Never Buy Read Iris, or Anything Else, from Iris Link

This person isn’t the first to have problems with the rip-off/scam artists known as Iris Link. This company is well known for making software that fails to work and doesn’t have features advertised, providing extremely poor customer support, failing to provide serial numbers for previously purchased software, and much worse. In my particular case, it took over a week, plus an email and two phone calls, to provide me with the serial number when I purchased Read Iris 11 for OS X, because of what they said was a flaw in their software. I’m now having troubles with my Read Iris 12 license, and have discovered that Read Iris 12 doesn’t work quite right with voiceover, and that it has serious bugs impacting OCR quality. Iris Link released an update that fixed, as far as I could tell, a grand total of zero of the problems. Currently, OCR quality is better in Read Iris 11 than Read Iris 12. That’s one hell of an upgrade! Someone should start a class action against these people.

The original complaint that enspired this post follows:

Hi all.

On September 25th I upgraded to readiris 12 for the mac for $40. It
didn’t work with voiceover. I called iris and after trying to get it
to work for me the customer service person supposedly processed a
refund. I thought I had seen a refund come back in but I think now
that it was just the authorization expiring. So this morning I checked
my account and found that $40 from readers had been processed on
October 5th–a whole week and a half after the initial processing. I
called iris and the person who answered the phone asked for an RMA; I
wasn’t given an ram. so I was told I’d have to call back in two hours
and talk to somebody named Casey who supposedly must have been the
person I talked to on September 25th. But this person I talked to this
morning said he didn’t know how Casey would look it up if I didn’t
have an RMA. I offered to give him my order number but he refused,
saying he couldn’t look it up that way. Since this isn’t the first
time I’ve seen delays or misplacement of information with Iris I told
the man that I wouldn’t be buying from the company again and planned
to file a report with the Better Business Bureau. He told me not to
threaten him and I said I wasn’t threatening, that I planned to carry
this out. He launched into what a big company they are and how many
euros they make a year and how they weren’t interested in scamming me.
I told him that the point was that the refund should have been
processed and the money certainly shouldn’t have been finally taken
out of my account a week and a half after I had requested the refund,
especially since I filed the request the same day I downloaded. He
told me how it’s a long process to refund–funny, it’s not a long
process to charge me and I’ve seen companies refund reasonably
quickly!!! I will be calling back and talking to Casey but I’ve also
filed a dispute with my bank which temporarily credits me wit the
money while they investigate. Merchants do have 30 days to refund
which I think is way too generous at least in this case. At any rate,
since this isn’t the first time I or somebody I know has had a refund
problem, though it was eventually resolved, I won’t be buying from
this company again no matter how good their product may become. I’l
use iris 11 as long as it works on the mac and after that if there
isn’t another program to scan adequately I’ll just have to go back to
using Abby Finereader in Windows. It’s not so much the time it takes
for a refund I’m griping about; it’s the fact that I was finally
charged again on October 5th after the authorization had apparently
expired, the fact that I wasn’t given an RMA, the fact that the person
on the phone passed the buck and wouldn’t even take my order number
and try to investigate or take my number and have Casey call me back
(I know they ask for your order number to process the refund so I
doubt his claim that the order number wouldn’t have been helpful!) and
it’s the fact that Carla and I too if i remember correctly had to call
again because refunds hadn’t gotten processed correctly!!! I’m sorry;
readers 11 was a good program, but I won’t be buying from this company
again.

–

Cheryl

OS X Scanning: The Saga Continues

As readers of Thursday’s posting may remember, I was attempting to scan documents using OS X. After getting the scanner set-up and installing the correct drivers, I purchased Read Iris. However, I didn’t have a serial number.

This morning, my serial number problems got resolved. At 9:00 sharp, I called Iris tech support. I spent seven minutes and thirty seconds on hold (the exact number from my phone logs), before the system gave up on finding anyone to talk to me and sent me to voicemail. I called back again right away, and spoke to someone in sails. They told me that the serial number was included in the email with the download link. I told them it wasn’t, and read the email off of my screen. Sails decided they couldn’t help me, and sent me to support. Support also told me that my serial number was in the original email. Once again, I told them it was not. So, they read me the number over the phone. They never did explain why the system failed, and my serial number wasn’t in the original email. Oh, well! At least, after 5 days, one unanswered email, and two phone calls, I finally have my software!

Registration of the software was another process. It took three forms, a serial number, a key, and a bunch of other information they already had. But after another half hour, it worked, and I was ready to scan.

