As you requested, attached is my newsletter, Opportunity Knocks.
this publication is free and represents my company's efforts to
keep up with advances in adaptive technology, to pass on helpful
hints,  and to carry one or two articles of general interest to
persons who use it.
Not all readers have the capacity to handle zip files so I have
adopted the practice of putting the text of the newsletter in the
message and attaching a zip file for those who can use it.
The zip file contains an ascii, a Microsoft Word, and a Wordperfect
5.1 plus version of the newsletter. As it was written in Microsoft
Word, formatting may suffer in the other two versions.
I attempt to release the publication quarterly and past issues can
be found on my homepage.
Please enjoy this material and send any comments to me by email.
Ted Young

     Computer Training & Sales/Disability Consulting

464 Sylvania Avenue      phone (215) 572-5882
Glenside, PA  19038-3629 fax (215) 572-6045

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
February 28, 1999


     Speaking of February, and I am sure that you were doing just
that as you reached for this technological epistle, it is a most
interesting month. Some great people were born in February (I had
to say that in case my wife and daughter happened to see these
pages). There is St. Valentine's Day, and Presidents' Day giving
many people a much-needed winter's day off. There are those
occasionally lovely spring-like days assuring us that the cold
weather will not always be with us. But no sooner does Punxatawney
Phil prognosticate, than the technophiles among us begin to think
of CSUN, that large adaptive technology event held in California
during March. And oh yes, I know that many of you begin checking
your mail breathlessly anticipating the next issue of Opportunity
Knocks. Well, here it is, so let's get started.

ADAPTIVE TECHNOLOGY UPDATES

AI SQUARED

     Work is moving steadily toward a release date in April for
ZoomText Xtra 7. The major thing that this release will do is to
support the multiple platforms of Windows 95, 98 and NT 4. By the
time you read this, Beta 3 of the program will be available from
the Ai Squared website and, if you procrastinate in your reading,
and who could given the interesting nature of this material, there
may be yet another Beta available.

     After the release of ZoomText Xtra 7, work will begin on level
3, which will feature the scanning option. Also, work will begin on
ZoomText Xtra 8, which will be "significant." My best efforts could
not get Scott to tell me any more about it at this time.

ARTIC TECHNOLOGIES

Unfortunately, I could not reach Dale McDaniel at Artic for an
update on the company, so my report concerning Artic is very
limited this quarter.

     I can tell you that work on the DISK Station is presently no
longer in progress, while the company decides whether to port the
product into the Windows operating system. Bottom line, no orders
for the product are being accepted.

ARKENSTONE

     As one wanders past the adaptive technology community water
fountain, it is possible to hear whispers of a most curious nature.
"You should see how fast she is", "Her best features are still
being kept secret", "Her first public debut will be in March",
etc., etc., etc. The cause of these virtual whispers is, as you
intuitive readers have already guessed, Ruby, the new upgrade from
Arkenstone.

     Although no one is talking much about all of the features in
this new product, we do know that it will be markedly faster. It
will have improved OCR with improved handling of columns. It will
include the American Heritage dictionary and a thesaurus. It will
include the ability to edit within the program and it will provide
a spell checker. It will also be easy to insert scanned pages into
your document. Additionally, it will be a full 32-bit product with
Windows 98 and Windows NT compatibility. In addition to the current
OpenBook menus operated from the numbers keypad, you will have the
traditional windows-style menu bar from which you can make all
selections.

The Ruby upgrade will ship with the IBM viaVoice Outloud software
speech synthesizer. It will come on a CD-ROM disk and include a
talking installation program. All of these and many other features
will be unveiled at the CSUN conference in March.

We also know that those who have purchased OpenBook Unbound in 1999
will get a free upgrade that will ship the first week in April. It
will come as a CD without the print and cassette manuals, although
all manuals will be included on the disk. For those purchasing
before January 1, the upgrade pricing is: $100 from version 3x,
$200 from version 2x, and $300 if you are still using version 1x.

