What's New From Hartgen Consultancy 2021!

Hi to all.

It has been a while since we updated you on news relating to what is happening at Hartgen Consultancy, so I thought I would take the time to do that now. While the pandemic continues and it is snowing outside, there's still a lot to celebrate in terms of what we are doing. So here are the highlights.

After successfully launching our product The Muze in December, we were lucky to be able to work with the developer of one of the music sources we use, so as to improve the functionality a little further. This meant that with the Ultimate Music Database, it is now possible to input the title of a song and have the results returned quickly, detailing the song artist, name, UK and US chart positions. We wanted this as part of the initial release, but it was only after working with the developer that we could make this happen. So we're thrilled about that.

Participants are now working through our training course in the use of the audio application Studio Recorder. This has meant more JAWS script writing than perhaps we would have liked, but the end results are very good and ensure that blind people really can get access to information quickly and in a concise format. The scripts also reduce the number of conflicts between JAWS and Studio Recorder.

Our next training course relates to using Microsoft Teams which is becoming particularly important in employment and education. You can check the details here.

Our scripts for the Zoom conferencing client continue to evolve. There have been tremendous improvements in the area of reducing speech output in the Participants List as this tends to refresh often when people speak, raise a hand, or enter and leave a room. The accurate reporting of audio recording we hope has also been improved upon.

And finally, we're about to launch a very significant update to our StationPlaylist scripts for JAWS. This week, users of these scripts will benefit from a range of new features and improvements. Again, getting things done quickly and easily without a lot of complication is the focus here. You can read about what is coming.

A small number of people have asked if it will be possible for our StationPlaylist scripts to work alongside our Leasey product in the same JAWS version. As soon as we are confident the new release of the StationPlaylist scripts is working for most people, there will be a version of them which will work with Leasey. To say again, this only affects in our view a very small number of users, but we are pleased to be able to do this.

In summary, further development on all products will continue as we move into the spring, and that includes new improvements for Leasey and J-Say especially.

Feel free to check out the links we have pointed you to and we hope very much to being able to work with many of you in 2021.