I haven’t yet, however, recognized everything correctly. I’m having problems with images getting cut-off, zoomed strangely, etc. But those things, at least, have nothing to do with Iris Read. Image Capture on OS X isn’t obeying the image measurements I type in; it only respects cropping information provided by the mouse. I’ll post when I figure this next problem out.

Scanning and OCR on OS X

I’ve had a mac computer for over a year, now. However, for all this time, whenever I needed to scan and OCR something, I’ve been using a back-up Windows laptop. Mostly, this was because I didn’t have any OCR software on the mac. I did briefly test out the scanning abilities of the mac, just to make sure things were working with my scanner, but I never seriously tried to scan something…until today.

The first step, of course, was plugging in and recognizing the scanner. I figured this would be a no-brainer; it’d been done before, and it should just happen, again. I plugged in the USB connection, and hardware growler notified me that I had connected canoscan. Yay! I figured all was still well in scannerland. Just to be safe, though, I pulled up Image Capture to do a test run. “No image capture device connected.” Huh? It worked before!

After some help from Aardvark, I found an Apple support article that told me I may need to download updated drivers from the website. I guess some update broke something, somewhere. Thankfully, the Canon website it sent me to was nearly perfectly accessible. Unfortunately, it was then that I realized I wasn’t exactly sure of my scanner moddle.

The first trick I tried, of course, was to go look at system profiler, and see if it would tell me anything helpful:
CanoScan:

Product ID:        0×1900
Vendor ID:        0×04a9 (Canon Inc.)
Version:        3.07
Speed:        Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer:        Canon
Location ID:        0xfd100000
Current Available (mA):        500
Current Required (mA):        Unknown (Device has not been configured)

Well, that was useless. The next trick: scan my scanner with KNFB Reader didn’t work, either. It told me text was cut off at the edges, but it couldn’t recognize the raised text on the back of the scanner. Oh, well. I suspect I remember my scanner moddle correctly, anyway. I just wanted to try and make absolutely sure before installing drivers. The last “trick” is to just go ahead and install what I think is the correct set of drivers.

Lucky for me, the second drivers I tried were the correct ones. After a more-or-less friendly install process, and a reboot, my scanner could be used. I opened up image capture again, gave it another test, and all was well.

With the scanner finally working, the next step was to get some OCR software. According to this guy, Read Iris Pro was the best. I’ve also read that omnipage was accessible, but it had several bad reviews when it came to OCR quality. Neither product had a downloadable demo. After some research, I eventually went with Read Iris. The online shopping cart was, however, confusing and hardly accessible. Links were unlabeled or mislabeled, and the entire purchase process was long and confusing. Anyone with a Visa card will understand the true horror of the process when I say that it insisted on sending me through the Verified by Visa program, a program that most websites (including Amazon, Paypal, and Google Checkout) all avoid because it has been proven so broken and insecure.

I did, however, finally make my way through it, and was emailed an FTP download link. Figuring that was all I needed, I downloaded the software, mounted the DMG, and moved the .app into my applications folder. To my surprise, that application was, in reality, a poorly named installer. Why it wasn’t packaged as an installer package, as is the correct procedure on OS X, is utterly beyond me. It required several mouse clicks to get through, it froze voiceover at several points, and was generally an awful ordeal. I have no idea how crap like that got through anyone’s testing process, to be declared accessible. After about half an hour of fussing, I completed the install.

When I started the application, for real this time, I was asked for a serial number. The problem is: nobody from Iris Link emailed me one! Figuring that the processing system they used was, perhaps, running slowly, I waited for two hours. When I still had no serial, and thus couldn’t get any work done, I emailed Iris. While waiting for an answer from them, I started this weblog entry, in order to kill time until I could do useful work. After getting the entry up-to-date with my adventures thus far, I did my daily work-out, and hit the shower. Still, I haven’t gotten either a reply to my email, or my serial number.

So, after a day of set-up, I still haven’t managed to scan a single document on OS X. Hopefully, I’ll have gotten the information I need from Iris sometime tomorrow. Interestingly, while searching for product reviews of Iris Read, google gave me several links offering torrent downloads of the software I’m attempting to purchase. I suspect that, if I had just downloaded the torrent, I would have my software by now. I’m not sure why Iris feels the need to punish honest customers with extremely unreasonable wait-times. I mean, seriously: they write state-of-the-art OCR software! Couldn’t they have an online activation system at least as advanced as the hobby developers selling $10 utilities? If you ever feel the need to make an online purchase from Iris, this is something to keep in mind: the company doesn’t answer emails, and at this point only God himself knows when I’m going to get the software I purchased.

