AssistiveWare released VisioVoice 1.1 for Vision-Impaired Mac Users

VisioVoice enhances access to Mac OS X for people with vision impairments through a system-wide talking interface and typing echo, text and image zoom windows, large cursors as well as a document and selection reader. VisioVoice provides naturally sounding voices through the included license of Infovox iVox for one language of choice. VisioVoice can also convert text, Word, PDF, HTML and RTF documents to audio files and iPod and iPhone-ready audiobooks. The new version of VisioVoice will be demoed at the Closing The Gap conference next week.

VisioVoice 1.1 new and improved features:

• Now provides a typing echo as the user types into any application.
• The text zoom window now updates as the user types.
• Talking interface enhanced to work not only with the mouse but also with full keyboard access.
• Talking interface and typing echo support was added for Pages and Keynote (iWork '08 and later).
• Improved support for reading text in Safari with VisioVoice's talking interface.
• Improved PDF import with smart-stripping of end-of-line hyphens.
• Japanese localization was added as well as a Japanese translation for the Mac OS X 10.4 version of Apple's VoiceOver screen reader for blind users. Use with DTalker 3.0 Japanese voices (http://www.createsystem.co.jp/dtalkerMacOSX.html).
• Enhanced compatibility with VoiceOver: if the included Infovox iVox voices are used with VisioVoice, VoiceOver will no longer cut-off speech generation.
• Now Leopard-ready.
• Many other improvements and fixes.

While VisioVoice provides as much support as is technically possible for applications that do not support Apple's accessibility API, best results can be expected when using VisioVoice with accessible applications such as TextEdit, Safari, iChat and others.

VisioVoice is a Universal Binary and can be used on PowerPC and Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or later. VisioVoice is localized in English, French, Dutch and Japanese. VisioVoice includes a license for Infovox iVox for naturally sounding voices in one language of choice. Voices are currently available for the following languages: American English, British English, Finnish, French, Canadian French, German, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, American Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian and Swedish.

Pricing for VisioVoice is 249 Euro/USD excluding VAT for non-Scandinavian languages. Version 1.1 is a free and recommended upgrade for existing users. [Bill Fox]