For example, if my cursor is at the beginning of the sentence, “I love cats”, and I press delete 11 times, I will hear “space”, “l”, “o”, “v”, “e”, space,”c”, “a”, “t”, “s”. What does ZoomText Fusion do when we delete characters? What is this similar to doing?Īs we delete characters, ZoomText Fusion will read the character we are about to delete. With the cursor in position, press the delete button 24 times. For example, if my cursor is at the end of the word “cat” and I press left arrow 3 times, I will hear ZoomText Fusion say “t”, “a”, “c”.
What does ZoomText Fusion do when we move through our writing with the arrow buttons?Īs we move through a line or word or paragraph with the left and right arrow keys, ZoomText Fusion will read out the character we just moved past. You can move the cursor by pressing the left arrow button. When you’re done, move the cursor over to the left so that it is positioned right behind the exclamation point after, “Hello World”.
Type out the line, “Hello World! I am writing in Word with Zoomtext Fusion!” The page is ready to take your input from the keyboard.Įxercise: Go to your desktop and open Microsoft Word. Reading & Writing When you open a new document in most document editor programs, your cursor will be at the beginning of the document. We’ll learn some specifics of using Word later. We’ll be practicing using a Microsoft Word document. What is an electronic document? Think of Microsoft Word files (.docx), Adobe Reader files (.pdf), email messages (.msg), and text files (.txt.
Note that there are also great lightweight text-to-speech options on iOS.Start Reading and Writing In this lesson, we’re going to start learning how to use ZoomText Fusion to navigate, read, and edit an electronic document. Here's a few tools you may want to consider on Windows. The answer to the question above will determine what text-to-speech tool you introduce. Eventually, they may come to the conclusion that audio is easier and faster and painless so they may be willing to invest the time to learn a screen reader or at least the screen reading functions of a magnifier like ZoomText. Once the student sees the value in text-to-speech they may be willing to use it in other circumstances. Let's find an alternative solution for that task that uses text-to-speech. what is the most painful/slow/frustrating task that your student must perform on a regular basis with their nose on the screen? I also recommend that you find a way to introduce text-to-speech in a way that solves a problem that is particularly painful for the student. I think you are very wise to introduce text-to-speech technology in a way that creates the minimum amount of friction and learning curve. Unfortunately, there is a huge learning curve for JAWS and other screen readers. As a result, they will probably never read for pleasure. They will correctly view reading as a painful experience to be avoided. Nausia and fatigue will greatly undermine their reading speed and endurance. That is particularly true for low vision students with their face inches from the screen. However, I believe all students with visual impairments can benefit from text-to-speech technology. Unfortunately, that behavior is specific to SAS Graphics Accelerator. We designed the speech output within SAS Graphics Accelerator to provide the appropriate amount of information to users given the context.