TO BE Continued…

Abandonware: Searchy

Hey, guess what? I’ve got nothing at all going on today, I’m working on a small project to be announced in the next one or two days, and I haven’t yet managed to finish the first book I intend to review this summer. You guys know what that means: another abandonware posting! Yes, that’s right! You all get another opensource Visual Basic program that I wrote in high school, and don’t plan to update anymore. Today, it’s Searchy. Searchy is a small program that allows you to perform quick searches by typing in the string, and selecting the website to search. This was a lot more useful when I wrote it, before we got the new Firefox address bar. This also means I get to see if macjournal can correctly upload files to my Wordpress install. If you can see and download searchy, then it passes the test. If not, than it’s a failure, and I need to fix something.
http://interfree.ca/samuelp/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/searchy.zip

finally purchased Mac Journal

After having some formatting issues with the entry I posted this morning, I finally got sick and tired of writing in my browser, and purchased Mac Journal. Hopefully, that marks the end of this nonsense. No, this entry doesn’t have any real content. I’m just testing. You can now go back to whatever you were originally doing. I know it works, now.

Making Foobar2000 Social

If you’re a user of foobar2000, the player now has all the components you need to enjoy the online music revolution, right from your media player! With just four downloads, you can add last.fm support and XM Radio to foobar.

The easiest is XM Radio support. Just download foo_xm from this website. Unzip the file, and copy the dll file into the components directory of your foobar2000 installation folder. Then open prefferences, and enter your XM email and password. You can now add XM channels to any foobar playlist, just like you would add any other type of streaming radio. No more opening your browser, loading flash, and logging in just to play XM. Also, now-playing notifications can be shown on the system tray, in your msn status, or anywhere else you already have foobar set-up to show now playing info. You can even use your DSPs on XM streams. It’s all the power of foobar, plus XM.

If you have a last.fm account, with a little more work, you can make foobar your last.fm headquarters. The most important download is foo_audioscrobbler. Download it, install, and enter your username and password in the configuration. Everything you play in foobar will now be sent to last.fm, without having to install the crappy last.fm client.

The next step is to get last.fm radio inside Foobar. Download foo_lastfm_radio and add it to foobar. Add your last.fm username and password in it’s configuration area, and you’re ready to go. You can open any last.fm radio stream from the file menu. You can also right click on a song in one of your current playlists, and select menu entries to play the last.fm artist radio or tag radio for that track. You can also download albumart of the currently playing song, skip songs, see upcoming songs, etc. This makes it really easy to switch between playing tracks from your local music library, and streaming similar tracks from last.fm.

The last step is to add the power of last.fm to your foobar media library, to help you create playlists based on your last.fm profile. Download foo_scrobblecharts, install it, and you can right click on any song, and select a menu entry to automaticly create a playlist of similar songs you already own. This is extremely useful for people who, like me, are two lazy to set-up playlists by ourselves.

Abandonware: JFW Hangman 2.0

If Sean can post all of his abandoned software projects, why can’t I? Anyway, I’m out of entry topics for the moment; I’ve been busy all day, and I just don’t have a darn thing I want to write about.

Thus, have a copy of JFW Hangman. It comes complete with multiple word lists, documentation, and Microsoft Visual Basic 6 source code. What it does not come with, because I lost it, is an installer. You’re going to have to register, if memory serves me, two DLLs before it’ll agree to run. However, to make up for that lack, the program comes with at least three bugs, that I’m aware of. What a bonus! Oh, wait…

It’s abandonware. I don’t even have a copy of VB6 anymore. So even if I wanted to improve it, or fix bugs (and I don’t), I couldn’t.

Beware: I have several other unsupported software projects. Unless I find something more interesting to write about by tomorrow, I’ll post another one.

Thoughts On Jungle Disk

It all started with a discussion between a group of us over how we could share large multimedia files in production between group members, without a lot of expense and hastle. The ideal solution was determined to be cloud storage. That is, you send your files to another company (like amazon, racspace, mosso, or google) and they store the files for you, on multiple computers, in multiple locations. When you need the file, you can call it up without worry over how, or where, it happens to be stored. For our cloud storage provider, we wanted a solution that was: cheap, unlimited (multimedia files can be huge), fast, extremely secure, multiplatform, and point-and-click both for set-up and accessing our files.

