreground and 1 for background and then the string STATUS, for example, would instruct Vocal-Eyes to search for the first occurrence of the text string STATUS that appears in red letters on a black background. Would you like to search for a particular video attribute and have Vocal- Eyes move your cursor to it regardless of what character is displayed there? You can do this easily as follows: First, press "F" to begin the search process. Press F1 and select the set of video attributes you'd like Vocal-Eyes to search for. Now, instead of entering a string of characters to search for, type a question mark and then press ENTER. The question mark is a Vocal-Eyes wild card. It instructs Vocal-Eyes to search for any character, so long as it fulfills the video attributes portion of the search command. Typing five for foreground and one for background, then following with a question mark and then ENTER, <, or > would instruct Vocal-Eyes to search for the next occurrence of red on black on your screen, no matter what character is displayed there. For example the string "test?9" would find the string "test09," "test19," "test 9," etc. Vocal-Eyes will consider any character to be a match for the question mark. What do you think you would have to do if you really wanted to search for a question mark? That's right-- simply type a grave accent (`) first to let Vocal-Eyes know to accept the next character, in this case a question mark, as is. The string "test`?9" would only find the strings "test?9," "test?91," "subtest?9a," etc. In this case, Vocal-Eyes must match the question mark since it was preceded with a grave accent in the find string. If you wish, you can assign a different video attribute for each character in the find string. Every time you change the video attribute, it will effect all characters typed from that point on, but you can change it as many times as you wish. Granted it may not be very practical to search for a 30 character string with each character containing a different video attribute, but it can be done with Vocal-Eyes. By default, Vocal-Eyes sets the video attribute to anything on anything. In other words, don't worry about what the attributes are. Simply find the specified characters. If you press F to type in the find string, as we said before, Vocal-Eyes will give you the last string typed as a default. If you hear a beep, Vocal-Eyes is telling you there is a specified attribute somewhere in the find string. If you are sighted, you will notice each character in the find string with a specified attribute is actually displayed in that attribute. Also, if you cursor over the default string using the arrow keys, Vocal- Eyes will voice any new attribute it comes across. If Vocal-Eyes does not speak an attribute when you press the arrow keys, you can assume the video attribute for the new character is the same as that for the previous character. Refer to Appendix I for a complete description of valid editing commands. As you can see, the "F" find command can be quite handy in locating important information in your applications program's display. Now that you've found them, would you like a way you can save, or mark, these screen locations for quick and easy access at a later time? This is where Vocal-Eyes' 10 markers come into play. The markers will be described shortly in this section. 9.3.4: SEARCHING FOR THE NEXT DIFFERENT ATTRIBUTE What if you simply want to search for the very next character which has a different attribute then the one currently under the Review cursor? Well, every time you press S in Review Mode, Vocal-Eyes will search for the first character with a different attribute than the attribute currently under the review cursor. It will search from left to right starting at the review cursor position. If found, Vocal-Eyes will move your Review Cursor there and speak the character as well as the attribute. If there is no character with a different attribute below the current Review cursor position, Vocal-Eyes will simply beep at you. In this case, the cursor will not be moved. This can be a very quick way of seeing how everything on your screen looks. It can also be a quick way of finding what the light bar should be set for. Feel free to use this feature as you see fit. Just remember, pressing S in Review mode is all it takes. 9.4: SETTING AND USING MARKERS We've already shown you how to use Vocal-Eyes' Review Mode to reread all or any part of your screen. Is there a part of your screen that you need to refer back to frequently? You've determined the column and row position you'd like to access on a regular basis, and you know how to move your cursor to this screen position by using your read character and read line hot keys, each preceded by the number of the line and column you'd like your cursor moved to. This probably seems like a lot of trouble to have to go through every time you'd like to move your cursor to this particular column and row position in Review Mode-- especially if you have to relearn the row and column numbers every time you run the software. We agree with you. It would be a lot of trouble, which is why we have equipped Vocal-Eyes with the ability to set and remember up to 10 different markers. Let's say that frequently you'd like to be able to enter Review Mode and move your cursor quickly and without a lot of fuss to the 40th column of screen line 3. Here's all you'd have to do. Are you presently in Review Mode? If not, use your Fast Review hot key to get there. Move your cursor to the desired position by typing 3 followed immediately by your read line hot key. Type 40 and follow with your read character hot key. Press the SPACE BAR to make sure your Review cursor is exactly where you want it. It should respond "C40, L3." Are