A New Update to our Leasey Girl and Where She is Headed!

We're very glad to be able to bring you the next update to our product Leasey, which is free to all version 4 users. If you haven't got your hands on version 4 yet, you can upgrade here to keep up with the latest updates.

Please read these notes carefully. It explains the changes in the new update, how to install it, and plans for improving access to applications for the rest of the year.

New Improvements.

In brief, these are the new changes to Leasey. More information concerning them can be found in our documentation.

ElBraille.

You can now more easily control your ElBraille (or a Focus display) if you do not know the Braille input commands as provided by the device. Press Shift+1 with letter B in order to bring into view the Edit Field whereupon you can enter a Windows or JAWS keystroke. Our documentation (Or Leasey's Help System) has an ElBraille category describing the other keystrokes, including the ability to find text more quickly, to delete text segments and to select text.

This is our first try at improving functionality for the ElBraille and we hope you enjoy using it.

Don't forget to check out our latest LeaseyBite audio tutorial to hear a demonstration of this functionality in action.

LeaseyConnect.

LeaseyConnect has been completely rewritten!

LeaseyConnect is our simple address book. It allows you to store and retrieve contact details for individuals and companies, read telephone numbers, send Email directly from it, and even reproduce frequently used Twitter usernames, either for sending a direct message or a mention. The next LeaseyBite audio tutorial to come will explain and demonstrate this in more detail.

While LeaseyConnect has been in place since version 1 of Leasey back in 2014, it needed significant revisions. This has now been done and is part of our project to rebuild some of Leasey's older functions to keep pace with modern Windows versions.

OpenTween.

Very good support for the OpenTween Twitter client has existed for some years and this has been improved. In particular, when the application is closed down by pressing ALT+F4, and then restarted, press F12 so as to resume your place where you stopped reading. You can also bookmark a tweet to get back to by pressing Control+Windows+K, and then F12 to return to your position.

You can find out more about our OpenTween training course here, and also refer to the section of this document relating to upcoming plans for Leasey.

Sounds Scheme.

Many people like to have audio cues play as a substitute for speech prompts. For example, when working with our LeaseyClips which enhance productivity considerably, it is more useful to have a sound play when text is copied to a LeaseyClip, or where its contents are pasted elsewhere.

We now have a Sounds Scheme which can be activated by pressing the Leasey Key followed by letter O. This rotates between three options: sounds on, sounds off and sounds with speech. This final item means that the sounds will play but the speech prompts are also spoken at the same time, meaning you can get used to what the sounds are like within the context of what is happening.

Do try the sounds, we think you will like them. We have sounds to represent LeaseyClips, selecting text, the reproduction of LeaseyTexts, and even for when a web page has completely loaded in your browser which our testers find very helpful.

Notepad and Wordpad.

You can now set LeaseyPoints in Notepad and Wordpad documents,. They also work in the Jarte word processor too! LeaseyPoints are like bookmarks, in that you can set up to 10 per document and go back to them at any time. We've had them in Microsoft Word and web pages for a long time. They have now been extended for documents in Notepad, Wordpad and Jarte.

An important change occurs in the Find dialog box. Ordinarily, if you wanted to find text, you would have typed it, pressed Enter, followed by Escape. You will now find that when you press Enter, Leasey will locate the text and read the current line. This was an essential requirement for the ElBraille functionality, but again, people have commented how helpful this is.

Updating Your Existing Version of Leasey.

Because of major internal changes to Leasey's folder structure, updating of Leasey this time involves downloading a full installer and running it. There is no need to uninstall your existing product.

Be sure to download the product you are authorised for, either Leasey Total Package or Leasey Advanced. If you are not sure which product you are authorised for, send an email containing your JAWS serial number to support@leaseycentral.com.

If you require assistance in installing the product, and you need a remote support call, again please send us an email so we can arrange an appointment to do this. Please be patient if this is the case as there is always a queue.

Leasey's Future.

We hope you enjoy this new release of Leasey, but we wanted to take this opportunity of outlining plans for the rest of the year which should hopefully reduce the number of questions along these lines we receive.

Development of Leasey will proceed in this order.

OpenTween Twitter Client. There are four areas of OpenTween we would like to provide greater access to. These are by no means essential, but we will have them in place and tested prior to 16 August which is when changes regarding Twitter will occur.

Skype Version 8. It is our intention to provide high quality support for Skype version 8 prior to September. To anticipate a question, Skype version 8 is very usable now. However access to it could be improved upon, and extensive tutorial information provided. Both of these issues will be addressed.

Spotify. Access to this application is not satisfactory at present. This will be rectified after September 2018. We are hopeful that we can return functionality to that which we previously enjoyed.

LeaseyBasic. This is our human speaking interface for complete computer beginners. This works well, however there are ways in which it could be improved. This is our project as we head towards the end of 2018.

Conclusion.

We hope you continue to enjoy Leasey. We're delighted with the number of people who see this product as not only a good vehicle for individuals to begin using a computer for the first time, but particularly those who wish to seriously improve efficiency and productivity when using their computers with JAWS. We look forward to completing the work outlined above and to introduce more features in 2019!