Several companies exist to do this. The way they work is, they create a virtual hard drive on your computer, but instead of all the files on that drive getting stored on your computer, anything you put there gets uploaded into the cloud.

The first provider we looked at was ZumoDrive. It looked interesting: easy to use, fast, and well supported. Unfortunately, it had several problems. First of all, it only seemed to be available for Windows and IPhone. When one of us had windows, another OS X, and a third a linux netbook, that just wasn’t going to cut it. Second, some of the features for optimizing the cache, like changing the bit-rate on mp3s so they could be streamed over low bandwidth connections, or determining what to cache locally based on file type, seemed to be rather insecure. If we wanted our storage provider, and everyone in charge of the networks between them and us, to know what we were storing, we could just use FTP or WebDav to my dreamhost account. Third, we knew we were eventually going to want 500 GB. At $80 a month, the pricing for ZumoDrive was a little high. However, according to the reviews, Zumo Drive used a storage provider called Amazon S3. I figured I’d go looking for other companies using S3 to do the same thing.

The first one I found was Jungle Disk. It runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux. It has extremely secure encryption; neither Jungle Disk, nor Amazon S3, can tell what you’re storing in the cloud. With Jungle Disk, you use your own Amazon S3 account; Jungle Disk doesn’t bill you for anything, or provide you with anything other than the software. That means that if Jungle Disk shuts down, your files will still exist, unchanged. You control your data, not Jungle Disk. I’ve been using the software for a week, now, and I’m overall pleased with my experience. Set-up is a little harder than with ZumoDrive, but the price is also a lot cheaper. It’s 10 cents per gig. That means that if I use 500 gigs in a month, I pay for 500 gigs. If I go on vacation for two months, and use 0 gigs, I pay for nothing at all. For the screen reader users reading this, almost everything is accessible. The automated back-ups on OS X aren’t accessible, and they’re really hard to use on Windows as well, but other than that everything worked perfectly. Unfortunately, the Windows version of the software has a few problems:
1. under network settings, I had to turn off the option to use a windows file system driver, and use a virtual WebDav server instead. If I didn’t, Jungle Disk would crash Windows Explorer, and it couldn’t be relaunched until reboot.
2. Copying files to any jungle disk drive using Teracopy has serious issues.
But once I got those things fixed, everything worked well. One other, small, thing to keep in mind is that Jungle Disk uploads items to the cloud in the order you paste them. So, if you paste in 14 gigs of wav files, then paste in a 20 kb text file, the 20 kb text file won’t be available to other machines using your jungle disk until all 14 gigs of wav files have been sent up. It would be nice if Jungle Disk could detect extremely small files, and shuffle them ahead in the transfer list, so they’d be available to other computers right away.

update: Thanks to a poster in the comments, I was lead to try Wuala. It uses both cloud storage, as well as peer to peer storage, in an attempt to limit costs, increase available storage, and allow for more flexability. It looked, at first blush, as though it was ideal for my needs. Unfortunately, it has several major flaws. First off, purchasing more storage is expensive. You pay per year, rather than per gig used or per month. This is a steep up-front payment for a poor student. As well, it requires even more for-thought as to amount of storage required. While you can trade storage, if you have storage available, you can’t get more than 20 gig until at least 10 percent of the 20 gig you’re offering has been used. As well, your computer must be online for at least four hours in a row, every day. This does not work well for laptops. But the most serious flaw of wuala is that, instead of writing native code for each operating system, Wuala uses Java. While it’s not particularly family friendly, the most accurate, and concise, criticism of Java I’ve heard runs as follows: “saying that Java is good because it runs on all platforms is like saying that anal sex is good because it works on all genders.” I hate and despise Java. It’s slow. It’s interface is strange, and while it’s accessible with NVDA, the interface doesn’t follow any windows standards at all. It eats memory faster than an extremely fat person eats chips. I don’t trust Java to run my entertainment software. Under absolutely no conditions am I going to trust Java with my important files. Some of the features of wuala, like the world feature, could be useful for filesharing and warez. But at this point, in my opinion, it’s not a serious file exchange and file storage system. That aligns with most things peer to peer. Peer to peer is a useful toy for avoiding responsibility for breaking the law. But it’s not useful for when real, legal, work needs to be done. Wuala is an interesting social and thought experiment. But, at the moment, it’s nothing more. I haven’t even gotten into the problem of trading storage on my computer when my ISP caps my bandwidth. In theory, depending on what wuala stores on my computer, it could wind up costing me even more to trade storage than to buy storage.