you in the correct cursor position? If so, press the "M" "marker to set" key. Vocal-Eyes will respond "Select marker to set." Press the number (zero to nine) of the marker you'd like to set. Vocal-Eyes will respond by saying "Marker x" where x is the number you typed. There-- you've just set your first marker. Are there other areas of the screen you'd like to be able to jump to quickly? Why not set a marker for each. You can use the numbers from zero through nine on either the top row of your keyboard or on your numeric key pad to set up to ten markers, each of them marking a different screen position. Have you set Marker zero? Move your cursor to a different screen position. Press the "G" "Go to marker" key. Vocal-Eyes will respond "Select marker to move to." Type zero and, almost as fast as you can remove your finger from the key, Vocal-Eyes has moved your cursor to the marked position and voiced the character that's there. Exit Review Mode and work a little with your software. Enter Review Mode and again press "G." Type in the number of the marker you want to move to. It's that easy, and that quick! Would you like to change the screen coordinates of a particular marker? Simply move your cursor to the new position you'd like marked, press "M" and then press the number of the marker you'd like to reset. You can change any marker's screen coordinates as often and as many times as you'd like. Be sure to resave your .SET file after you've set or changed markers. That way they'll still be there the next time you run your applications program using the same .SET file. 9.5: USING MARKERS FOR WINDOW COORDINATES Now that you may have several markers set at different points on the screen, wouldn't it be nice if you could use these points to specify the positions of a window? Well, you can do just that. Remember in Review if you press F4 you are prompted for the four points of the currently active window? You typed in the new numbers and/or pressed ENTER over some of the default values. Well, instead of typing in a number, why not give it a marker number and let Vocal-Eyes figure out the exact number for you? For example. Move your Review cursor to line ten and the fifteenth column position. Verify you are there by pressing the SPACE BAR. Now set marker seven to this location by pressing M followed by 7. Now select window eight by pressing F3 followed by 8. We want to set the coordinates of the top left at line ten column fifteen and the bottom right at line twenty-five column eighty. So press F4 and at the Left column number prompt type M7 ENTER. At the top line number type M7 ENTER again. For the Right column number type 80 and 25 for the Bottom line number. There, you have just setup the window using your preset marker. Verify the settings by pressing F8. Sure enough, it is set exactly the way we wanted it to be. You can use a marker for any or all of the window coordinates. Simply type M followed by the number of the marker to be used instead of actually typing in a specific number. You can also use this for the Read Temporary Window command. Any place Vocal-Eyes asks for the coordinates of a window, you can answer its question by using any of the 10 markers. In section 13, we will discuss the powerful hyperactive windows. Keep in mind that while setting up their coordinates, you can also use any of the 10 markers as described above. 9.6: CURSOR ROUTING As we've stated throughout this manual, whenever you enter Review Mode your applications program is placed into a state of suspended animation. It only "wakes up" when you've exited Review Mode, at which time it picks up right where it left off. We also emphasized the fact that, whatever keys you press while in Review Mode, none of them were passed along to your applications program. Well, here's the exception that makes the rule. Let's say you've entered Review Mode and located some important information 3 screen lines up and 14 columns to the left of your current applications cursor. You'd like to move your applications cursor to this important information, so you use one of your Review Mode exit keys to return to your applications program, and then use your cursor keys to move the appropriate number of lines and columns to reach your desired location. That's one way you could do it. Another is by using Vocal- Eyes' cursor routing feature. Here's how it works: Enter Review Mode and move your review cursor to the desired screen position. Now, instead of using the ESCAPE key, or your fast review key or your Review hot key to exit back to your program, press ALT-X. Or, if you're using a 101-key keyboard, you could alternatively have pressed ALT-ESCAPE. In either case, Vocal-Eyes will respond "routing," exit Review Mode for you and automatically press your cursor keys enough times to move your applications cursor to the correct line and column position. Many applications programs do not move their cursor by conventional means, which is to say via the four ARROW keys. Or, you may have placed your review cursor in a screen location not accessible by your applications cursor, such as in the middle of a help screen, or on a status line. Or, if your program uses light bars, your applications cursor may not even appear on the screen. In these cases, when Vocal-Eyes is unable to route your cursor, it will respond "unable to route," and return you to your applications program. The best way to determine whether Vocal-Eyes can route your applications cursor is to try it. So go ahead-- give Vocal-Eyes' ALT-X or ALT-ESCAPE cursor routing feature a try. If you are using an applications program which should be able to route but you get the message "Unable to route," you may want to increase the route delay using option 17 in the general menu. For example Sprint, a word processor from Borland, requires a route delay of at least twenty for Vocal-Eyes to route the cursor correctly. The higher the number, the slower Vocal-Eyes will communicate to the underlying applications program. Try to keep the route delay as low as possible for faster response. However, some programs may require a slightly longer delay than others. 