brianhartgen's blog

Introduction.

There's no doubt that more and more blind people are preparing programmes for radio, especially on the internet. The number of people who have our JAWS scripts for StationPlaylist Studio tell us that. But people need access to information about music. Who recorded a specific song? When was it released? Which position on the chart did it reach?

You can now easily obtain this information, and you do not need to own the StationPlaylist product in order to do so.

The Muze is a set of JAWS scripts which gives you a gateway to a wide range of music sources in order that you can gather the information you need quickly. You can check on artist biographies, statistical information and much more. All the information is publicly available, however we know that many people are not tapping into these resources so as to give them a thorough and accurate overview of the music they enjoy or wish to play. The Muze can be used either as a standalone product or it easily can coexist with our J-Say, Leasey or StationPlaylist scripts.

How It Works.

All functions of The Muze can be accessed from a convenient List Box or through dedicated shortcut keys so you can refer to your favourite sources quickly. When within each source, a wizard guides you through a series of questions so the Muze can gather the information needed so as to deliver the correct results. All shortcut keys are global, meaning that they can be accessed from within any application.

In The Muze, you can check the following sources:

Every Hit. This is a very comprehensive search tool requiring special explanation. The Every Hit web site allows you to access the UK singles, albums, E P's and sheet music releases from 1947 to 2013. Our special interface allows you to retrieve a top 40 for the week, but it goes much further. You can search for song title, artist, specify the start date for the search, the peak chart position, whether the search should start with an individual letter, and more. All this can be achieved by not working with the web site. Best of all, the results page stays open while you make notes on the retrieved records.

Other sources include:

• The Official Charts Company, for retrieving the most accurate chart information in the UK.
• Billboard Magazine, for retrieving the most accurate chart information in the US.
• Ultimate Chart Database, for comparing UK and US chart data. This includes the UK singles and albums chart from 1952 to the present and the US singles and albums chart from 1940 to the present.
• Last.FM, for artist biographical information and to preview songs on YouTube.
• iTunes, for previewing songs or listening to them on Apple Music. Use this source also to retrieve new release information of singles, albums, audio books, TV shows and movies.
• Genius Lyrics, for checking lyrics of a song to ensure they are suitable for broadcast and obtaining other useful music facts and artist biographies.
• Wikipedia, for researching song and artist information.
• Discogs, for obtaining release information of singles, albums and those all important 78's.
• 45Cat, for obtaining release information of singles, albums and those all important 78's.

Some of the representations are plain text summaries in order to make understanding of the data much easier. In such summaries, you can press a keystroke to hear the focused track on YouTube if a sample exists, or another keystroke to copy the artist and title to the clipboard so as to use it with another of our sources. List Boxes of results may also be returned to ensure you locate the item you really want.

Examples of Facts You Can Quickly Learn.

• How many number 1 hits did Elvis Presley have between 1960 and 1962 in the UK?
• In which year did Margaret Whiting record "Moonlight in Vermont", on which record label was it released and who produced the arrangement?
• List all songs by Phil Colins with UK and US chart peak positions.
• Give me the top 75 singles, including positions for this week and last, for 28 April 2004, either for the UK or US.
• How many singles did Dion Warwick have on the Billboard chart? We can tell you she has recorded 56 Hot 100 Songs. Includes 2 number 1 hits and 12 top 10 hits .
• List the songs containing artists starting with the letter F from 1 September 1972.
• Tell me the record label on which "Love Me Do" was released, together with the chart positions week by week.

We're just scratching the surface here, but there is much more information you can find and learn about.

Training.

In order that you can gain the most from these powerful tools, it is likely that you will need some training on the various techniques associated with them. Every chart source has its strengths and weaknesses and it is important to let you know what they are in order that you can use the one which suits a particular situation. Your purchase of this product includes the audio archive of a webinar which took place demonstrating many of the product's functions.

While there is some documentation provided, the questions in each dialog box are easy enough to understand what is required. The way in which you will get to know when to use each source and the features contained within it is through the training. Most importantly, you need to be taught how to get the information quickly.

Pricing.

The cost of The Muze and its training is £50 which is approximately 62 US dollars.

Please enter your JAWS or Fusion serial number here.

Conclusion.

