Important Messages, such as Service Disruption and Opening Times.

Hartgen Consultancy closing dates are as follows:
Friday 20 December 2024 through to Monday 6 January 2025.

During these dates, urgent technical support queries, together with sales orders, will be processed by Email only.
This is exactly the same procedure as previous years.

Are usual opening hours are Monday to Friday 9 AM to 5 PM UK time, excluding public holidays.

What's New in Leasey Version 7!

Leasey Version 7 Is Just a Few days Away!

Version 7 of our popular Leasey product is now available. Our beta testers have been hard at work testing the new improvements and features. We're extremely grateful for their dedication and support of this product.

We're now ready to let you know about the new improvements which are briefly outlined below. Our documentation describes the additions in full.
The documentation has been significantly revised to the extent that it is now close to 400 pages.
It is available as HTML, Microsoft Word format or DAISY text.
So that you do not need to struggle to read the entire document, we have placed the very significant changes on this page.

Leasey version 7 is a chargeable upgrade, so let's go through what you need to know about that.

If you have purchased Leasey from 1 December 2021 onwards, your upgrade is at no cost. With our products, we always have given a three month grace period to be as fair as possible to people who have only recently purchased it.

There is no pressure to upgrade Leasey. Your existing copy will not stop working, nor will it do so if you decide to uninstall it and reinstall at a later time. You'll know already that Leasey version 6 is working alongside JAWS version 2022 so you have excellent support there. However, if you would like any of the below changes or fixes moving forward, you will need to use Leasey version 7.

If you are using an older version of Leasey, for example version 5, the cost is the same as upgrading from version 6 to 7. We never charge for incremental upgrades.

Leasey Version 7 upgrade is priced £25 which is approximately $33.
You can pre-order and upgrade Leasey here.

New Features.

So let's dive in and see what's new.

Fixed or changed in the most recent build.

Atmosphere Radio has been added to the Dance radio category.

When viewing the list of ALT Codes, they are now displayed in alphabetical order.

The function to cause JAWS to announce the time using hours, minutes and
seconds is now restored to the Leasey Clock menu.

If you install Leasey 7 as a new user rather than upgrading, you cannot
install the LeaseyGames.

If you press Control+Shift+A in Microsoft Edge to disable the additional
verbosity, the setting is not retained if JAWS is restarted.

The keystroke to move to the next link of any type in a Chrome-based browser
and Edge is changed from Leasey Key space to full-stop or period by itself.

If you use the default JAWS command to append text to the Windows Clipboard,
Windows Insert C, it now works with the new Leasey
quick select facility.

If you try to select text within a "read only" Outlook message you no longer receive an unknown function call.

If you select a word in a document, and then use a LeaseySearch tool such as
Wikipedia, Google or Oxford Dictionary, the selected word is now in the edit
field.

The new keystrokes for VLC bookmarking are now listed correctly in Hotkey
Help.

Brilliance for BrailleSense.

In version 6 of Leasey, we introduced Elegance for ElBraille. Rather than remembering lots of often complex key sequences, it is possible to use the Braille input keyboard on the ElBraille or a Focus Braille display to very easily control your computer just by typing logical commands, such as, Windows Space D, to move to the Windows desktop.
Absolutely no thought or learning required. If you know the Windows or screen-reading keystrokes to use ordinarily, you can use your ElBraille in a matter of minutes.

We're very glad to be able to bring to you the same functionality using the BrailleSense in terminal screen-reading mode. Once the BrailleSense has communication with JAWS, you have exactly the same functionality to control your PC, carry out screen-reading commands, create abbreviations to common Windows functions and more.

Improved text Selection.

Since people began to meet Leasey, we have always had the ability to more easily select text in many applications. When text is selected, you can of course manipulate it in any way you choose.

You can still work in the same way as you always have by marking the start and end points of the potential selection. But now, you can save yourself some keystrokes. Mark the start point of the selection, but you do not need to mark the end point. Just place the cursor at the potential end point and use a command such as Control+C for copy or Control+B in Microsoft Word. You are also able to copy such text to a LeaseyClip.

Protecting LeaseyClips.

By customer request, we've added the ability to protect LeaseyClips from being overwritten. Once protected, and you try to copy new text to the same clip, Leasey will prevent you from overwriting it.

Removing Microsoft Edge Announcements.

