I have had everything freeze up when working with internet explorer, MS
Word and Window Eyes and also with Fire Fox. On one occasion, I had it
make a weird three or four tones and then I was frozen and out of
everything. At least three times that day, I sent an error report to GW
Micro and after three or four times of the same thing happening, I just
gave up and stopped sending reports. Another thing that happens is that
when tabbing from Window to Window, the speech is slow to start and
seems to stutter. I've left the computer for hours without turning it
off to see if anything improves and it doesn't. I can't exit out of
anything and I have to either shut down by turning the computer off or
by pressing the reset button. I'm using Windows 7 professional and
Window Eyes 8.00.
On 2/11/2013 4:54 AM, Brandon Miller wrote:
Hello everyone, my name is Brandon Miller. I've never posted to this
list before, but I've known about it for years and as someone who has
been a Window-eyes user for a very, very long time, I'd like to see if
there's anything I can do that may help to remedy some of the problems
written about in the last digest list I got. For reference, I've been
a user of Gw Micro products since the Vocal Eyes days! For those who
may not know, Vocal Eyes was a screen reader for the Ms Dos operating
system. Anyway, here are my observations:
1. To Bob Jutzi, and Andrea Sherry. The only synthesizers that I
personally use are Eloquence, and a version of the RealSpeak Jill
voice that I got last summer from Nextup.com. I bought the 22 KHZ
version and I love it. I use it on a daily basis, and I at least do
not experience the mispronunciations that you are. I feel like one
thing that makes things confusing is that there are several companies
willing to sell TTS (or text-to-speech) voices, and although I haven't
ever tried to definitively prove this, I believe that the voices are
mostly all just given different names by different companies for
marketing purposes. In other words, what I'm saying is that to me, it
sounds like the actual sampled data used to create the voices is all
the same, and just given different names for the sake of marketing by
different companies. I do know for a fact that the company Nuance is a
very heavy hitter, and they have in truth actually put in a lot of
time and energy to develop their own original products and
technologies. I also like and respect Loquendo, Cepstral, and Ivona as
far as TTS voice development companies are concerned, pretty much in
that order. As far as solutions for the annoyances that you're
experiencing, what you were told about the Extended dictionary ap
makes a lot of sense. I used to have it installed, and it may in fact
be a solution for you because with it, you can indeed define specific
pronunciations for specific synthesizers. It's a very powerful app and
I have a lot of respect for the person who developed it. They
obviously put a lot of time and hard work in to it.
2. To manny. I completely agree with Steve Jacobson's suggestion.
Proceeding with his suggestion should in fact work flawlessly, because
it's essentially the exact same thing as inserting a CD into a CD
drive and running through the setup procedure that way. What may have
caused the problem that you experienced has to do with the original
setup procedure making various registry entries, updates,
modifications, Etc. as Window-Eyes in being newly installed. The
registry on your computer post Window-Eyes installation could in fact
be vastly different from the registry on your friend's computer, and
that's what could cause installation errors to occur using the method
that you tried to use. Taking Steve's suggestion would be the exact
same thing as doing a fresh install, which should eliminate the
possibility of a bad install altogether
3. To Sandy. I am unfortunately experiencing the exact same kind of
browse mode problems that you are.. I've called and spoke with the
tech support department of Gw Micro, and have been basically told to
hold on, hang tight, that they're aware of the issue but because it's
relatively hard to reproduce on command, more investigation is going
to have to be done on their part. They did suggest redrawing the
screen when these annoyances occur to see if that solves the problem,
but for me at least, it annoyingly does not. One work around that I've
found is to alt-tab away from the app that's giving you problems, and
do make sure that you actually let go of the alt key so that focus is
actually moved in to another application altogether, and then alt-tab
back in to your original app. That's the only thing I've found that
works. Also, I told the tech support team at Gw Micro that I'm
experiencing the behavior in both the Internet Explorer and Mozilla
Firefox web browsers, so it's not a problem that can be relieved by
simply switching browsers, if you're even the kind of person who would
do that. Firefox sometimes actually seems to almost freeze up
altogether. As soon as I notice that happening, although I almost
immediately alt-tab to Window-eyes, even though by that point I should
be completely outside of the Firefox application, Window-eyes'
responsiveness remains extremely sluggish and delayed for some time
after. I know my personal system setup so well that I can actually
audibly hear load increasing and decreasing on my processor. Speaking
of that, for reference, your system seems much more modern than mine.
Haha, I use a Windows XP tower setup, I've got service pack 3
installed, I'm completely up-to-date as far as Windows update is
concerned, I'm using Microsoft Security Essentials as my malware
solution, I have that app run a full system scan weekly and I do have
automatic updating turned on. My hardware is as follows. I have a
Pentium 4 processor running at 2.00 GHZ, I have 4 gigs of DDR ram
installed as that's all that this particular motherboard will support,
my primary hard drive is a 20 gigabyte drive, and my secondary drive
is a 120 gigabyte drive. As far as web browsing and online
connectivity is concerned, I have Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702,
installed, and Firefox version 18.0.2. I use Thunderbird 17.0.2 as my
email client. In short, I am a highly advanced computer user. I hold
the MCSE certification, so the long and the short of things is that it
has nothing to do with my system. I know my system, intimately, and I
did not begin noticing this behavior from Window-eyes until I
installed Window-eyes 8. As an example of how picky I am about the
maintenance of my machine, when I received the CD version of my WE 8
upgrade, I made careful note of what apps I had installed, then I
completely uninstalled We 7.5.2 or whatever the last iteration of the
WE 7.5 life cycle was, and installed a brand-new, fresh, clean copy of
Window-eyes 8.0. In short though, you aren't alone Sandy, but I
unfortunately don't know what to tell you as far as how to remedy your
particular problem. It appears to affect both modern and legacy
systems, and modern and legacy apps. Hopefully Gw Micro will be able
to address this issue soon.
--
Respectfully submitted,
Brandon Dean Miller
--
Marcie Brink-Chaney
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