In the June issue of AccessWorld, we took a look at Dolphin Guide, a screen reading solution for those who might not be able to easily use a computer in the conventional manner due to neurological, cognitive, and/or physical impairment. In the July issue, we looked at Leasey, a set of JAWS scripts from Hartgen Consultancy that benefit everyone from the beginning computer user to the power user who wishes to increase productivity at the keyboard. In this article, we will consider yet another approach to assisting the novice computer user who is visually impaired: the Speak Easy Media System from New Designs Unlimited(NDU). NDU is a small company that is operated solely by Matt Hill, and is based just outside of Detroit, Michigan. Android users will be familiar with the Darwin Reader and Darwin Wallet apps for reading books and identifying money, respectively. Both of these apps are designed by NDU.
The Speak Easy Media System consists of software that can be installed on any Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Windows 7, or Windows 8 computer. In addition to this software, NDU will provide a turnkey solution for anyone who wishes to purchase a full system. This includes a laptop computer with Speak Easy already installed, a portable audio player, and a flatbed scanner. Although the recipient of the Speak Easy Media System will need to have sighted assistance to set up the Internet at their location, NDU will set up a GMail account on the system if requested to do so.
Obtaining and Installing the Speak Easy Software
When I first visited the New Designs Unlimited website, I did not immediately find a downloadable demonstration copy of Speak Easy. I later found the file located on the site's Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, but I still needed to call the company to obtain an authorization code for the 30-day evaluation of the software. The first couple times I called the phone number provided on the NDU homepage, I was sent to voice mail and my calls were not returned. I did not realize at the time that the company was a one-man operation. On my third attempt, I was able to speak with Matt Hill who was friendly and courteous throughout the entire conversation. Matt e-mailed me a link to the Speak Easy setup file and provided a 30-day evaluation code for me to use so that I could test drive the product. He also included a PDF version of the user manual, also available from the company's website.
I loaded NVDA during the installation of the Speak Easy software, and NVDA spoke throughout the install process. I was not given the opportunity to tell Speak Easy to not load when Windows restarted, and I was unable to successfully change this option in Speak Easy's preferences. I later learned that this is a known issue with my Windows 7 computer.
After the Speak Easy software was installed, NVDA went away and the voice of Microsoft Anna took over. Speak Easy launched a very basic tutorial that would be suitable for anyone who has never touched a computer in their life. This tutorial launches when a preconfigured computer running the Speak Easy Media System launches for the first time. I was told to press the Down Arrow key first. I received no feedback when I intentionally pressed the wrong key. I did receive a "nice work" prompt when the correct key was pressed. Next, the Up Arrow, Right Arrow, and Left Arrow keys were introduced. A detailed description of the position of each key on the keyboard and its purpose were provided. Next, I was given an explanation of menus, and the use of the Control key in conjunction with the arrow keys. The F1 key is the help key, and gives detailed instructions on the use of Speak Easy in various areas of the program. It is possible to Arrow Up and Down to choices mentioned in help, and act on them by pressing the Enter key. You can exit help mode by pressing F1 again, or pressing the escape key. F2 acts as a describer mode of sorts, allowing you to press keys such as the Up, Down, Right, and Left Arrow keys to learn what they do without performing an action. Keys on the QWERTY keyboard are not described. Pressing escape does not exit out of this mode; you must press F2 again to leave describer mode. F3 opens a history of previously spoken text, which can be reviewed using the Up and Down Arrow keys. As with the F1 key, it is possible to press F3 again to leave this mode, or you can simply press the Escape key.
I did not see an obvious way to skip the tutorial on the first launch of the software, but it takes about five minutes to complete, and is probably a must for the beginning computer user.
After completing the tutorial, I registered the software. Instructions were simple and easy to follow. I was told to type my name and press Enter. Then I was told to enter the registration code and press Enter. Speak Easy alerted me to the fact that it had loaded with a short musical phrase, and then I lost speech completely. I was able to load NVDA, restart my computer, and things went well from that point.
Setting Up Speak Easy
When Speak Easy loads, the user is presented with a simple menu of nine numbered choices plus a few others that are not numbered. As you Arrow down, you hear descending tones. Arrowing up yields higher tones. Menus wrap, but the tones tell you that you have gone from the top item in a menu to the bottom, or vice versa. The main menu contains an option to shut down Speak Easy and return to Windows. NVDA automatically loads at this point. It is also possible to shut down your computer from the Speak Easy main menu. Speaking of Windows functions, it is worth mentioning here that the Speak Easy user manual recommends not performing Windows updates. The Speak Easy software is updated over the Internet, and includes Windows updates.