9.7: ADJUSTING THE UP AND DOWN ARROWS IN REVIEW MODE As you already know, if you press the up and down arrows in review, Vocal-Eyes will read you the new line. However, you can instruct Vocal- Eyes to read something other than the line when you move up and down. Pressing "V" in review mode will rotor among character, word and line. If you set this to word, pressing the up and down arrows will only read the new word under the review cursor. Setting this to character will cause the up and down arrows to read only the new character the review cursor lands on. Feel free to set this to your particular needs. This value is saved with the .SET file. This means, although reading the new line is the default, by changing this value and saving it to disk, Vocal-Eyes will now default to your particular needs-- character, word or line. This setting also directly effects the up and down arrows while using the VE cursor. Section 10 will discuss the VE cursor. 9.8: THE SYNTHESIZER CHANNEL Would you like to access your voice synthesizer directly? Try using the Review Mode "C" for "synthesizer channel" key. Basically, there are two reasons why you might want to send characters directly to your synthesizer: First, you might want your synthesizer to voice some text without having to enter the text into your current applications program. Second, you might want to send your synthesizer a command to change one or more of its settings. For example, Sounding Board users might want to turn on acronym read. To send a string of characters directly to your synthesizer, enter Review Mode and press the "C" for "channel" key. Vocal-Eyes will respond: "Enter command...press ENTER when finished." Go ahead and try this now. Try typing in your name and then pressing ENTER. What happened? Did your synthesizer voice your name? Exit Review Mode and you'll discover your applications program is still just as you left it. Your program doesn't even realize your synthesizer said your name. As we learned back in SECTION 4 of this manual, Vocal-Eyes has some pretty sophisticated synthesizer control features. You can control all of the popular voice and punctuation settings, and you can set them differently for screen and keyboard review. However there are many other synthesizer commands you may wish or need to enter from time to time during your PC work session. Normally, these commands are entered from DOS, but Vocal-Eyes offers you the ability to issue any synthesizer command from inside Vocal-Eyes' Review Mode. The advantage of this is that you don't have to save your data and exit your applications program and return to DOS in order to change a synthesizer setting. You can do it from Review Mode via the "C" synthesizer channel key. In order to send a command to your synthesizer, the first thing you have to do is get its attention. The Sounding Board, along with many popular voice synthesizers, uses the CTRL-E key for this purpose. Whenever a CTRL-E is sent to the Sounding Board, it knows that it's supposed to accept the following characters as a command instead of text to be voiced. At the beginning of this topic we mentioned that you might want to use the "C" synthesizer channel key to turn acronym read on. Here's how you would do this. First, enter Review Mode and press the "C" synthesizer channel key. Press CTRL-E to get the Sounding Boards attention. Are you currently using CTRL-E as one of your voice hot keys? If so, don't worry, Vocal- Eyes knows better. Each key you press will be sent verbatim. Now, to turn the Sounding Board's acronym read feature on, you would type A1, which is the Sounding Board's acronym read on parameter, and then press ENTER. Now, until you turn it off, the acronym processor will be on, just as if you had issued the command line parameter. As you can see, the "C" synthesizer command key offers you ready access to all of your voice synthesizer's controls without having to disturb your work in progress. Check your synthesizer documentation to learn the various settings and switches that are possible with your particular synthesizer. If you try to change a setting Vocal-Eyes is using such as the rate, pitch, volume or tone, your new setting will not last very long. Vocal-Eyes will reset it back to what it thinks it should be. Therefore, if you want to change any of these values, you must use the Voice Control Panel. This is actually easier anyway. 9.9: BLOCK WRITE Here's a Vocal-Eyes feature we know you're going to like-- the ability to copy text or other information from one program and enter, or "write" it directly into another. This really has nothing to do with speech, but it sure is a handy feature to have around! Say, for example, you're in your database management program. You've found the name and address you're looking for, and now you want to return to your word processor and enter the name and address in a business letter. You could Braille the information onto a card or type it into Noteworthy and then retype it into your business letter once you've moved out of your database manager and back into your main word processor. But why not save yourself all that hassle and use Vocal-Eyes' handy block write feature? Here's how it works. First, go into the hot keys submenu and select option 62: Block Write. Assign a hot key that's both convenient and easy to remember. You'll probably be using this feature a