GW MICRO

By now, all of you know that Window-Eyes 3.0 is out and it is truly
a five-star winner. I covered the features it would have in my last
newsletter and, yes, they are all there and working great. It ships
with the Microsoft speech engine, which gets mixed reviews from my
customers. Some of them really like it while others don't. Remember
you can still use your hardware speech synthesizers if you choose
to do so. The program makes it extremely easy to switch between
speech synthesizers. Your sporadic web-surfer has tried Window-Eyes
3.0 with the Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.2 beta and finds it
works very well.

So, where does a company go after such a success? Doug tells me
that there are some things they would like to improve, such as the
speed of Microsoft Active Accessability when using Internet
Explorer. Also, they want to do more work preparing for Microsoft
Office 2000. To cover these items and some minor bug-fixes, current
plans are to have a free release of version 3.1 some time shortly
after CSUN. You will be able to download it free from the web-site,
or pay $20.00 to get a new CD containing the upgrade.

The next major release will include Braille Display support on
which work is commencing. As for Windows NT, the current efforts
are geared toward preparing for Windows 2000 and NT 5. Should this
work run ahead of schedule, the company might turn its attention to
NT 4.

If you read these information-packed pages before venturing off to
CSUN, you can stop in the GW Micro Suite Thursday and Friday where
one-hour sessions concerning Office 2000, and Internet Explorer
will be available.

HENTER-JOYCE

     According to the Henter-Joyce webpage, version 3.3 of Jaws for
Windows is just around the corner. Following is an excerpt from the
web page listing the new features, and formatted and shortened to
meet the confines of this newsletter.

     "JFW 3.3 is a 32-bit screen reader application for Windows NT
4.0, Windows 98 or Windows 95.

JFW 3.3 Features:

* Completely Compatible with Magic 6.1!

* Enhanced support for popular applications, including Microsoft
Office 97 and Office 2000; WordPerfect 8 and 9; Internet Explorer
4.01 and 5.0; Outlook 98 and Outlook Express; Eudora 4.0 and 4.1;
RealPlayer Plus G2 and RealPlayer G2

* Support for refreshable Braille displays; now including output in
Grade 1 and 2! .  Easy access to the System Tray items in a pop-up
list box

* Option to speak in a different voice when reading different text
styles. Options include font, point size, bold, italic, underline,
color, capitalization and repeated characters

* New, more natural sounding SayAll, SaySentence and SayParagraph
functions

* Automatic graphics labeler
* Network authorization capability

* Updated multi-lingual Eloquence software synthesizer

* Support for the Microsoft Object Model and Microsoft Active
Accessibility

* Access to MS-DOS windows

* Support for MS-SAPI 4.0 software synthesizers

* Completely new Basic Training Cassette tapes

* Complete documentation, including Quick Reference Cards in print
and Braille

* Application-specific tutorials, including Internet Explorer 4.01
and Microsoft Word 8

* Enhances performance of Henter-Joyce's new Magic 6.1
magnification software, for Windows NT, 98 and 95

Also, Magic 6.1, covered in previous editions of this prophetic
journal, will be released shortly.

SIGHTED ELECTRONICS

     Although not official yet, there is discussion about being
able to trade up from the old Index Basic and old Everest printers
to the new models. The trade up would be your old printer and 40 or
50 percent of the cost of the new one.  As far as your armchair
historian knows, this is a first in the Braille printer market.

     Optical Braille Recognition (OBR) is shipping now at a list
price of $895.00. Your inquisitive scribe has not had a chance to
test this product, but I will definitely be doing so before the
next issue of this technological collage. There is a sample program
available which translates 6 lines at a time. The demo sells for
$50.00 and $10.00 shipping. The cost is based on the fact that it
needs to include all of the calibration sheets and manuals of the
full version. It does not include all of the features of the full
version, but it will give a person a sense of the program. If you
buy the full version, the $50.00 is deducted from the cost.

