ZoomText Fusion and Hartgen Consultancy Products: a Powerful Combination.

If you missed the news announced on VFO's FSCast Podcast yesterday, a new product comes to the accessibility market soon called zoomText Fusion.

Originally conceived to provide access to the Window-Eyes screen-reader with the ZoomText screen-magnifier, ZoomText Fusion has now been reborn to provide low vision users the ability to use JAWS for Windows and ZoomText. It is a powerful keyboard-driven magnification product to include an enhanced level of speech within a screen magnification environment.

ZoomText Fusion is ideally suited to organisations and establishments where there may be a varied user need, or indeed individuals whose vision fluctuates during the day and may well require additional sophisticated screen-reading to complement their use of the display with the computer mouse.

Although ZoomText Fusion is not released as of the time of this writing, we can already say that all of our products, without exception, are working with it. To be clear, that is StationPlaylist Studio, J-Dictate, Leasey and J-Say. So when browsing our website and looking at our product range, you can be confident that if you plan to use ZoomText Fusion, you can do so when you buy a package from us.

In terms of J-Say, towards the summer we do intend to add a range of voice commands so as to control the features of ZoomText which potentially you would want to change by speaking to the computer. These might be to change magnification levels, to control mouse pointer or colour settings, to name but a few examples. When creating this level of access, we will be sure not only to make it possible to control the requested feature but we will also give audio cues as to the status of the changed function. This will not only assist users but particularly blind trainers who are assisting people with low vision. That's an essential component so the blind trainer has confidence in delivering his or her classes or home tuition.

Our Leasey product will, in time, receive an update to provide low vision users with additional functionality.

In order for our products to work with ZoomText Fusion, users will need a new license. If you are purchasing a product from us for the first time, you can let us know whether it is for ZoomText Fusion or JAWS. If you are upgrading from JAWS to ZoomText Fusion, and you already own one of our products, the license can be transferred for an extremely nominal charge. Please talk to us if this applies to you.

In summary, there's nothing stopping any ZoomText Fusion user right now using our products, and in the coming months, they will be enhanced further to make the user experience even easier.

Remember too that our Training Area contains low cost training courses which may well assist a new user of Fusion getting up to speed with some of the keyboard commands for applications and many of the features specific to JAWS. This would be useful if a low vision user has not worked with JAWS previously.

We're very excited about bringing our product range to low vision users. We've wanted to do this for a long time as we have been asked for it on many occasions. ZoomText Fusion gives us this opportunity and on behalf of future customers, we would like to thank the team at VFO for making it possible.