Hi All

Sorry for delay in responding to this msg but I feel that it has to be said
that the Aria has a lot of problems.

I purchase one two years ago to support my studies.  I had a lot of problems
with it.  I've lost countless number of files that contained important
lecture notes and found the battery to be very unreliable.  Robotron had a
E-mail list but then decided to discontinue it.

I would advise anyone to think twice about purchasing one of these
unreliable machines.

Gena J



Gena J
Mobile
07801659097


-----Original Message-----
From: VICUG-L: Visually Impaired Computer Users' Group List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Kelly Pierce
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 1998 6:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: tech: an alternative to the braille & speak


from the november 1997 issue of the braille forum.

               ROBOTRON'S ARIA: IT DOES EVERYTHING BUT SING!

                               by Nolan Crabb

   So you're thinking about one of those portable notetakers with a
   braille keyboard. You're thinking about buying one, but you can't get
   excited about it. You've seen the Braille 'N Speak, after all, and
   while it does a fine job at what it does, something somewhere's
   nagging at you  forcing you to wonder if there isn't an alternative.
   Indeed, there is. It's available at a good price, especially when you
   consider the capabilities. It's called the Aria, a product of
   Robotron, an Australian manufacturer of adaptive equipment for blind
   users. The Aria has so much to offer that you can't afford to ignore
   it as an option.

   It appears that Robotron is committed to making serious inroads into
   the U.S. market with its Aria. If you've ever seen or used a Braille
   'N Speak, you have some idea as to the dimensions of the Aria. Like
   the Braille 'N Speak, it's designed to serve as a notetaker,
   clock/calendar, and calculator. But in fairness to both products,
   that's where the comparisons have to end. You see, the Aria is not
   merely a dedicated word processor with extra features. It's an actual
   computer with a DOS- compatible operating system. With the Aria, you
   can import and export files in WordPerfect, copy files from one
   directory to another as you would in DOS using a regular computer, and
   more. These are very different machines. If you're a traveler who
   takes lots of notes on the go, the Aria might be what you're looking
   for.

   The Aria can use memory cards which allow you to have the fast
   equivalent of a hard disk inside the machine. The unit we borrowed
   from Technologies for the Visually Impaired, Inc., the primary
   Robotron dealer in the U.S., did not include a memory card. Still, it
   worked fine without one. With one inserted, however, you have pretty
   solid computing power at your disposal.

   While the machine has a braillewriter-style keyboard, it also offers
   function keys and cursor keys like a full-sized computer. The function
   keys carry out various tasks depending upon which Aria feature you're
   working in at the time. Setting It Up:

   Running the setup routines for the Aria is easily accomplished. In the
   setup, you can determine whether you want grade 1, grade 2 or computer
   braille. You can set the speech volume, pitch, rate, inflection, and
   more simply by moving the cursor keys through the various talking
   menus. Once set up, the machine remains as you set it. (I lost full
   battery power once and lost all my settings, but they can be saved to
   a memory card for easy retrieval if necessary. I experienced that loss
   only once during the eight weeks or so I used the machine.) The Word
   Processor:

   When you turn on the Aria, it sounds a beep, then seconds later a harp
   chord plays. While you may not have a divine or angelic computing
   session every time, that harp sound reminds you that this machine
   includes an impressive sound chip capable of producing voice,
   primitive beeps, great sound effects, touchtone telephone keypad
   sounds, and musical sounds. The Aria is capable of playing WAV files
   files that produce music or sound usually associated with DOS or
   Windows-based computers. After the harp plays, you can tap function
   key 1 to enter the built-in word processor. Once you're there, you can
   simply begin typing or set up your pages and margins. There's a
   special effects menu for bolding and underlining text, page numbering,
   page breaks, tabs, and more. A two-keystroke combination lets you save
   your files, import them, and export them. You can import files from
   other sources and export them as WordPerfect, Wordstar or other file
   formats. You can do the kind of things you might expect to do with a
   word processor  block text, move text, spell check your document,
   count the words, etc. Of course, you can print to either an
   Epson-compatible or LaserJet-compatible printer. The Aria has some
   substantially flexible braille translation capabilities that would let
   you connect a braille printer to the computer and produce respectable
   braille. The Clock:

   The Aria includes built-in clock, stopwatch, and timer functions. In
   addition, you can set reminder alarms and a wake- up alarm that would
   bring the heaviest sleeper to his trembling feet. It begins with a
   loud rooster crow then blows an incredibly loud, obnoxious and
   persistent train whistle until you stop it. There's no snooze feature,
   but after being hit with that train whistle, you'll be grabbing the
   Aria and your clothes simultaneously.