lot, so you'll want to select a hot key you can assign to the same key in almost every application. Now, back in your applications program, enter Review Mode and move your review cursor to either the beginning or the end of the address you'd like to have copied. Press P. Did you hear Vocal-Eyes say "Mark?" If so, move your cursor to the opposite corner of your address or block of text. Press R. Vocal-Eyes will then say "Copy." Now that you've copied your address or block of text, you can change applications as many times as you like. You can even reinvoke Vocal- Eyes with a new .SET file. Your text is safely stowed away inside a special Vocal-Eyes buffer, which, by default, can contain a block of text as small as a single character or as large as about half of a twenty-five- line screen. This buffer size can be adjusted to your individual needs. It can be enlarged or even completely eliminated. Section 14.5 will cover how to adjust this buffer size. Are you back in your word processor? Place your cursor where you'd like your address to be entered. Press your Block Write hot key. Vocal-Eyes will enter your marked data as if you'd typed it in yourself, only more quickly-- much, much more quickly. If for some reason you would like to cancel a block write before the operation has completed, simply press the ESCAPE key. The block write operation will be canceled immediately. No further characters will be entered into your text editor or word processor. When you copy data, Vocal-Eyes will make a rectangle out of your two specified points. The first being the location you placed a mark using the "P" command and the second point being the location of your Review cursor when you issued the "R" command to replace the contents of the block buffer with the data specified in the rectangle. You can think of this as the upper left of a window and the lower right of a window. All characters inside this temporary window will be copied into what is called the Block Buffer. This is where Vocal-Eyes will hold onto it for you. What if you are using your data base and you want to copy the persons name and address to your word processor? Well, what if each of the fields is in a different location of the screen? You can't get it all in one block copy. You would first have to copy the name then street, then city then state and finally zip. If your Data Base placed them all together where you could place a rectangle or window over all of them, you would have been able to do it with one block copy. Does this mean you have to go back and forth between your word processor and data base program five times to copy each field? Not quite. When you issue the R command, the contents specified in the temporary window will "replace" the data already in the block buffer. It sure would be nice to simply add the data to the end of the buffer instead of replacing it don't you think? This would allow you to copy each of your fields individually but when you are done have all the information at once in the Block Buffer. You can either replace the existing data with the new data using the R command or add the specified data to the existing data by using the T command. The R command can be thought of as Replacing the new information over the old. The T command can be thought of as tagging the new information onto the old. You can append information in this way as long as the Block Buffer can hold it. If you try and add more then the Block Buffer can hold, you will get the error message "Block Too Large." You will have to use smaller chunks when copying data. The buffer defaults to 1024 characters. If you can see the screen, you will notice Vocal-Eyes has changed the attribute of the character where the block was marked using the P command. This simply makes it easy to see what is about to be copied. To copy data you must follow these steps: 1) Move your cursor to the top left or bottom right of what can be thought of as a temporary window. Once there, press P to Place a mark at this position. 2) Now move your cursor to the opposite corner of this temporary window and press either R or T. Regardless of which command you press, all the data in the specified window will be copied to the block buffer. The difference is if you issued the R command, the data specified will REPLACE all data already in the block buffer, whereas the T command will TAG the specified information to the end of the existing data in the block buffer. 3) Once you have the data you want in the Block Buffer, exit Review Mode and move your cursor in your applications program to the position where you want all this information placed. Now press your Block Write hot key. At this point, Vocal-Eyes will send the information from the block buffer to your application program just as if you were typing it from the keyboard. If you wish to cancel this command, press ESCAPE at any time. Vocal-Eyes will immediately stop sending the characters. If while writing the clipboard to your application, you lose characters, you may want to increase the write delay using option seventeen in the general menu. Some application programs can not receive characters as fast as Vocal-Eyes is sending them. Therefore, you may have to increase the delay, causing Vocal-Eyes to slow down. Try to keep this value as low as possible for faster response. Normally the default of two should be fine. However, if there is a problem, option seventeen on the General menu is where to resolve it. We are sure you will find many applications for this feature. Use it as often as you wish. Why try and memorize information simply to have it placed somewhere else? Not only could you forget, you may introduce typing errors. Vocal-Eyes will never forget and of course will not give you any typing errors.