Fruitbox

ClipSpeak is a lightweight text-to-speech tool that speaks text you copy to the clipboard. It’s small, and tries not to be in the way, keeping user interfaces and interaction to a minimum. I intend this to be a quick and easy tool to use when you need something read aloud.
Right now it just sits in the system tray’s icon area, reading whatever you copy to the clipboard with the currently selected SAPI5 synthesizer in the control panel’s speech dialogue.

I intend to have the first release up on CodePlex within the next month.

ClipSpeak at CodePlex

Flimag hasn’t had much progress since my last post. I’ve been poking around at this thing and that and thought about things now and then. This project is quite difficult, and requires much time, so I’ve decided to work on something else for awhile. Check out the post above!

So I’ve been looking at this thing and that, trying to figure out what to use for Flimag, and I found out that Windows Vista finally has a compositing window manager, Desktop Window Manager. With composition, windows are drawn separately into buffers, and this sounds like it could be very useful for a screen magnifier. I believe many of the Linux magnifiers use this methodology.

A Screen Magnifier Using “High Level” Implementation Techniques.
This is yet another great paper, not relying on DirectX overlays!

Here’s a very interesting paper:
Full-screen magnification for Windows using DirectX overlays [PDF]
This is exactly what I’m after, so now I’m trying to decide which tools to use. Managed DirectX, SlimDX, OpenGL, …?

ZoomText 9 är för närvarande långsamt, trögt, söligt, segt, … sa jag långsamt? Vad gör man åt det? Man köper en ny dator med två, fyra, eller rent av åtta kärnor, och hoppas på att ZoomTexts prestanda ska förbättras, men det man möter är ingen trevlig syn.
Vid uppstart kommer ZoomText 9 att se till så att alla program som är igång (och de du kommer starta) inte kan använda mer än en kärna (CPU 0). Vilken smidig lösning på prestandaproblemet!
Jag kringgick detta genom att använda ett program som sätter processortilldelningen och ser till att inte ZT kan ändra det. Get and Set Affinity heter det.
Tillslut valde jag ändå att gå tillbaks till ZoomText 8, som verkar vara för gammalt för att ens känna till flera kärnor. Ha!

What is it?
Flimag (pronounced fly mag), the fast and lightweight magnifier is a screen magnifier for Windows. Right now it is just an idea.

What is so special about it?
Flimag is intended to be different than e.g. ZoomText and MAGic. Its main purpose is to be fast, responsive and compatible, providing a lightweight alternative for people who just needs a basic full-screen magnifier that is fast and works well with other applications.

Why not use what is available?
The big magnifiers out there certainly have many nice features, but they are slow, doesn’t keep up well with new technology, require immense system resources, and in addition to that they might disable graphics acceleration and maybe even secondary cores on multi-core systems. The architecture they use is old: There should be better options today.

How will Flimag do it?
The big magnifiers out there use custom device drivers they hook in between the GDI and the graphics driver, and I intend to stay away from that. I have not yet decided on a replacement, but right now I am looking at using hardware overlays. Doing so would have the benefits of very little overhead and working hardware acceleration (since that is what it uses anyway).

In what language will Flimag be written?
Probably C#.

Will Flimag be open-source?
Yes!

When will the development start?
Yes folks, this is the hard one. I have already been thinking about this project for about a year now, so who knows. Every now and then I am experimenting with something related to this, and that is the way it is going to be for a bit longer, until I feel I know enough about the underlying technology.

Do you have ideas? Suggestions?
Know the Windows API?
Know a lot about DirectX/OpenGL?
Contact me!