Having used these sources of finding music every day, we can say how useful they are for retrieving music facts and statistics for your radio shows, pleasure or to answer questions in the pub quiz! Learn about the music and tell the world about it too!

A Training Course for Users of JAWS for Windows and StationPlaylist V5.5.

Introduction.

For many years, the StationPlaylist software has been the tool of choice through which blind people broadcast their radio shows or even run their own stations. We know this because there are hundreds of StationPlaylist users on our customer database. If you use the software, are you getting the most from it or do you just work with the features you need?

The "Broadcast It" audio tutorial produced some time ago teaches a new user how to work with many aspects of StationPlaylist Studio (for broadcasting audio), StationPlaylist Creator (for managing schedules), and StationPlaylist Streamer (for sending output over the internet if external devices are being used). However, during the past year or two, the developers of this amazing product suite have created new features not described in the tutorial. Over the years, it has been supplemented by:

The StationPlaylist Workshop, and
Let's Track It.

This new training course, "Another Hour of Music Power", focuses exclusively on the release of the StationPlaylist product suite, version 5.5 with JAWS for Windows.
This training course is for people who are using any one of the StationPlaylist products who want to improve the quality of their radio output and station management.

Hartgen Consultancy are ideally placed to run this training course. The JAWS scripts we have created and sell, in our view, provide unparalelled access to many features of the StationPlaylist products. We both sell and support the entire SPL product range. Finally, our internet radio station, Team-FM, is hosted exclusively using StationPlaylist tools and we take advantage of the vast majority of the features on offer in that regard.

What Will I Learn?

While there are many new features and fixes included, we have singled out an unprecedented 18 improvements which we think warrant special attention and explanation. Some of those need to be explained within the context of accessibility with JAWS, and relate to using Creator, Studio and Remote voice-tracking.
All of the 18 features have been tested and you will hear comments on all of them and how best to work with them.

Who is the Course For?

This course is suited to anyone who is familiar with many of the functions of StationPlaylist Studio and Creator if appropriate, together with voice-tracking locally or remotely, and who would like to build on existing skills. You should be familiar with how your screen-reader functions together with Windows concepts, such as how to navigate around applications.

Costing.

The cost of the course is £35 which is currently $44. The training session is 90 minutes duration.

Alternatively, anyone who wishes to purchase the course can send an Email to jaws@hartgen.org, whereupon a fully accessible electronic invoice will be sent to you which can be paid through PayPal or any major credit or debit card.

Summary.

The StationPlaylist suite of products is the most accessible means of broadcasting to a very high standard. Get yourself into the studio and bring your radio shows and station to the next level!

Introduction.

Now is your chance to get some high quality training on some of the latest features within the screen-reader JAWS for Windows which have been introduced over the past two years. This follows on from our previous popular training courses on this subject. These training courses are still popular and people are still purchasing the older volumes in the series even today!

If you are a person who chooses to upgrade your copy of JAWS on a regular basis, or maybe you've skipped an upgrade or two and you are about to update your computer to JAWS for Windows version 2021 in October, chances are that you may not have had time to get to grips with the latest features the screen-reader offers. While JAWS does contain excellent documentation, there's nothing like someone sitting down with you to explain how many of these new features work.

That's why at Hartgen Consultancy, we've created a short course to enable you to get your JAWS knowledge up-to-date. The course will focus upon the new features included with JAWS versions 2020 and 2021.

With the new annual subscription to JAWS now available starting in the US, (designed to make it easier for people to obtain JAWS or to jump up to the latest release), it's a good chance to get your knowledge updated. Not only that, this training course is ideally suited to users of Zoomtext Fusion too.

Purchasing JAWS is a significant investment, so it is important that you make the most of what you've paid for and that you are taught by someone who fully understands all aspects of using it. You may also be an access technology Trainer, or an I T Lecturer in a College who has a basic awareness of how JAWS works but again is not up to speed with the latest enhancements.

What You Will Learn.

This course is in one session lasting 90 minutes. It is designed for anyone who already understands how to use many functions of JAWS but who would like to gain a greater skill level with the latest features. The features are demonstrated with real world examples so that they make sense.