   This is a wonderful machine for those ham operators or shortwave
   listeners who want to keep track of their local time and Coordinated
   Universal Time (UTC) concurrently. You can set your local time and
   then have the clock keep track of another time zone. You can swap the
   two around or simply have one spoken then the other. It's great for
   those contact logs you want to keep. The Calculator:

   The calculator is very full featured as nearly as I could tell. It
   appears that the scientific functions are robust, and you can
   entertain yourself for hours converting miles to kilometers, liters to
   gallons, Fahrenheit temperatures to centigrade ones and much more. If
   you're just balancing the checkbook or doing relatively simple
   day-to-day kinds of calculations, you won't even stretch this
   calculator function. Telecommunications:

   The telecommunications capability of this machine is one of the best
   things it has to offer. You don't need special added software.
   Everything's built in, including the protocols or languages needed for
   computers to smoothly send and receive files.

   The Aria allows for easy setup of the terminal and serial port, and
   the communications with an Internet server or other on- line service
   are smooth and seamless. Of course, you'll still need a modem. For the
   person on the go interested in quickly sending and receiving files,
   the Aria truly shines. For what it's worth, this machine can also
   function as a DecTalk- compatible speech synthesizer. Please realize
   that while it is DecTalk compatible, it sounds nothing like a DecTalk.
   The Telephone Directory:

   A braille notetaker wouldn't be worth much if it didn't offer the
   ability to create some kind of address book that includes phone
   numbers. In this area, the Aria does nicely. You can create telephone
   directories of almost unlimited size. I didn't like the address
   feature particularly. I would have liked a feature that would allow
   multiple addresses for individuals. But the actual phone number
   portion more than made up for the address inconvenience. In fact, I
   was downright dazzled by it. The Aria can not only store your phone
   directory, it can actually dial the number for you. Simply hold your
   telephone mouthpiece up to the Aria's speaker, tap a key, and the
   sound chip comes alive and sounds the telephone keypad tones.

   This is a must-have feature especially if you're a ham operator who
   wants to connect to the public telephone system with your radio. While
   most handheld ham radios have telephone keypads on them, there may be
   times when you want to dial without someone seeing the special codes
   you may have to enter to connect your radio to the telephone system.
   By holding your radio near the Aria, you could have the computer do
   the dialing for you while you hold down the push-to-talk key.

   You don't have to be something as esoteric as a ham operator to enjoy
   this feature. Those long-distance codes that can tax your memory can
   be stored safely in the Aria and effortlessly dialed from your hotel
   room or even a phone booth.

   You can sort the phone directory and search it for names. You can even
   load a separate directory should you want to do so. The Diary:

   The diary lets you set up appointments that can be sorted, searched,
   and edited. The calendar here is OK, but it could be easier to use.
   You can determine on what day of the week a certain date will occur,
   and you can figure out quickly the number of days from one date to
   another. The File Manager:

   The Aria's file manager lets you rename, delete, copy, search for a
   specific file, tag or mark files for further manipulation, change the
   file attributes, remove a directory from the built-in RAM disk or the
   memory card, format a drive, and speak the status of your disk. It's
   pretty comprehensive and relies heavily on the function keys, as do
   most of the other Aria features. Battery Life:

   While battery life may depend somewhat on the intensive nature of the
   task you've asked the Aria to perform, I got somewhere between six and
   ten hours on a charge. Robotron says the battery can be fully charged
   in three hours. You can determine how much battery life is left by a
   three-key combination. The battery's life is measured in percent. When
   charging, the Aria simply says "charging." I found the battery
   percentage gauge somewhat unreliable. At one point, I was assured by
   the machine that I had 100 percent of battery life. A bit later, that
   percentage had slipped to 75. That's natural enough. But when the
   gauge mysteriously rebounded to 100 percent a few minutes later, I had
   to question the integrity of the gauge or the battery. Of course, with
   NiCad batteries, anything is possible, so placing blame entirely on
   the equipment may not be fair. The Manual:

   The folks at Robotron certainly know how to write a user's manual.
   This one is extremely clear, concisely written, and very logically
   presented. If I were buying a notetaker for the first time, I'd
   consider the Aria because of the clarity of the manual. Regardless of
   your experience or lack thereof with notetakers, you can teach
   yourself how to use this machine quite easily with the manual.

