Revision 1.3 includes the following enhancements:

ASAW now supports software-based speech synthesizers that let you use
the sound card as your speech synthesizer.  Of course, Text-Assist has
always worked in this role, but now, you can use non SoundBlaster sound
cards.  This has the advantage that you can now use a multi-media
notebook computer and not have to have a separate speech synthesizer.
Text-Assist also had the annoying feature of taking away your other
Window sounds.  All the MSAPI complient text-to-speech engines we have
tested let you use the sound card for both speech production and still
let other sounds work at the same time. This new capability works by
complying to the new MSAPI specifications for text-to-speech engines.
Any MSAPI complient text-to-speech engine can be used.  At this time,
we've tested ASAW with FlexTalk from AT&T, Monolog97 from First Byte,
and DEC-Talk's software version.  Of these, First Byte's is the most
inexpensive at only $59.

To use the new software-based synthesizer, install the software that
provides the text-to-speech engine, then start ASAW with the MSAPI
command line parameter.  If you download ASAW from the WWW, you will
need to get the msapi.zip file and unzip it directly into your ASAW
directory or into a temporary directory where you have unzipped ASAW if
you have not installed it yet.  If installing from the distribution
disks, select Auto Detect from Setup (or just hit Enter when Setup
starts) and let ASAW detect the synthesizer for you.  You may also start
Setup with "a:" on the command line to skip testing for the other
synthesizers on the main distribution disk, then when Setup asks, remove
the first disk and insert the disk labled "SSIL".

There is a new Menu used to set your synthesizer's voice.  The options
in the Voice menu depend on which voices your speech synthesizer
supports.  In addition to the preset voices available for each
synthesizer, ASAW lets you additionally customize these voices each with
their own individual rate, volume, and pitch settings.

The scrollbars that control volume, rate, and pitch now let you use some
additional keys to control their values.  Pressing PageUp or PageDown
now increases or decreases the value of the scrollbar by 1/10 of its
range.  The Home key takes the value to its minimum, and the End key
takes it directly to its maximum value.

The Window menu features the Silent option.  When enabled, Silent
windows do not get spoken, except when using the reading keypad.

The Window/Focus menu contains the Restrict option which tells ASAW that
when this window has the focus, it should ignore other windows, even
though text changes in those windows.

Another option in the Window/Focus menu, Say Previous Item if Static,
controls the way ASAW treats static controls.  If enabled, when a
control gets focus, and its previous control is a static label, that
lable gets spoken.  This is normally what you want, but there are times
when this is not the desired behavior.

Revision 1.2 C introduced the mouse announcment features that provide
the user with the mouse's position if the mouse pointer isn't directly
over an object on the screen.  Revision 1.2 D now offers an option in
the Mouse menu, Say Mouse Position, which controls this behavior.  Like
all mouse options, these settings are global, no matter the Scope
setting.

Using the reading keypad to move to the previous and next lines now
leaves the horizontal reading position in the same place it was on the
line instead of moving it to the beginning of the line if you check
"Maintain Horizontal Reading Position" in the Keys menu.

Revision C contains these items:

Physically moving the mouse now produces some better feedback.  Here is
how it works: if you move the mouse to a position on the screen which
contains no data of particular interest or no data that ASAW knows
about, you'll hear an announcement about what pixel position the mouse
it at.  If you do hit a screen object, ASAW beeps and reads the object
you're moving to.  If you move the mouse more vertically than
horizontally, ASAW reads the line, otherwise, it reads a letter at a
time unless you move horizontally more than a single letter.

Alt+Tab now announces the item you're moving to.  If you have three or
four windows open, holding down Alt while pressing tab for each item
also works properly.

There is a new option in the Windows/Focus menu.  Graphics Spoken lets
you decide if you want to hear image names and numbers when a new focus
gets presented.  Normally, this option is not checked, except for with
controls in the "Button" class where you'll want to know about symbols
like checkmarks.

Some dialogs weren't getting read automatically when they appeared.
This is fixed.

The Interactive Caps Identification function caused many synthesizers to
announce the control codes rather than the raised pitch of the capital
letter.  This is corrected.

Revision b contains the following updates:

The Top of Window, Bottom of Window, Left of Window, and Right of Window
commands are now enabled.  You access them with keypad ctrl+8, ctrl+2,
ctrl+4, and ctrl+6 commands.

Setup now adds ASAW to your Start menu (for Windows95 only), so you can
easily start ASAW with Ctrl+esc, A no matter where you are.

Several problems were also corrected.  Among these includes the fix for
detecting and announcing positions in scroll bars and track bar controls.

Many internal changes also made their way into this revision that pave
the way for a new 32 bit version of ASAW.

Revision A should be much more responsive and the keypad should be
working more accurately.

The Help topics now have Next and Previous buttons, so you can use
ctrl+dot and ctrl+comma to move forward and backward through the topics.