Topics include:

• Enhanced JAWS and Invisible Cursor Support for Windows 10 Universal Apps.
• Improvements to JAWS OCR.
• Enhancements in Microsoft Office 365.
• Improvements with Braille, including using Braille without speech.
• Toggle JAWS Sounds in Speech On Demand.
• Microsoft Edge improvements.
• The Braille and Text Viewers.
• Keep Wireless Speakers and Sound Cards from Clipping Speech.
• Features of JAWS 2021 including OCR to Word and the new Voice Assistant.
• Other Tips and Tricks which are hidden away just waiting to be found. As usual you will hear about things which are not apparent on the surface! People often tell us they learn things about JAWS which they have not been told anywhere else.

How to Purchase.

Catching Up with JAWS is priced £35 which is approximately 47 American dollars.

Alternatively, anyone can purchase the course by sending an Email to jaws@hartgen.org, whereupon a fully accessible electronic invoice will be sent to you which can be paid through PayPal or any major credit or debit card.

Conclusion.

With JAWS 2021 just around the corner, be sure you are at the cutting edge and become familiar with everything new in this upcoming release and the current version. You'll be glad you did!

Hi to All

As soon as Leasey version 5 was released, we started work on the next update. In previous years, we've spent several months producing an update and let you have all the new features all at once. This year, we are going to give you two or three features at a time spread throughout the year so you are not waiting too long for something good. We do have features planned on this basis for the remainder of this year and possibly beyond that.

So what is coming up in June?

Support for VLC Media Player.

VLC Mediaa Player is a very comprehensive audio and video player. It can certainly play all manner of audio and video files, but it can also allow you to watch DVD's including those with audio description, stream radio stations, listen to YouTube video and other streaming services such as SoundCloud. Leasey users asked for better JAWS support for VLC and this is the first run at it.

You will be able to do things like:
Determine the current position in a file, total length and remaining time. This is given in a nice clean format, such as 2 minutes 40 seconds.
Better handling of keyboard navigation so as not to conflict with JAWS keystrokes, for adjusting volume, fast forward and rewind in many increments, changing playback speed, and so on.
General accessibility improvements throughout.
A keystroke to cause JAWS to speak the current file name.
A verbosity option. When enabled, and you navigate the file, it will cause JAWS to speak the current position in minutes and seconds.
Included the ability to move to a specific time within a file as this was not particularly accessible.
Cleaned up a lot of extra spoken information when navigating VLC.

LeaseyCast.

Leasey now makes it possible for you to access podcasts. Some people would like to be able to search for new podcasts to play on the computer, or to listen regularly to those which they know. However, some of us, myself included, do not particularly care for them but nevertheless want to be able to download the occasional episode. We want the ability to be able to save the file in a specific location so as to easily find it later. This system allows you to stream a podcast over the internet or download it to your computer, so you can transfer it to a portable device.

We are using one of the widest sources of podcasts available as Leasey uses the iTunes catalogue.

You can either search for a podcast by its name or by genre. A good example of category search would be the word "Family". Either way, you will get a list of results. You can press Enter on any one of them.

This reveals a screen containing:
A description of the Podcast you have chosen.
The ability to add it to a list of favourite podcasts.
The title of each episode.
A description of each episode.
A link to download or stream the episode.

Here are two examples.

Example 1.

FSCast.

The official podcast of Freedom Scientific, leaders in assistive technology for blind people and those with low vision. Hosted by John and Larry Gasman,
FSCast features news, interviews, and product demonstrations relating to Freedom Scientific products such as JAWS and ZoomText. FSCast is a great way to make the most of the products you have as well as learning about what’s new and what’s around the corner.

Add this Podcast to the LeaseyCast List.

FSCast 183, using the SAS Graphics accelerator to listen to graphs and charts.

On FSCast 183, we're joined by Ed Summers, director of\ accessibility at SAS, to get a stereo demo of the SAS Graphics accelerator, and to \learn about
accessible SAS tools for doing statistics. He'll also direct us to some of his blog posts \about how he trained himself to listen to synthesized speech
at close to 600 words per minute.

Download or Stream FSCast 183, using the SAS Graphics accelerator to listen to graphs and charts.

FSCast 182, NFB president Mark Riccobono, and ACB president Dan Spoone on coping with COVID-19.

Etc.

Focus on the Family Marriage Podcast.

Timeless wisdom from Focus on the Family that will challenge and encourage you in your marriage.

Add this Podcast to the LeaseyCast List.

Blessing Your Spouse in Simple Ways.