One of the first things I did in C# was to rewrite an application that I previously wrote using C++ and the Win32 API.
It is a magnifier that works in a window of arbitrary size. It works by taking a portion of the screen defined by a square with the mouse pointer at it’s top-left corner (in my example, a 200 by 200 area) and copying it onto a form, stretching it as necessary.
This is what I did:
1. I create a new WinForms application in Visual Studio.
2. In the properties window of the form, make sure double buffering is enabled.
3. In the class public partial class Form1 : Form I add the following member:
private Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(200, 200, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
I also add an additional using-statement: using System.Drawing.Imaging;
4. Finally I override the OnPaint event to do what I want, and to cause an immediate invalidation of the form:

protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e)
{
Graphics pgfx = e.Graphics;
pgfx.CopyFromScreen(Cursor.Position.X, Cursor.Position.Y, 0, 0, Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Size, CopyPixelOperation.SourceCopy);
pgfx.DrawImage(bmp, 0, 0, this.ClientRectangle.Width, this.ClientRectangle.Height);
this.Invalidate();
}


Not very useful, but neat!
A bad thing right now is that the form continually repaints itself, despite the fact that this might not be needed. A possibility would be to only repaint the form when the mouse cursor moves, although that would cause problems with other things in the area that might change, a progress bar for instance.

A quick note on my previous quick note on news from the AT world.
The same day I wrote that post I stumbled upon a blog called — what a coincidence — ZoomText Scripting!
Apparently, AI Squared is working on adding scripting capability to ZoomText. This is precisely the one thing I hoped they would get into implementing.
Check out the website at: http://zoomtextscripting.com/

Just a quick post to share what I consider the most important news in the AT world. As you know by now this has to do with magnifiers and screen readers.
So first off — ZoomText — what has happened? Not much, really. I am disappointed.
Off we go to JAWS then. JAWS 9 public beta is out, and the most significant change for me in this release is the support for the standard GMail interface, yay!
Next up we have Issist, the creators of iZoom, who now has released “the world’s first web-based screen magnifier”, which is pretty neat!
NVDA is progressing steadily. I should get to updating the Swedish translation (which I haven’t done since the 0.5 release).
When it comes to Linux, Orca is still going strong on the screen reader side, while we have a new program on the magnifiers’ side, namely the zoom plug-in for compiz-fusion. I haven’t tested this yet, but it’s supposed to be the greatest so far.

At BlindWebAccess.com you will find a petition I ask all of the readers of this blog to sign. You can read more about it at the mentioned site.
Yahoo is a big company, and their services should definitely be accessible to the blind and the visually impaired.

View and sign the petition here!

NVDA 0.5 är nu klar för hämtning.

Gå hit för att ladda ner installationen, eller hit för att hämta zip-versionen (som går att köra från t.ex. ett USB-minne).

Installationen har förnärvarande engelskt tal (men svensk text).
När du kör programmet första gången kommer gränssnittets och talsyntesens språk automatiskt att sättas till det språk du har Windows.
På svenska finns för tillfället bara det hjälpdokument som visas i NVDA:s huvudfönster (Kom igång med NVDA).
För en mer omfattande guide på engelska kan du titta in här.

Jag har översatt NVDA till svenska. Nästa stabila version är en stor milstolpe, v 0.5, och kommer att släppas snart. Den kommer att innehålla det svenska språkstödet, och svensk talsyntes tackvare eSpeak. Ladda gärna hem och testa, och meddela mig problem med översättningen. Observera att vissa saker inte ännu går att översätta, såsom skriptnamn i tangentbordshjälp, eller “in” när man trycker insert+numpadPlus.
En stor fördel med NVDA är att man kan sätta den på ett USB-minne och använda på andra windowsdatorer utan att behöva installera någonting.

Let us all have a look at NVDA. It is a a free and open-source screen reader for Windows that is being developed in Python. Despite this it is impressively responsive. It is in fact so responsive I do not see a need to rewrite it at all (at least not at this point). Using the very lightweight eSpeak synthesizer you can easily compare the performance to that of using JAWS with Eloquence.
I have translated part of the application into Swedish, and as eSpeak has quite a promising Swedish voice this seems to work quite well!

I have just read that Freedom Scientific is suing Serotek, claiming trademark infringement for use of the term “FreedomBox”.
I do not know much about this yet, but to keep up with the latest news on the topic be sure to check out Blind Access Journal.