Disable Error Reporting in Windows XP

The microsoft error reports send far, far, far too much information to Microsoft, including your list of running processes and installed programs (last I checked). On all of the computers that I have to set up, I turn off the ability to send error reports to Microsoft. This stops people from getting themselves into trouble. To do this, take the following steps (only works in XP):

1. If you are not already, log in as administrator. If you are already logged in as administrator, stop for a minute and ask yourself why. Nobody runs permanently as root under linux/unix, and the same applies to Windows XP.
2. Go to start menu, settings, control panel, system.
3. Click the advanced tab.
4. Under advanced, click “error reporting”.
5. Select the “disable error reporting” radio button, and check the “but notify me when critical errors occur” check box.
6. Press ok to exit error reporting, and then ok to exit system. Then close the control panel.

Congratulations! You’re done.

Jaws 10 Beta 2 Now Available

The jaws 10 beta 2 is now available. The email announcement follows. Still, no new features that can compete with Window Eyes, in my opinion. Not that I use Window Eyes or anything.

JAWS public beta 2 is now live!

There is a seriously cool and exciting feature called JAWS Tandem in
this
new release that will certainly change the way people use JAWS! I
certainly
find this feature a huge benefit!

Go to the website to read all about the new features and download the
public
beta.
http://www.freedomscientific.com/downloads/jaws/JAWS-public-beta.asp

Cuil: What Is The Point?

Apparently, a web robot calling itself Twiceler has, for reasons known only to itself, been visiting my tiny little corner of cyberspace several times an hour. It doesn’t really matter to me, I have the bandwidth to spare, and Dreamhost hasn’t started complaining yet, but I was kind of wondering, while sitting waiting for my next class to start, what the purpose of all these visits is.

After clicking a few links, I discovered that my friend Twiceler works for a brand new startup search engine called Cuil. According to the website:

…Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone
else–three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft…Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency. Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there.

Wow! This sounds impressive! It could even, perhaps, be a google killer! As a journalist, though, I have to evaluate this for myself. Is Cuil really as wonderful as it says?

According to my traffic logs, Cuil must have indexed most of my recent posts, at least. I mean, it has visited 123 times in the last 2 days. So I have some perfect data to test Cuil on for accuracy. Let’s start by trying to find out information about the Victor ReaderStream birthday party coming up on Saturday. I posted about this a while ago, so surely it’s indexed. A search on cuil for victor stream birthday not only returns no results about the online party, it doesn’t even have anything about the Victor Reader! The exact same search on google, however, has an advertisement for the Victor product, the ACB birthday party from last year, and the birthday party we’re discussing this year, all on the front page! It’d be hard to do better than that, unless they linked to the Humanware press release directly from the Humanware website, rather than the version I posted.

But maybe that was too difficult for Cuil. Maybe it’s just not good with recent events; it probably takes several months to do all that website analyzing they keep going on about. Let’s try a search for a tiny internet radio network that’s been around for three years now, called The Beyond Radio Network, and see what information we can find. A search for the beyond radio network on Cuil does find the tbrn.net homepage as the first link. However, of the rest of that first page, over half of the links lead to 404 pages! What on earth? Let me repeat that. Half of the links on the first page of results go to 404 pages! How long has it been since Google sent you to a 404 page? It never happens! Not even when searching for the beyond radio network.

I just have no words. A search engine that sends people to 404 pages, and can’t present the right information for even the most narrow search, is visiting my blog several times daily. Why? I’m starting to suspect that the more often a search engine visits my blog, the worse it is. I mean, I’m also amused to note that, according to statpress, 100% of all search traffic to my blog comes from Windows Live Search. Windows Live Search? What the heck?

Windows 7: A nicer Calculator! More Ribbon!

That’s right, folks. Microsoft really knows how to give us what we want, now. In Windows 7, we’ll get a calculator upgrade, and ribbon in default windows apps! Doesn’t that fill you with the unresistable desire to run out and upgrade?

Free Accessible Linux Distro

The following information comes from an email announcement in my inbox, this morning. I’m not exactly sure why we need another distro when we’ve already got Ubuntu, but it might help someone, and choice is never a bad thing. Post thanks to access-l.