Making your spouse feel loved never happens by accident. It requires paying attention and doing something to bless him or her. John, Greg and Erin explain
how they've learned to love their spouse through simple actions.

Download or Stream Blessing Your Spouse in Simple Ways.

Making Time for Date Nights.

Etc.

It is also possible for you to manually add a podcast feed if you happen to know it.

Please note that iTunes does not need to be installed for this functionality to work.

Other Changes.

When in the Outlook Attachments List, it is now possible to use Control+C to copy the attachment to the clipboard rather than pressing Shift+Tab to move to the Copy button.

In Microsoft Edge, you can now manipulate the slider for the speed of other voices in the Immersive Reader.

The presence of the Immersive Reader should now be spoken by JAWS whenever it is available. There are some situations currently where this is not the case.

There will be LeaseyBite audio tutorials available on all these points particularly the first two as their functionality requires some very detailed explanation.

We hope you will look forward to Leasey in June, and beyond as we have a lot of exciting features to come.

You've read about it in the news, you may have seen it on TV and it is possible you have used it. Zoom is one of the world's most popular communications software packages. Whether it is hosting meetings, lessons, podcasts or making simple calls to friends and family, Zoom has all you could ever need.

On a personal level, you might want to contact family members living far away. Professionally speaking on the other hand, meetings are the heartbeat of businesses and organisations. Information is shared, ideas are generated, decisions are made, and work is coordinated. But running an effective online meeting is different from doing so in-person and that’s why many are run ineffectively. A correctly run virtual session can be just as successful as an “in person meeting,” but many meeting leaders lack the full knowledge necessary.

Zoom can help with all your meeting needs. Yet, with a wide variety of functions there comes a complex app which many have difficulty in using or understanding how a specific feature works.

In our training course, "Time to Go Zoom", we'll show you how to work with many of Zoom's functions.

Why Produce a Training Course When Other Resources Are Already Available?

The simple answer to this one is that we've been repeatedly asked for it. There are plenty of free and excellent resources available, many of which we've been promoting for a long time. However, there are a number of areas in which people have requested more detail. Whether you are a beginner to the Zoom platform whose requirements are quite modest, through to someone who hosts events for professional organisations, we're very confident you will gain a lot from this training course.

Who Is the Course For? A Three Step Guide.

1. First-time users to Zoom who want a quick set-up guide;
2. Anyone who wants a handy guide to quickly use Zoom's core features;
3. Anyone who wants to save time without searching through confusing FAQ's

This course is presented in simple and clear terms, with a step-by-step approach that will help you to master the Zoom program within the shortest period of time.

Subjects Discussed in the Training Course.

The course is divided into five audio lessons, with a running time of close to six hours. Topics include:

• Creating a Zoom account.
• A discussion of Zoom plans.
• Choosing a suitable microphone.
• An overview of Settings in the desktop client.
• Learning the Zoom shortcut keys.
• An overview of settings on the Zoom website.
• The do's and don't's when participating in meetings.
• An overview of the desktop client prior to joining a meeting.
• Joining a meeting from a provided link or through the Meeting ID.
• Muting and unmuting your audio.
• Leaving a meeting.
• Starting an Instant Meeting.
• Managing screen-reader alerts. Decide what is important to you.
• Scheduling a meeting using the desktop client.
• Scheduling a meeting using the Microsoft Outlook Zoom Addin.
• Copying Meting Information details.
• Copying the meeting URL.
• An overview of the Zoom primary window and the meeting window.
• Examining important Zoom controls a word or character at a time.
• What is "Original Sound" and how does it work?
• The Participants List. This is a lengthy section with particular emphasis on muting and unmuting individual users, identifying hands which are raised to denote that a user wishes to speak, assigning a user to perform closed captioning, and banning users from a meeting. Particular emphasis will be placed on how blind people can independently carry out these actions while presenting the meeting as professionalism is always paramount.
• Muting and unmuting all users.
• Determining the name of the person speaking.
• Waiting Room access. Admitting all participants, admitting a user into the meeting individually, sending a user back to the waiting room.
• Recording a meeting using Zoom's own recording facility, both locally and in the cloud.
• Making higher quality recordings of meetings when on a budget and not using an audio mixer.
• Using Zoom with Braille.
• Sharing your screen and applications. This includes sharing the audio sound of your computer or screen-reader so it can be enjoyed by others. This section goes onto explain how to temporarily change user privileges regarding screen sharing.
• Text Chat Messages. Sending and receiving messages, reviewing messages received, saving chat messages.
• Ending a meeting.
• Starting and stopping video.
• Zoom Polling./li>
• An overview of Zoom Phone. How it works, sending and receiving calls, placing calls on hold, recording voicemail, and more.