A new product coming soon, which will be covered in our next issue,
is a joystick-like product, that enables users of two-dimensional
Braille displays to navigate the screen much as a sighted person
would use a mouse or track ball. Stay tuned!

TECHIE TIDBIT

     Maybe you're like me and find that when you want to go to the
desktop (Yes, some people really do go there from time to time),
you find yourself wandering around on the blank screen, wishing you
could find 'My Computer.' No, I know you don't want to find my
computer, you want to find your 'My Computer.' Oh well, never mind.

At any rate, I find that if I hold down my 'Windows' key, yep,
that's the key closest to the alt keys that is not the space bar,
and hit the letter M I go right there.  I just tried it with four
programs open and, sure enough, it worked again.

By the way, another useful windows key combination is 'Windows-E,'
which opens Windows Explorer. It lands you on 'My Computer,' and of
course, the first down arrow is the floppy drive. As you know,
unless you have a disk in the floppy drive the computer hangs up a
bit, so be prepared to hit two down arrows quickly to get to the
'C' drive. Better yet, set up a hot-key for Windows Explorer. My
hot-key always lands me on the 'C' drive tree-view.

SAPI

If you have installed Window-Eyes 3.0 and have also run either
OpenBook or JFW with eloquence or ViaVoice OutLoud, you may have
noticed speed deterioration when using these software synthesizers
together with those programs. The problem is that Window-Eyes uses
version 4.0 of SAPI. The old versions of eloquence and ViaVoice
OutLoud were set to work best with version 3.0 of SAPI. Ruby will
solve this problem for OpenBook users as it will use SAPI 4.0, and
I understand that there is a fix on the way from Henter-Joyce.

     Speaking of Eloquence, GW Micro decided not to ship it with
version 3.0 of Window-Eyes.  They chose to use the Microsoft speech
engine instead. Henter-Joyce ships Eloquence with JFW, but this
version is locked-in to JFW.  In other words, the version shipped
with JFW will not work with other programs like OpenBook and
Window-Eyes.  OpenBook began giving away IBM ViaVoice OutLoud last
November, and it will work with screen-reading programs including
Window-Eyes and JFW.  And when the Ruby Edition begins to use SAPI
4.0, ViaVoice will work correctly with screen-reading programs such
as Window-Eyes and JFW.  You need the latest version of Eloquence
to avoid the slow down problems of SAPI 4.0. Now I know you will
all feel much more enlightened on this subject and use it as a
conversation item at the next cocktail party.


SOUNDS

A couple of newsletters ago, your humble scribe felt in a
confessing mood and admitted an addiction to Old-Time Radio on the
web. Alas, this was just the tip of the iceberg, and yours- truly
has begun to explore sound in a much more aggressive manner. Let me
share with you some of the little that I know, and I promise to
update you as I learn more.

     You all know that if you pop a music CD into your CD-ROM drive
and close the drawer you get instant music. By the way, what is
really neat is that using your screen reader, you can jump from
track to track. If that isn't enough, if you download a program
called CD wizard, connect to the web, pop a CD into the drive and
run the program, it will go out on the web to a huge
master-database where your CD is most likely registered, and
automatically label the tracks for you. Now it is not just jumping
from track one to track two, it is "knowing" the songs you are
choosing to play. If you think that's neat just wait.

     Suppose you were to decide that what you would really like to
do is to take the best songs from your CDs and either store them on
the computer to be played at will, or create your own CDs of your
favorite cuts. With that decision you have just stepped into a
fascinating world of new terminology and software.

The process of taking a cut from the CD and putting it somewhere
else is called "ripping." There are a number of inexpensive
software programs that enable you to do this. Before we go any
further down that trail, we must first know take a little sidetrack
and learn a little more about sound.