   Having said all that, I admit I yearned for a reference section where
   the commands were all laid out with brief explanations. Some kind of
   reference card would be valuable to first-time users. The cassette
   version of the manual is thoroughly tone indexed, and the Australian
   accent of the narrator makes listening to it a novel experience. If
   you have to judge a product by its manual to some degree, the Aria
   gets high marks on that alone. So Is It Perfect?

   The Aria's far from perfect. In fact, there are some starkly negative
   things about the unit that should force any buyer to take a hard look
   at the machine before the wallet comes out.

   First, I never got used to the keyboard. In fairness to Robotron, I
   should admit that while I learned to use a braillewriter at age four,
   I've always been somewhat faster on a good old qwerty keyboard. So
   there's my bias up front. Still, I use a Braille 'N Speak rather
   heavily, and I've achieved a respectable speed with it. Not so with
   the Aria keyboard. It feels spongy rather than springy. I had to use a
   moderate amount of pressure just to get the right keystrokes. More
   than once, I've attempted to check the battery life only to find
   myself in the initial setup section called mode. I think the keys are
   just too far apart and the action too unresponsive to ever make this
   machine a keyboard aficionado's dream. Add to that the fact that you
   can choose between two keyboard settings only  click keys and spoken
   keys. Those rapid typists among us would prefer a silent keys setting
   where it neither clicked nor spoke when a key was depressed. The
   absence of this silent key setting is a real problem for anyone who
   doesn't want to hear constant clicking or letters spoken through the
   earphone or speaker.

   Keyboard performance is a very subjective thing, however. I strongly
   recommend you play with one of these units a bit before buying if
   possible. You may find the keyboard OK, but I never got used to it.

   There were times when the design of this unit bugged me. To simply
   turn it off, for example, you have to press all four cursor keys at
   once. If you ever played Twister as a kid, this Aria turning-off
   exercise will bring back fond memories. It feels like a miniature game
   of hand twister every time you turn it off. Come on, guys. If you're
   serious about the U.S. market, give us a simple on/off switch. I'll
   bet there isn't a prospective American buyer who wouldn't pay another
   50 cents or so to get a convenient on/off switch. Heck, we might even
   pay a buck or two for it. This machine with its multiple simultaneous
   keystrokes isn't designed with touch typists in mind. You have to take
   your hands off the six writing keys in order to hit a function key or
   a shifted function key. In some instances, the shift key and the
   function key will be at nearly opposite ends of the computer,
   necessitating a two-handed approach. In its defense, the Aria is small
   and there had to be some keyboard compromises made to keep it that
   way. If small's the name of your game, chances are you will tolerate
   most, but probably not all, of the keyboard compromises.

   I initially hated the speech in the Aria. As one who loves to crank
   the rate of a synthesizer to something akin to astronomical heights, I
   figured I could stand any voice. The Braille 'N Speak's speech chip
   comes up with some pretty primitive sounding speech much of the time.
   Initially, I thought the Aria was worse. As I worked with it and
   learned to manipulate it more to my liking, I'd say the Aria might be
   slightly better at some things. I had a difficult time making the
   speech pronunciation dictionary work correctly. The Bottom Line:

   The multiple capabilities of the Aria make it a good deal for the
   price. Interactive games are now available, the word processor is
   probably adequate for most needs, and the telecommunications and
   telephone directory enhance the value of the machine a great deal. The
   calendar and diary are probably the most lackluster features, and the
   reminder alarms you can set for appointments or whatever may not be
   loud enough to get your attention if you're doing something away from
   the Aria. If you like braillewriter keyboards, you'll probably want to
   consider buying this machine.

   At press time, the Aria costs $1,245. The price includes a two
   megabyte flash RAM card. Other packaging options are available,
   including external storage devices. You can upgrade the unit simply by
   downloading new software; no need to send it back for chip
   replacements. For additional information, contact TFVI, 9 Nolan Ct.,
   Hauppauge, NY 11788. Tel. (516) 724-4479. E- mail: [log in to unmask]
     _________________________________________________________________


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