You will also get to hear some demonstrations of Original Sound versus Zoom's own noise reduction capability, and you will get to experience what it is like to host a meeting with many participants.

A bonus lesson is included contributed by one of our course participants on the subject of breakout rooms.

Finally, the training course resources page points you in the direction of obtaining useful applications for your computer, together with hardware such as audio sound mixers and microphones.

Next Steps.

While the range of topics above may seem quite daunting, we are only tapping into the functionality offered by this amazing meetings client.

Conclusion.

With the current pandemic causing chaos around the world, Zoom has become a very vital tool for small, medium and large teams who want to stay connected and continue their daily workflows with minimal obstruction, as well as being able to host family gatherings at a distance or other social get-togethers. While we hope people will be relieved from social distancing at some point, the future looks bright for Zoom.

If you are looking to use Zoom professionally or personally, you need to know how to use it properly. Come along and find out how it is done! Z is for Zoom. All your friends in one room!

Hi to all

This blog post will quickly update you on recent events here at Hartgen Consultancy. It is being distributed to our email lists of relevance to the topics about to be discussed.

We've recently changed our telephone numbers for both the UK and the US. Please review our Contact US page on this site for details. As from this point, you should receive these details on all email messages being sent out including orders.

Next week, our training course in the use of the Everything program will take place. Anyone who has purchased this should by now have received full joining instructions.

Our scripts for the Zoom conferencing client are being updated week by week. Recently added was better support for waiting room access so we alert you in two ways: either if someone has entered or left a waiting room, and also whether you are in a waiting room awaiting admission to a meeting.
There is also the possibility that soon the scripts will support close captioning for those people who would like to submit and review text associated with that.

Now to Leasey. We hope soon to be releasing a new update. This has caused some complications because of a regression in the JAWS 2020 product concerning keyboarding. Vispero are very aware of the problem and are actively working on it, but we think we have a workaround for the time being.

The update to Leasey will include a feature expanding our ability to create web page Favourites. Placing them in different folders will be easily possible.
We hope to release this update next week assuming no other problems arise.

Now to training courses.

We've had suggestions for training courses from a large number of people, falling into two areas.

The first is using the Zoom conferencing client. We are fully aware that there are excellent free resources available, and from the outset we've always promoted those and will continue to do so. But they were prepared prior to many of the advancements in the JAWS scripts. Further, there are a large number of features which are not covered, including waiting room access, efficient ways to find users with raised hands, Zoom Phone and many other such areas. If anyone would be interested in such a course, do let us know and then a decision will be made as to whether we go ahead with it. We did hold back on this because of the various resources already available as there is no sense in duplicating what is already very good. But the number of enquiries mean that we need to put the idea out there.
If such a training course was to be available, we would need to do it fairly quickly.

The second suggestion is a training course on the effective use of the ElBraille. This is one which hasn't been attempted as far as we know, but it would very much depend upon how much interest there was in this.
Again, if there is such interest, let us know.

In closing, we would like to thank you for your patience in the response to technical support calls. As has been mentioned before, the work since the pandemic has doubled. But as of this moment, most things seem to be up-to-date. If you do need assistance, let us know and a time can be arranged with you if the query cannot be solved by Email.

Stay well and safe!

You may be aware that, starting on 4 April 2020, quite correctly Zoom Client Meetings have imposed a further level of security on meetings and events. This article discusses any accessibility implications regarding these, which should not take me too long to write because there are none.

Applying Passwords.

For all Basic users on free accounts and accounts with a single licensed user, Zoom meetings may require an additional password when setting up a meeting. This option is enabled by default.

There are no accessibility difficulties here and, if you had previously used such a password, JAWS will just respond in the same way as it always has. When scheduling a meeting, a password field is available. You can either accept the default one or change it to something of your choosing.

Meeting invitations including links for people to join already contain the password as part of the link so there should be no difficulty in this regard. They can simply activate the link so as to join the meeting.