Free Software Version of the Amazability, Inc. Adept1 Assistive
Technology Product

Amazability, Inc. seeks to provide persons with visual impairment and
other disabilities products which have the lowest cost possible and
which meet people’s access needs.  We have been developing the Adept1
assistive technology product since 2002.  Part of the work has been
done with support from the United States Department of Education, as
outlined at http://www.amazability.com/about.htm, and has included
the design and implementation of a series of applications and
activities intended to work with speech.  Command interaction may be
done with a mix of voice recognition and keyboard input with all
activities designed to work in a similar manner with a minimum of
voice or keyboard commands needed to carry out complex actions.  A
word processor, email with address book, a web browser, and an online
library of books, reference works, and other items are
available.  The Adept1 may be used for all types of programming where
software can be developed, debugged, and run by those!
 who wish to use the Adept1 as a talking workstation.  See the
Amazability, Inc. homepage http://www.amazability.com where there is
a link to a Google Tech Talk that includes, in the latter half, a
demonstration of the Adept1.

Amazability, Inc. is preparing to offer a free software version of
the Adept1 under the terms of the GNU General Public License – GPLv3
- as described at http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html

Amazability, Inc. plans to provide the free software version with
publicly available speech engines while at the same time making its
proprietary version, described in the Company’s website, available
under dual licensing.

As the free software version is prepared for publication, we are
soliciting volunteers who would help in building a core group of
developers whose task would be to complete and add to the free
software version.  Additional documentation to insure the successful
transfer of technology and the future implementation of new features
are near term goals.  Longer term goals are to implement portable
versions of the Adept1 and to provide a port of the technology from
Linux to the Windows and Mac OS X environments.

Feasibility studies, focus group activities, and considerable beta
testing have been carried out.  This has led to the design of a
product that our testers find highly useful.  The Adept1 is readily
learned and can serve the wider population of persons, whether with
disabilities or not, who have little or no technical experience.  We
hope that, by making the Adept1 freely available, persons with
disabilities may be able to obtain an assistive technology product
that works for them.

Those interested in participating in the preparation of the free
software version and in forming a support group or who simply have
questions should contact us through email at: ken@amazability.com.

Accessible Second Life

Wonderful: just what I need. Another virtual world to suck up hours and hours of my time. Apparently, a group of folks has created scripts to make second life accessible to blind users. Interestingly, this happened in august, yet it completely failed to draw the attention of audio games, blind access journal, or anyone else. Information thanks to a poster on Audyssey.

Blind Gamers Chess Challenge

Another new game for the blind gamers of the world. Finally, a self voicing chess game to replace the now extremely old Winboard for JFW. This is Windows software; if you’re on OS X, you already have a perfectly accessible chess game.

You can read all about the new game by visiting the blind gamers page at:

www.spoonbillsoftware.com.au/blindgamers.htm

BG Chess Challenge runs in three different modes: Blind accessible, Vision impaired and Sighted, so it is suitable for all levels of visual acuity. It is also suitable for beginners as well as experienced chess players. A separate Word document explains how to play chess, if you have never played before or need to brush up on the rules and you can set the computer player’s skill level anywhere between Novice and Expert, so that you can be ensured of a challenging game regardless of your own skill level. In blind mode, graphics are still provided so that sighted spouses can play along with their blind partners. As with all Spoonbill Software’s accessible games, it is completely self voicing. You will only need your screen reader to read the on-line help, or the separate How To Play Chess document.

BG Chess Challenge is the fourteenth game in the Blind Gamers series of accessible games and is free for the asking.

Any DVD Update

The program that allows you to remove the DRM from DVDs, so you can make copies or rip them to movie files on your computer, has been updated again. This is a Windows program; I haven’t found any similar programs for OS X. For those interested, the list of fixes and the official update follows:

Dear valued customer,

we would like to inform you, that a new version of AnyDVD
has been released. Here the list of fixes and improvements:

6.4.6.9 2008 09 19
- New (DVD): Added support for new protections, e.g.:
 ”The Perfect Seduction – Pick Up Magic with Steven Shadow”, Germany
 ”Desperate Housewives Season 4″, US
 ”eli stone Season 1″, US
- Fix (DVD): Bug introduced in AnyDVD 6.4.6.6, CSS decryption on second
 layer failed with some discs, e.g. “Robocop 2″, Germany
- Some minor fixes and improvements
- Updated languages

The update is free for all registered customers, of course.
Just install the new version on top of your current version,
regardless which version you have installed:
http://www.slysoft.com/download.html

Have fun with AnyDVD!