There is now a screen stabilize time menu item in the Window menu.  It
provides ASAW with the number of times it should check before
considering the screen stable.

Lexicon Manager now recognizes entries in caps as applying only to
capitalized versions of the word.  This should help distinguish LAX from
lax.  Lexicon Manager now joins root words with the rest of the
word--unless you add a space to the end of the definition.

The ASAW Control and Info dialog is now reintrent.  This means that if
you need to make adjustments to the control and Info dialog itself, you
can do that.

ASAW's manual is now available from the Help menu.

The Help menu contains "About" which shows the ASAW version number, and
if the program is a registered version, the user's name and registration
number.

In earlier revisions of ASAW, when you changed the Scope setting then
looked at other settings, those settings were not always indicative of
what the actual setting was with that particular scope.  Now, when you
change scope and look at other settings, those settings reflect the
setting with respect to the scope in effect.

ASAW's Lexicon manager is now available.  See the online documentation
for details.

By default, ASAW monitors screen activity and lets you know when
differences appear.  You can turn this monitoring off in one of two
ways.  First, to temporarily turn it off, just press the Control key.
Monitoring stays off until you press another key.  Using Shift for this
purpose makes the best key to return to monitoring, because the shift
key won't do anything to the underlying application.

The second way to turn monitoring off is in ASAW's Window menu.

The Hilight section of the Windows menu lets you turn off stringent
checking for hilighted material.  Turning this off usually doesn't make
ASAW read any less, it can often take care of a situation where you hear
something read twice.

The Continuous item of the Focus menu of the Window menu lets you tell
ASAW to automatically begin reading continuously when this window type
appears on the screen.  You can use this if the kind of text you use
with this application is always meant to be read in whole.  To stop
Continuous Reading, press the Control key.

Focus Stabilization in the Focus section of the Windows menu lets you
adjust the amount of time ASAW waits for the screen to stabilize when
new text appears in this type of window.  Increasing this time can also
help stop situations where you hear ASAW read a window twice.  This
happens if the stabilization timeout is set too low, and the screen
actually continues to change after the stabilization timeout period.

Ctrl+keypad Enter now reads an entire document.  Press the Control key
by itself to stop the continuious reading function.  While Continuous
Reading procedes, you may still use keys like Page Up and Page Down to
move through the document you are reading.  Pressing the Control key
cancels Continuous Reading.

There is a new Caret sub menu under the Options menu. The Caret menu
controls several aspects about how the editing caret acts in a specific
situation.

The three options under the Caret menu are:

Horizontal Adjustment tells ASAW to add the specified amount to the
horizontal position of the reported caret position.

Vertical Adjustment works the same way, except it effects the vertical
setting.

Stability Time tells ASAW how long to wait for the caret to stabilize
before considering the new caret position valid.  Normally, you'll want
to leave this at 0, but there are some programs that don't update the
screen quickly enough after the caret moves.  You'll recognize this
behavior when your hear ASAW say what you moved the caret from as well
as what you move the caret to.

You will recognize the need for caret adjustments when you hear ASAW
read a line below or above where the caret is really located when you
use the application's arrow keys to move the caret.  If ASAW reads the
line below where the caret is located, use a negative number to adjust
the vertical position.  If ASAW reads the line above where the caret is
really located, use a positive number.  The amount to adjust depends on
the application, but in general, you could start with increments of 10s
to get the caret reported correctly.

There are several new synthesizer related aspects to know about:

The .syn file for your synthesizer has three new options that control how
your synthesizer acts.  The first is in the [ssil] section of the file.
It is ignore=.  You can list a series of punctuation characters after
the "=" to make ASAW refrain from sending those characters to the
synthesizer.  This option effects speech when normal punctuation is
turned off.  Normally, the synthesizer should not say any of these
characters when punctuation is turned off, but some of them still do.
Text-Assist and DEC-Talk are two that come to mind. This line tells ASAW
not to send any of those punctuation characters to the synthesizer.  If
punctuation is turned on, ASAW sends the synthesizer a word spelling out
the punctuation character, so this is not an issue in that situation.

The second new setting in the .syn file for your synthesizer appears in
the [defaults] section of the .syn file.  It is an option called Buffer
Size.  By placing a number at the end of this line, you tell ASAW to
restrict the amount of text it sends to the synthesizer at one time.
The default value is 1024, so if the line doesn't appear in your .syn
file, ASAW never sends more than 1024 characters to the synthesizer at
once.  This setting helps your synthesizer from getting bogged down with
too much text.

The third new setting for your .syn file also appears in the [defaults]
section of the file.  It is Capitalization Pitch.  This setting tells
ASAW what pitch to use for capital letters.  if there is no
Capitalization Pitch line in your .syn file, ASAW uses the synthesizer's
highest pitch to report capital letters.