Waiting Room Access.

The area which perhaps is a little different is Waiting Room access although it has always been present in the Zoom Client.

Zoom is enabling the Waiting Room feature by default. Waiting Room allows the host to control when a participant joins the meeting.

Waiting Room is one of the best ways to control who’s entering your Zoom meeting by giving you the option to admit participants individually or all at once. Zoom highly recommends using this feature to secure your meetings and prevent unwanted participants if a link is shared publicly.
If you do not want to use Waiting Room, you can disable it for your own meetings, an individual group on your account, or the entire account. This can be achieved in Settings for your account described below. Waiting Room can also be enabled or disabled at the time of scheduling and during a meeting.

Should you choose to use the Waiting Room feature, here is how to admit people using JAWS.

When a person attempts to join a meeting, he or she is placed in the Waiting Room. If screen-reader alerts are enabled, you will hear that a person is in the Waiting Room.

Press ALT+U so as to display the Participants Panel.
You should be focused in the list of participants.

Press Shift+Tab repeatedly from the Participants List. If people are in the Waiting Room, you should hear JAWS announce the presence of one or two Buttons: Admit All and Admit. If only one other participant is waiting, only the Admit button is spoken.

Pressing Shift+Tab once more will set focus to the list of people in the Waiting Room. This works in exactly the same way as lowering hands or unmuting users in the Participants List. Press Down Arrow so as to select the name of the person to admit to the meeting, then press Tab once to reach Admit. Finally, press the Space Bar.

Please note: there is no spoken alert advising you that a person is now in the meeting. You will need to Tab repeatedly until you reach the Participants List and check this.

Finally if necessary, press ALT+U to close the Participants List.

People Who Have Raised a Hand.

If people have raised hands during a meeting, it is worth noting that they should appear close to, or at the top of, the Participants List. Press the Home key by itself to reach the top of the list. The JAWS scripts now contain an audio cue as you move through the list to advise you of those people who have their hand raised. This should provide a blind person with a very quick overview as to the status of raised hands and is highly effective in managing large conferences.

Locating a participant with a hand raised can be achieved with the arrow keys, whereupon you can press Tab once to lower the hand or, to unmute or apply other options. As a side note, in the Other Options category, you can send a person back to the Waiting Room should you wish to do that.

Disabling Text Chat.

Particularly when working in large groups, it may be prudent on your part to disable text chat messages. If for example you have a guest speaker, it is extremely disconcerting for that person if messages are appearing in the text chat area which are disrespectful and can spoil the delivery of such a presentation. The JAWS scripts provide a high level of control over alerts and messages, so they can easily be filtered out globally if desired. It is when these messages are reviewed later that it could be embarrasing.

To disable chat, select the General category from Settings in the Zoom Meetings Client.

When selected, press Shift+Tab once to reach the link entitled "View More Settings Open in your default browser". Press Enter.

Navigate to the Heading: entitled "Chat" and you will find it can easily be disabled by working with the options underneath.

Happy Zooming!

As we mentioned last week, at Hartgen Consultancy we are trying to provide people with as much support as possible as they transition to work from home or who are forced to take a break from study. We've just released a new version of our Zoom scripts to support Zoom Phone, ideal for telephony work. This functionality was added as a direct result of people contacting us who are using it due to the current crisis.

As Vispero today have stated, anyone living in the United States of America and Canada can gain access to JAWS at no cost between now and 30 June 2020. We are following in their footsteps as far as we can to provide the following discounts and offers. All offers valid until 30 June 2020.

• Leasey Total Package One Year Access: Now £50 as opposed to £75. That's a £25 or $28 saving.
• Leasey Advanced One Year Access: Now £35 as opposed to £50. That's a £15 or $18 saving.
• Anyone who purchases one of our training courses can buy one and get one free. Just let us know which is your second choice.
• J-Dictate: Now £60 as opposed to £80. That's a £20 or $23 saving.

We very much hope that people can use this time to take advantage of our training courses to learn how JAWS can be used to work with applications. In the case of Leasey, we think this is a serious power-house of tools which can help with all manner of computing tasks, as well as creating a way for people who are less experienced to work with computers.