Gordon Reeves
Customer Care Center

Window Eyes 7.0 has been Released

Window /Eyes 7.0 is out, finally with scripting support. I’m not a huge Window Eyes fan, but I think comparing the number of features in the latest Window Eyes, the latest NVDA, and the latest System Access, with what we’re getting in Jaws 10 is instructive. Jaws 10 has hardly anything, other than auto forms mode, something other screen readers have had for a while now. Is jaws really so good they have nothing new to offer us? Or is it just that Freedom Scientific is stagnating? The official GWMicro release announcement follows:

GW Micro is proud to announce the official release of Window-Eyes 7.0.  The maturity of Window-Eyes has reached unprecedented levels in this latest version.
The addition of scripting support provides users with the tools to enhance the accessibility and usability of third party applications, the operating system, and even Window-Eyes itself. GW Micro has always stood by the statement that Window-Eyes does not include complicated and proprietary scripting support, and that statement remains true with Window-Eyes 7.0. Instead, the addition of an industry standard scripting interface using tools that already exist in the Windows operating system allows users new to scripting, seasoned programmers, and everyone in between to take full advantage of this powerful new feature without getting bogged down in a complex and rigid programming environment. Users not interested in creating scripts can still take advantage of scripts written by other users through an intuitive script management system.
GW Micro is also proud to offer a centralized script repository where both script users and script developers can gather to distribute and discuss Window-Eyes scripts. More information can be found at http://www.gwmicro.com/sc.
Window-Eyes 7.0 contains several other features, including many Browse Mode enhancements, the inclusion of a new Eloquence synthesizer, support for both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8, and overall increased speed and stability. Window-Eyes 7.0 is fully Unicode compliant, allowing for more localization options for virtually any language. In addition, Window-Eyes 7.0 is the first screen reader to provide support for iTunes 8, including access to the Apple iTunes store.
Thank you to everyone involved in the public beta cycle. Window-Eyes continues to lead the way in adaptive technology because of the dedication of our customers.
Window-Eyes 7.0 is a paid upgrade for existing Window-Eyes users. If you own Window-Eyes 6.1, you may purchase an upgrade to Window-Eyes 7.0 for $175, plus shipping. If you already own Window-Eyes 6.1, and have an active SMA, you will be receiving your Window-Eyes 7.0 CD in the mail soon. Please be patient; all Window-Eyes SMA CDs are our first priority. You may also choose to download your Window-Eyes 7.0 upgrade for immediate installation. To download the Window-Eyes 7.0 upgrade, to check the status of your SMA account, or to determine your upgrade eligibility, go to the Window-Eyes Help menu, and choose the Window-Eyes Upgrade option. Alternatively, you can visit http://www.gwmicro.com/upgrade, and follow the instructions.
If you own a version of Window-Eyes older than 6.1, refer to the GW Micro Window-Eyes Upgrade Catalog page (https://www.gwmicro.com/Catalog/Upgrades/) for applicable upgrade costs.
Window-Eyes 7.0 supports Windows 2000, Windows XP (32-bit versions of Home, Professional, and Media Center), Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista (all 32-bit versions), and Windows Server 2008 (all 32-bit versions).
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at 260-489-3671, or support@gwmicro.com.

testing MacJournal

This is a test of MacJournal, a blogging and journaling program for the mac. Unfortunately, I get a “server error” whenever I try to download entries from my blog, but perhaps wordpress doesn’t yet support that feature. Or perhaps it’s just broken in some way or other. This test entry will see if MacJournal can post to the blog, or if it can neither post nor download.

Jaws 9: Jaws 8 With Bugfixes

Instead of updating the blog last night, I downloaded and installed Jaws 9.0 Public Beta 1. The good news: they finally fixed the blank pages problem! Now, whenever you load something in the browser, it never comes up blank. The bad news: other than some surface features, Jaws 9 is really just Jaws 8 with all the major bugs squeezed out. Shouldn’t this be jaws 8.5? At least it’s faster than jaws 8, and doesn’t give blank pages. If you haven’t yet, you should upgrade for those fixes alone.

Blind Crawler

For those of us still using Jaws for Windows, Blind Crawler may come in useful: it’s a site with the specific purpose of searching jaws scripts. Just type in the application you need, and it’ll pull up the page with scripts for it. It’s…Google for Jaws 1.0!