Hi Jon, If you are sighted and need to get off to a quick start reading electronic books in PDF or Word format you might consider checking out GhostReader. This is a third party text-to-speech product by AssistiveWare, who also make VisioVoice, a product that a number of VoiceOver users like. However, this is pitched at the mainstream text-to-speech market, so it doesn't involve the full-system VoiceOver integration that makes VisioVoice more expensive. What you would get are improved InfoVox/iVox voices and an easy-to-use interface for reading out documents and/or transferring them to audio files that you can play back. GhostReader supports switching voices and, what is particularly useful if you need or want to read text in multiple languages, the ability to switch to InfoVox/iVox natural sounding voices that handle other European languages with correct text-to-speech rendering of accents.
Take a look at the web page at: http://www.convenienceware.com/ghostreader.php This might be easier for you to start with, since GhostReader supports skipping paragraphs, replaying sentences, switching voices, etc. and a bilingual single user license would be $59.95. There was also extensive discussion about this and about the InfoVox/iVox voices about a month ago. It's still worth learning VoiceOver, and it can do things like zoom up selective lines of text that the general zoom feature cannot. VisioVoice can zoom selected parts of the screen, and has lots more feature (such as the ability to run VoiceOver for complete system functions in languages other than English). However, take a look at GhostReader and see if it might work for you. Cheers, Esther On Thursday, September 06, 2007, at 11:06AM, "Jon Solitro" wrote: >My name is Jon, I just began using the mac visionaries mailing list. I >joined because I recently got my first Mac and can see well enough to use >the zoom feature most of the time. I am in grad school now, however, and >need to read electronic books. They are scanned for me either in PDF or Word >format. I canot for the life of me figre out how to use Voiceover. I went to >apple and downloaded the manual to listen to, and its pretty general. I'm >still having trouble. Can someone walk me through it at all? Is there >someone I can get help from over the phone? > >Jon >