You will see updates to Leasey arriving in the coming weeks as next week we'll be working on the next one. We're about to investigate the possibility of ensuring easy access to Disney+ which is launched in the UK and parts of Europe this coming Tuesday. Netflix access and searching capabilities were introduced into Leasey this past month. We're also extending LeaseySearch to provide access to more resources and, don't forget that Leasey includes games too! A good chance to take your mind for a while off the troubles we have.

Finally, we've just released the archive of our successful training course "The Inside Edge, using Microsoft Edge with JAWS for Windows". Feel free to check it out in the Training area of our website. A new training course has also just been announced relating to the Everything search tools.

We wish everyone good health and please stay safe!

Do you need to find an important document quickly on your computer? How about searching for the song you want to hear which you know you've downloaded but cannot remember where it is? How about locating a report you've written which contains a specific word or phrase? These things and many more can be achieved through the Everything program from Voidtools.

The ambitiously named Everything is an accessible piece of easy-to-use Windows PC software that bypasses Windows search with a lightning quick interface and real-time results for all of the files and folders in your local storage device or any subsection of it. You can also search for text strings within the content of documents or maybe song or artist names of audio files. Its efficiency, effectiveness, stability, and low system resource usage make it a keeper utility.
How it works is the subject of our training course: "Hold Everything, using the Everything Program with JAWS for Windows".

If it's that simple, why do I need to buy a training course to learn how to use it?

Everything contains an enormous amount of power which you may not know about. Given that we use this program every day, we've learned lots of strategies to make searching for items quick and easy, all of which will be shared with you. And what's more, the JAWS scripts accompanying this class mean you gain even more power when using it.

Why Do You Need JAWS Scripts When the Application is So Accessible?

Purchase this course and find out. You will love what they can do to help you search for content you need to locate in seconds. When you use Everything to search for hundreds of items per day as we do, you'll discover how much time these scripts can save. JAWS is much more than a screen-reader and we've always pushed it to its absolute limit to enhance productivity. That's what you will find here.

What Will I Learn?

The training course is in one lesson of 90 minutes duration. The topics include:

• Carrying out a simple search.
• Examining the results.
• How the JAWS scripts significantly improve the searching experience.
• Open folder location.
• Filter by specific file type or group.
• Locating files exclusively in a folder.
• Finding files modified today or this week.
• Searching the content of files.
• A discussion of file indexing.
• Real-time updating.
• Finding recently modified files.
• Operators and Wildcards.
• Search ranking - opening frequently run files.
• Keyboard shortcuts.
• Everything's Options and Indexes.
• Locating Help information for topics we're not able to cover.

The training course is priced £30 which is approximately $35, and will give to you:

• A recording of the lesson in MP3 audio format which you can download whenever you want. The link to the file will not expire.

Alternatively, please send an email to
brian@hartgenconsultancy.com
whereupon an invoice can be sent to you so that you can pay for the training course online.

Conclusion.

Learn how to find folders and files with incredible ease and speed with Everything and JAWS for Windows. There's everything to gain and nothing to lose!

Hi to all

During the past few weeks, we've had quite a number of people learning what Leasey is all about and purchasing the product and we thank you for that. This has been largely due to various users advocating the benefits of Leasey on Email lists, Twitter and Facebook, together with Vispero's FSCast which gave us a lot of airtime.

All of our products, without exception, have an annual upgrade price applied to them. However, Leasey did not have this last year. The last upgrade cost we asked for was at the start of February 2018.

If you would like to obtain the new Leasey version 5 when it is made available in March 2020, and subsequent updates, the cost will once again be £20 which is $26.
In line with the policy applied to our other products, if Leasey (or an upgrade to it) has been purchased since December 2019, you will automatically be entitled to a free upgrade. We always give a three month grace period.

One thing to make clear. If you do not wish to upgrade Leasey to benefit from new features moving forward, you will still be able to access your earlier licence in the future should you need to reinstall it. The activation will not disappear just because you have not upgraded. However, if you do want to benefit from the good things to come this year, you will need to pay the upgrade fee. As well as funding Leasey development, it ensures that we can tap into the services we use for weather, news and other sources, all of which have to be paid for.

To ensure you can use the update on the day of release, feel free to purchase an upgrade licence here.

If you have any difficulty purchasing the upgrade, please feel free to get in touch with us.

What We've Achieved in the Past Two Years.