Ordinarily, as you carry out actions in Microsoft Edge, such as when loading a new web page into the browser, you will hear messages such as "Loading Page". You can now stop these announcements from being spoken by JAWS.

Relocating Previous Web Page Position.

If you move to a new web page by pressing Enter on a link, and then go back to the previous page, there are often times where focus is lost from the position where you left off reading. You can now press a keystroke to relocate the previous position. Note that this also works within Microsoft Outlook. So, having activated a link from within an Email message, and you return to it, if the cursor position is lost the keystroke can be pressed to relocate it.

Scripts for APH Studio Recorder.

We've added a comprehensive set of JAWS scripts to support the APH Studio Recorder application. In addition to giving you convenient keystrokes for reading important information, they also include a facility to reverse the functionality of audio playback and pause with Space and Enter. For those people using applications such as Sound Forge, this makes the transition to Studio Recorder much easier.

Browsing 7 Digital.

Access to the 7 Digital music service has now been added to LeaseySearch. This gives access to high quality music files for purchase.

ALT Codes.

You may have come across a situation where you need to enter a character into your text edit area which is not present on your keyboard. As a basic example, what if you need to enter a pound sign and your keyboard layout does not accommodate it? This is where ALT codes come into play.

In some situations, there is a very nice and efficient way of entering such special characters by pressing and holding the ALT key, and simultaneously entering the character’s decimal value on the numeric keypad. This is where the term ALT codes comes from. For example, to enter the ellipsis, you could press and hold the ALT key, and enter 0133. This would give you the appropriate character. For the • character, you could enter the code 0149.
However, this requires you to turn NumLock on, (not intuitive for screen-reader users needing the NumPad), and this also presupposes that either there is a NumPad on your keyboard, or at least you can turn the central part of your keyboard into a numPad.

Leasey version 7 now has a special tool for entering the ALT codes available. Pressing the key to start the process asks for the ALT code to be typed. For those who are very familiar with this practice, it is simply a matter of typing the code, pressing Enter and the relevant sign is inserted into the text area.
If the user presses the same keystroke again, the edit field contains the same code as previously entered in the event the sign needs to be repeated.

For those who are not familiar with the codes, if the edit field is vacant, pressing Enter will bring into view a list of all the ALT codes available. The description is given together with the code number. This serves two purposes. First, a code can be selected from the list and the Enter key pressed to insert the relevant sign. Second, giving the code values in this way helps anyone in learning them so that they can be entered manually at a later time, bypassing the list.

In the event a person prefers to use the list of codes constantly, focus never returns to the top of it each time it is entered. The option just used gains focus automatically in the event that the sign needs to be repeated.

Improvements to Existing Features.

  • Leasey Text Selection is working in the new version of Notepad for Windows11.
  • When in the list of LeaseyCuts for web pages, pressing Control+C should now copy the URL for the focused cut.
  • When pasting LeaseyClips, in most cases Leasey no longer removes trailling spaces.
  • You can now press a keystroke so as to output the system clock to the Braille display which refreshes each second. All Braille displays supported.
  • It is now possible to get a list of packages you have tracked via Track Package in LeaseySearch.
  • You can press a keystroke to copy the elapsed time in the Stopwatch to the Windows clipboard.
  • Microsoft Outlook Calendar functionality contains some improvements in line with recent application changes.
  • The radio update facility is working again so we can make changes to streams more quickly.
  • If using Leasey Advanced, the keys for use with Leasey Basic have been removed as they are unnecessary. These are for the Leasey main menu, context menu and help. The LeaseyManager keystroke is also removed as the functionality only applies to Leasey Basic. This means that more experienced JAWS users can once again use those keystrokes for the functionality for which they were intended.
  • Functionality has been added to Winamp and VLC media players so you can easily relocate your last played position in an audio file.
  • Within VLC Media player, you can now set, move to and delete bookmarks.
  • From any application, pressing Insert+T twice quickly will virtualise the window title so you can read it more carefully. A link at the bottom of the window allows you to copy the text to the Windows clipboard.
  • JAWS will now not double speak Windows notifications.
  • LeaseyAlerts should now work on Facebook pages.
  • OpenTween JAWS scripts are once again included.

Conclusion.

The next major update to Leasey is already being worked on containing some new features. You can hear about some of these in the upcoming version of the Mosen at Large podcast.

We hope you enjoy using the new release of Leasey!

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