Hello all,
What follows is a summary of the demo given by Jim Vaglia of Productivity
Work's Web browser software Webspeak given at the June 28, 1997 meeting
of the Visually Impaired Pennsylvania Computer enthusiasts meeting held
at the Pitt Hillman Technology Center located in Oakland Pittsburgh Pa.
START OF SUMMARY
Joe Murdy opened the demo by explaining that Webspeak is simmular to
Netscape but made for the blind.  Joe then turned the meeting over to
Jim.  Jim started out by talking about the Prodwork support.  Jim
mentioned his frustrations he had with Prodwork's not answering his email
messages with problems he was having with Webspeak version 1.4.3.  How
ever, after posting an email message to an email list vicug-l and
forwarding the messages to two email addresses at Prodworks he did
receive responses from Prodworks and Jim expressed his satisfaction that
he had heard from Prodworks.
For Jim's demo he used his 486 notebook IBM Thinkpad with a 14.4 baud
modem,
12 meggs of memory 350 megg harddrive, Windows3.1 Window-eyes1.1 and a
P.C.M.C.I.A Accent messenger synthesizer designed to work with notebook
computers.
Jim first used a dialor to connect to his internet provider.  Jim waited
until he heard his dialor connect to his provider and then minimized the
dialor and used control, alt-p to call up Webspeak.  Hotkeys are shortcut
keys in Windows which make it easier to run programs under Windows.
During the Demo of Webspeak Jim experienced difficulty with the dialor
redialing when ever he chose a link on the web.
When Webspeak comes up talking you hear an introductry message.  Then Jim
pressed the enter key and Webspeak loaded a local page on the harddrive
called the Webspeak start page.  Brief instructions were given of how to
move thrue the start page, how to get help, how to enter a web address,
and how to open a local page on the harddrive.
Jim Demonstrated how to open an url, (to type a web address,) f-2, howto
get a summary of the current web page, f-10 and reading a web page using
f-3, etc.
Jim demonstrated the Yahoo simplifyed search page that comes with Webspeak
and is loaded on the harddrive of your pc.
The highlights of the demonstration were when Jim went to his homepage
THE CHATTERBOX url:
http://www.lm.com/~jvaglia/chatbox.html
A page dedicated to chat web pages.
Jim demonstrated the mailto facility by trying to send a message to
himself.  While Webspeak eventually told him the message had been sent
Jim had hit the q-key to stop the mail function because of the dialor
redialing so many times.  As a result Jim checked his mail after he came
home from the meeting and had received no messages from himself.
People wanted to know what my mother/computer consultant and I thought of
Webspeak.  While I have enjoyed the product Mom and I feel Prodworks is
deceptive in their advertising of a free software product.  Inorder to
receive the unlock code from Prodworks to download the latest version of
Webspeak you must pay $50.00 before receiving the code.
The overall impression was that people at the VIPACE meeting were quite
pleased with Webspeak.
Jim Vaglia
[log in to unmask]