Leasey has undergone an enormous amount of work during the past two years, the highlights of which include:

• The Weather app was completely rewritten to make use of a new service. This included adding far more detail than users had before. When it was released to the public, further refinements were made to it and subsequently released.
• TVMaze search was made available to search for TV shows past and present and to give information about shows.
• The ability to create a new Outlook Email message, a new Outlook appointment, and a new Outlook task from any application. Microsoft Outlook does not need to be running initially to use this feature.
• Unprotect Microsoft generated documents with a keystroke.
• Support for the WordWeb dictionary.
• New radio stations added to the radio directory and the ability to update streams remotely when they change.
• Added a fully-featured currency converter which is incredibly easy to use.
• Added full support for the Last.FM service to browse music and gain information about it including song lyrics.
• Implemented an RSS newsreader.
• Re-worked the support for Spotify.
• Introduced Time Monitoring so you can monitor for synchronising a clock.
• Various calendar features, such as "Get Days From Dates", to view how many days fall between two dates, and "Days of Future and Past", so as to find out the date when a number of days have elapsed.
• A setting to take you directly into the properties for your soundcard.
• progress Bar indicator sounds to indicate progress of file downloads in browsers and most other progress bars.
• Move to the first or last instance of a web page element.
• Keystrokes in Microsoft Word to move to first, next, previous and last spelling and grammatical errors.
• New attachments list in Microsoft Outlook.
• LeaseyConnect, our Address Book, was completely rewritten.
• Added functionality to rename LeaseyNotes or move them from one category to another.
• Added more functionality to the HTML Assistant.
• Added support for the Microsoft Outlook calendar.
• Created a new interface to ensure ElBraille is easier to work with.
• Ensured our LeaseySelect facility could work in Mozilla Thunderbird.

Those are just the improvements which come to mind at present. Apart from very visible features, a lot went on behind the scenes, to improve Leasey's overall file structure and record LeaseyBite audio tutorials. We also made the Leasey User Guide available in text DAISY format.

More importantly, what is coming up this time?

To get us started this year, these are just some of the improvements we hope to make available in March 2020.

• We're currently testing support for Netflix. You can search by movie or TV show title, actor name etc, and get results back. When watching an item, you can use keystrokes similar to those we have for YouTube, such as Pause and Play, Volume Up and Down, Fast Forward and Rewind. We even have a facility to browse titles with audio description.
• In Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers, it is now possible to toggle whether JAWS speaks the auto-complete information as text is typed into the Address Bar. Similarly, when moving through the auto-complete list of entries with Up and Down Arrow, the output is cleaner and easier to understand.
• In Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, you can save a web page shortcut to your Favourites folder, or any folder of your choosing. We would prefer you use LeaseyCuts as they are quicker and easier to manage, but that facility is there.
• Added Leasey support in Firefox to indicate via an audio cue when a new page is loaded, when you move back a page, and other functionality specific to Leasey available in other browsers.
• We previously added a script to end selection and copy it to the Clipboard automatically. A key has been introduced so as to end the selection and append the text to the clipboard.
• When creating a LeaseyClip, and no text is selected, we use the text on the clipboard instead.
• LeaseySearch now allows you to search the new RNIB Home Reading service for the downloading of books in DAISY format.
• Many people use our list of attachments script in Microsoft Outlook to bring all attachments into a vertical list. We've added the ability to copy those attachments to an alternative location in addition to opening them.
• We've undertaken some work in Outlook meeting requests so as to provide some improved spoken output when navigating items you have received.
• When using the list of recent Google searches list, we've given you the ability to remove an item from it. Some people make heavy use of this list.
• When using OpenTween, we've ensured that entries from LeaseyConnect can be accessed. This was working, but due to the change in Leasey's file structure it stopped being available.
• Added more functionality into the HTML Assistant by customer request.
• A keystroke exists to speak the Windows version number being used.
• When carrying out searches in Leasey's YouTube search, and on Google, the first result was not being located. This is now fixed.
• If Leasey's sound scheme is enabled, and you move to a previous page, a "backward" sound is heard. Leasey already has the ability to play a sound when a new page loads.

There are also some other features in the works. For example, we are looking at the ability through LeaseySearch to search the MixCloud service of audio shows. This looks very promising.

We hope people will continue to enjoy all that Leasey has to offer!