An Incredible Year For Hartgen Consultancy!

Hi Everyone!

We would like to wish you all happy holidays and a very merry Christmas. As some of you may know, we are closed for business as of next Monday at 12 PM UK time, and I wanted to ensure all our Email lists and social media outlets had this notice before we go away for the Christmas holidays.

This has been an incredible year for us at Hartgen Consultancy. We would like to thank those of you who have purchased products from us, our beta testers for the hard work and time they have invested in getting the products to where they need to be, and our wonderful product distributors who sell and support what we have to offer. We're very grateful to everyone.

Let me choose some highlights to celebrate this year.

Leasey has had an amazing year in 2022. More features have been added during the past 12 months than any other year. Those which particularly stand out are all our new search tools, such as Amazon, EBay, time conversions, holidays, recipes etc. Support for WhatsApp was introduced and that will be extended next year. The help system was improved which included the ability for people to create their own custom notes for applications. And we mustn't forget being able to store settings in the cloud so they can be used on multiple machines.

The LeaseyBites have made a return in the form of a podcast, and new episodes are set to be recorded in the early new year. One of the reasons for their continuation is because we will have new features to show you in version 8 of the product. The new release is being worked on right now!

Another area which has seen significant growth this year would be training and scripting. This is particularly true in the area of JAWS script writing for government departments and organisations, but it also includes our range of training courses. We had a training course this year called Jaw Muscles (containing useful JAWS for Windows tips), a huge course entitled SenseAbility devoted to the BrailleSense 6, Opening Windows (useful Windows tips and procedures), and Catching Up With JAWS (to get people up-to-date with the latest features in the screen-reader). Using the Brave browser is first on the list for next year.

All the segments in the Webinars are divided into separate files for easy navigation, and people love the text transcripts too. The archive and text is usually available within 12 hours of an individual Webinar. We think that is fast.

Our other products have also had updates this year including J-Say for voice recognition. Many people are benefiting from J-Say as each week goes by.

The only fly in the ointment is Microsoft Teams. Development to improve some major flaws in the accessibility of Teams is exceptionally slow, and it would be good to see some improvement in that area next year.

The ability to support customers more effectively took a giant leap forward this year with the new update to Remote Incident Manager from Pneuma Solutions. This not only makes it possible to resolve difficulties more quickly, but also assists in the area of training and demonstrations. It really does make the world of difference in terms of what can be achieved.

And finally, we were thrilled to be presented with an award for excellence by the Pennsylvania Council of the Blind. This was the 2022 Impact Community Award. You can check out the full details of that on the Home Page of our web site.

Again, thank you all for helping make 2022 the wonderful year that it has been and we look forward very much to helping more people use their computers next year!

Brian Hartgen