The basic sounds you hear from your computer are in the form of
.wav files. Without wishing to get too technical at this time, the
name springs from the fact that the sounds we hear travel through
the air much as waves travel through the ocean. They look like
ocean waves with peaks and troughs and the sound you hear actually
varies with the shape of the wave. These sounds can be captured
electronically and stored on the hard disk of your computer. In
fact, the various dings, chords, etc. that you hear when you run
windows are made by playing these .wav files. These files are
extremely large requiring huge chunks of space on your hard-drive
for the simplest of sounds. To solve this problem, various forms of
compression have been created. One of the latest of these
compression techniques, which compresses the wave files and
maintains almost all of the quality, is MP3. A CD music track would
require about 40 MB of hard disk space while an MP3 file of that
track would take up between 3 and 4 megabytes. I only mention all
of that here to confuse you as much as possible. Well, ok, I really
mentioned it because various software programs you can buy to rip
your favorite cuts from CDs use various compression methods.
Further, various programs you can use to play those cuts from your
computer play back various types of compressed files.

Your neophyte audiophile has purchased two such programs:
Audiocatalyst for ripping the CDs, and Win-amp for playing the
music back. With Audiocatalyst you get much the same track-labeling
ability you get with CD wizard that we mentioned earlier. You
simply put the CD you want to rip into your drive, connect to the
Internet and tell Audiocatalyst to go to a CD-database site and get
the track information for your CD. After this is done (you can skip
that step if you want to), you simply select 'grab' from the
Audiocatalyst menu and sit back. The song is copied and put into
mp3 format.

Win-amp, another very inexpensive program, allows you to play .MP3
and other compressed formats. You can even build your own
play-lists or have the program play the songs in random order.

Now if you have a great speaker system connected to your computer,
you may want to stop at this point. However, you may want to go on
and make your own CDs, or put the mp3 files onto something more
portable. There are already a couple of players that can handle
.mp3 files available on the market. I believe that you can look for
this area to expand.

We will deal more with this area in our next edition, as your
intrepid explorer is about to take the plunge and get a CD
readable/writable drive.

     In closing this article let me express my thanks to Jonathan
Mosen, a guy who knows far more about this area than I do.  He
reviewed this article for factual content. If you are interested in
more information on this subject, you might want to subscribe to
the PC-audio listserv that Jonathan has established. To subscribe
send email to:
[log in to unmask]


WINDOWS 98 AND HP SCANNERS

     So you say you have one of those HP 3P scanners that simply
refuses to die. Day after day it plods along faithfully scanning in
your work, and even though you would like to upgrade to another
scanner, you can't see doing that when the 3p just keeps working.
I've been there myself. What's that? You thought that since you
intend to upgrade to window's 98 you could use that as an excuse to
dump the old 3P since you have heard that Windows 98 won't support
it?  Sad news my friend, or, good news, depending on your
pocketbook. Relax, all is not lost.

If you have the triangular scanner card, you can get an upgrade
from HP, but make sure it's a Deskscan 2.8 or better.  That will
provide drivers for your old HP 3P or better scanner. The cost is
$20.00.

     If you have a real dinosaur, those roaring, scale dropping,
old rectangular cards, you can still upgrade by purchasing an
upgrade kit from a company called Advansys.  The kit consists of a
PCI SCSI card, cable and drivers.  Depending on whether one orders
the basic card or the super SCSI, the cost will be $99.95 or
$129.95.  For more info, call 1-800-540-3360.



MY ONLY COMMERCIAL

     Don't complain, you knew it was going to happen sooner or
later, and I did wait until you got through all of the above great
information before I did it.

So let me remind you that Young Opportunities Inc. provides
computers, peripherals, and adaptive technology at reduced prices.
In addition to discounts on all prices, our monthly sales can add
to your savings. In addition to other products, we carry all the
products listed in technology updates, and we invite you to call
for further information.

     I'm working on an update to that antediluvian relic known as
my catalog.  If you go to my web page, please don't read the
catalog, as it is far out of date. Until the new one is ready,
please feel free to call for prices.

CLOSING TIME

     Time, cost and postage tell me that it is time to end this
newsletter.  Please address any comments to me at the address on
the front page, or contact me by email at [log in to unmask]
Also, please feel free to visit my website at:
http://www.voicenet.com/~youngopp