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Active Areas in outSPOKEN 3.0
One of the most striking new features of outSPOKEN 3.0 are the Active Areas.
Using Active Areas, it will be much easier to find your way in the complicated
world of Windows. outSPOKEN 3.0 includes a set of Active Area definitions for
some popular Windows applications. These can be modified and expanded with new
definitions. In this information sheet, we will explain in short what Active
Areas are, what they can do for you and how you can define them yourself.
What is an Active Area?
An Active Area is a part of a window, in which outSPOKEN will act in a
specific way. How big this area should be and what action outSPOKEN should
perform, is up to you. The user can determine the Active Area's size and
position. The decision on what kind of action outSPOKEN has to perform in the
Active Area is defined by Trigger-Action pairs.
A trigger tells outSPOKEN when it has to act. An action tells
outSPOKEN how it has to act.
This is just one example of the many possibilities the Active Area
functionality in outSPOKEN has to offer.
What can Active Areas do for you?
The main purpose of outSPOKEN's Active Areas is to give better access to the
applications you are working with. This can be done by having outSPOKEN provide
you with only the information (in speech or in braille) that is useful to you at
that time. What information that is, and when it should be displayed or spoken,
is up to you. Needless to say, that the Active Areas in outSPOKEN give you a lot
of flexibility to customize your Windows applications.
Example 1
Suppose you are reading a Word document with many fonts and font sizes. Of
course you would like to know when the font or font size changes. You can define
an Active Area at the location of the screen where Word displays the font name
and its size. First you define the size and the location of the Active Area by
pointing out the upper left and the lower right corners. Then you tell outSPOKEN
to read the contents of the active area, every time it changes, by defining the
Trigger-Action pair. In practice this means that outSPOKEN will give you the
font size and name, every time the font changes. This will give you a much
better idea of the document's layout.
Example 2
Suppose, you are working as a telephone operator. The status of your incoming
phone calls always appears in the same area of the screen. You can define an
Active Area at the same position and with the same size as the area in which the
information is displayed. You can tell outSPOKEN that every change of
information in that specific area should be read by your speech synthesizer, or
displayed on your braille display.
How to define an Active Area?
In Example 2 an Active Area is created that can be used by a telephone
operator to have his or her line status information read by a speech synthesizer
and displayed in braille, every time this information changes. Assume that both
outSPOKEN and the telephone application are active and that the telephone
application has the focus. Step-by-step the Active Area is defined as follows:
- Move the mouse pointer to the upper left corner of the area in which the
phone call information is displayed.
- Define this point also to be the upper left corner of the Active Area by
pressing the key combination CTRL-SHIFT-KPD1 and hold this key combination
for about one second.
- outSPOKEN will say 'Defining Active Area'.
- Move the mouse pointer to the lower right corner of the information area.
- Define this point also to be the lower right corner of the Active Area by,
once again, pressing and holding the key combination CTRL-SHIFT-KPD1 for
about one second.
The Edit Active Area dialogue will pop up. Tabbing through the dialogue will
show you the following fields and information:
- 'Name' edit box, where you can fill in a name for the Active Area. The
default name is Active Area 0, supposing that this is the first Active Area
being defined. Fill in a name that matches the purpose of this Active Area.
In this case Line information would be appropriate.
- 'File' edit combo button. Here you can specify in which file the Active
Area definition will be stored.
- 'Hot key' combo box, that enables you to choose a hotkey (INS-a through
INS-z) that acts as a Trigger. In this case we do not use a hot key and
leave it to None.
- 'Triggers and Actions' group box. A list of existing Trigger-Action pairs
is displayed. Leave the list as it is.
- Buttons to modify, change and create Action-Trigger pairs.
- Tab through the dialog items to the button 'New' and press Enter. The
Trigger-Action dialogue appears.
- From the list of Triggers, select Text is written.
- From the action list, select Read contents.
- Close the dialog and create another Action-Trigger pair.
- From the list of Triggers, select Text is written.
- From the action list, select Show contents.
- Close the Trigger-Action and the Edit Active Area dialogues.
This Active Area speaks and shows in braille the status information of the
telephone application. Every time the application writes new status information
on the screen, the Active Area is triggered.
Call 800-317-9611 for more information.
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