ASAW now allows you to change synthesizers without removing ASAW from
memory.  To change to a different synthesizer, just run ASAW with a new
command line parameter indicating the synthesizer to use.  If, for
example, you where using Dubl42 and you wanted to change to tassist,
you'd just run ASAW with this command line:  c:\asaw\asaw tassist

Version 1.1 A:

The way the Scope Menu effects other settings changes.  Now, when you
set the scope and make another adjustment, that adjustment changes the
desired scope setting as it always, but now, it also changes the more
specific settings as well.  This prevents the situation where you turn
on punctuation under the "This Class This Program" scope (which is the
default) Then change the scope to a lesser specificity and change the
punctuation again.  In this case, the more general setting gets used,
but the more specific setting takes presidence since it is more
specific.  Now, the more specific settings also get changed.

Cursor responsivness gets corrected with this release.

Attribute notification and pixel announcements get added.  Turn them on
and off in the Options menu.

Version 1.1

There is a new Windows-based setup program to help with the installation
and updating process.  The old ASAWINST command still works to let you
install from the DOS command line with command line parameters, but now
it just passes those parameters on to Setup where the real action
happens.  In previous versions, you had to remove ASAW from memory
before updating the software--now, Setup automatically suspends ASAW
while it copies criticle system files, then Setup restarts ASAW when the
update is complete.

Removing ASAW from memory is now accomplished through ASAW's File menu.

In earlier versions, ASAW's window sometimes got the focus when you used
the Alt+Tab or Esc+Tab commands.  This no longer happens; you have to
press keypad 0 to access ASAW's functions.

The method ASAW uses for set files changed with 1.0D.  You may safely
remove the .enu and .saw files from your directory.

In previous versions of ASAW, you had to specifically save settings.
Now, each setting gets automatically preserved right when you change the
option. Settings files are now readable, too.  You can use any standard
text editor to review or alter settings to any application.  MicroTalk
recommends, however, that you use ASAW's built-in controls to alter
settings.

ASAW contains a new Scope menu. The Scope menu lets you adjust how
widely your settings effect other applications' behavior.  By default,
settings you change effect only the specific class of the specific
application you're in when you access the Control and Info dialog, but
you can set the Scope menu to either apply settings more widely--to all
programs-- or more narrowly--to the specific title and class of the
specific application.

A new item on the Label menu, Class, lets you name classes of windows
and controls.

The Key menu now permits turning on and off speaking of individual
keystrokes and lets you make keys get spoken by words.

The Options menu contains several new options.  Literary Reading makes
ASAW speak the text more smoothly, especially when reading documents.
Interface Sounds (on the Options menu) lets you substitute sounds for
specific actions.

There is a new menu--the Mouse menu.  It lets you turn off ASAW saying
where the physical mouse moves and lets ASAW move the mouse cursor along
with the reading cursor.

There is a new Window menu.  It lets you adjust how much gets spoken
when windows and controls get activated or focused.

The Dubl42.dll driver now supports com3 and com4 for use with LiteTalk
and DoubleTalk LT.

The problem of ASAW getting stuck in the capital letter voice is fixed.

The problem of getting stuck inside a control with the letter reading
commands is fixed.

The problem of ASAW not announcing some links properly with Internet Explorer
version 3.0 is fixed.

The Text-Assist functionality is greatly improved and stabilized.

ASAW takes a new command line parameter, /quit, which removes it from
memory from the command line.  This option should prove useful for
dedicated speech programs, like OpenBook, where it is necessary to
remove the screen reader from memory before use.  To use it with a
program like OpenBook, you can create a batch file like this:

c:\asaw\asaw /quit
c:\openbook\openbook

Make a hot key to the batch file, and you're ready to start scanning
with a single keystroke.


1.0 C

Previous versions of ASAW were'nt properly announcing the state of
button controls that were checked.  Now, the word "checked" precedes the
announcement of a button control.  When you change the button's state,
the button control is announced again.

There is a new command, Ctrl+Keypad 8, that reads the title of the
current window.  If the current window has no title, the command
announces the name of the active window.

This version corrects some minor problems with caret tracking and
announcing.  Most noticible was with WordPerfect.  Sometimes, when you
moved to a new line, ASAW said "blank" even though the line actually
contained text as you could tell by using the Read Current Line command.

DoubleTalk synthesizers with a ROM revision of 4.20 or later support a
feature called real-time indexing which wasn't present on models earlier
than 4.20.  Unfortunately, this meant that even though the new
DoubleTalk driver is more responsive, it won't work with those earlier
DoubleTalks.  For this reason, ASAW now comes supplied with the earlier
DoubleTalk driver.  If you want the newer driver, specify dubl42 as your
synthesizer key word when installing.

1.0 b

There is now an additional installation option, ob, which tells ASAWINST
to use an existing OpenBook setup.  See "Appendix A" for details.

Some of the .syn files used the keyword port= instead of PortDefault=
and some drivers expected to find their com port setup under
PortDefault.  The software and .syn files were updated to reflect this
information.