After I finished installing Speak Easy and rebooted my computer, I went to the preferences menu, which is number nine in the main menu. It is possible to press a number on the keyboard to jump to a menu item, or you can simply use the arrow keys. When you first enter a menu, you must press the down arrow key to hear the first item in that menu. Speak Easy does not read the first item automatically.
I went to Voice Preferences and changed the SAPI 5 voice or "speaker name" as it is referred to in Speak Easy lingo to VW James, a SAPI 5 voice that was already on my system. The voice rates that were available to me were Slowest, Slower, Normal, Fast, Faster, and Fastest. I found myself occasionally put off by the vague terminology used by Speak Easy. The previous example is just one of several I could cite. I would have preferred to hear numbers or percentages. I had to frequently remind myself that Speak Easy is geared toward the person who has absolutely no computer experience whatsoever. I chose the Faster voice rate, and left the setting alone for the duration of my trial. When working with Speak Easy preferences, the user is always told that a preference has "not been changed," or that the new preference has been saved. I adjusted several preferences all at once, but we will talk about them as they become important later in our examination of the Speak Easy software. There are several preferences including settings for low vision users that we will not have time to discuss in this article. Suffice it to say that Speak Easy is quite configurable.
The Speak Easy Entertainment Category
Each time I loaded Speak Easy after it had been shut down, I was greeted with a message such as "Good morning, Jamie Pauls. Your Speak Easy is ready to use." I suspect that many new users will find this greeting comforting as they begin to explore their new Speak Easy media system.
I decided to begin by exploring the Speak Easy Entertainment Category, which is the first entry on the main menu. Speak Easy gives a nice summary of the contents of each category before you even enter it. This is a nice touch and again will be of great benefit to the novice user.
DAISY Book Audio CD and Audio CD Player
I didn't have a DAISY audio CD handy, so I popped a Garth Brooks CD into my computer's CD-ROM drive. I was able to move from track to track using the Arrow keys. The Enter key starts and stops audio playback, while the Down Arrow key pauses and resumes audio playback. The Right and Left Arrow keys moved me through the track, although this process was not smooth, but rather choppy. Control plus the Arrow keys moved me from track to track. Speak Easy did not recognize the CD title or track names, but this may have been a problem on my end. I was unable to recognize CD info using Winamp, and needed to use Foobar 2000 instead. Finally, I did not appear to be given the option to change the volume of the music I was listening to in Speak Easy.
Podcast Audio Shows
When I took a look at the various podcasts available using Speak Easy, I needed to choose a "source." Sources included Comedy, Poetry and Prose, Business, Entertainment, NPR, CBC Radio, CNN News, Fox News, Educational, and Visually Impaired Podcasts. The Visually Impaired Podcasts genre included NFB Presidential Releases (which was misspelled and thus incorrectly announced by Speak Easy), Blind Access Journal, and, oddly enough, Blind Cool Tech. The now-defunct Blind Cool Tech podcast yielded errors when I tried to play any listed episodes. I had better luck with the NFB Presidential Releases podcast. The audio began to play immediately, and I was told when the podcast had finished downloading. The Enter key and the Down Arrow key behaved in the podcast audio as they did when I was playing a CD. Right and Left Arrow keys moved by a few seconds in the podcast, and adding the Control key to the Arrow keys took a "bigger jump" in Speak Easy parlance. Again, the rather vague and informal style of presenting information here was a bit disconcerting to me.
Audio Books On Tape
The rather oddly labeled Audio Books On Tape category brought me to a search box where I was asked to type the name of a book I wished to read. I typed "Tom Sawyer," and was presented with a list of seven books. These included The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Tom Sawyer Abroad. I chose the first selection, and was presented with a list of 17 chapters. The first item, labeled Chapter 01–02, began playing instantly when I pressed the Enter key. I discovered that this, and presumably all of the books in this category, are LibriVox recordings, which are free, public domain audio books.
Audio Books Read by Your Speak Easy
Perusing this category of books, I found many categories including "Recently Added." Each item in the list of results includes the book title, author, year of publication, and a good description of the book. I chose Ladder of Babel, a detective novel by Doug Buckley published in 2015. Pressing Enter on this title retrieved a list of 58 volumes. Volumes in this instance appear to be various levels of a DAISY book, including the cover (which was blank), the title page, and the main sections of the book. Each volume must be closed, and the next volume must be selected and opened manually. These books are read by the voice that you have configured in Speak Easy.
Music Stations
This category presents a list of Internet radio stations from all over the world. Included is a decent list of police scanner feeds, which I enjoyed checking out. Ctrl + Enter allows you to set stations as favorites, although I was unable to get this to work.
The Speak Easy Productivity Category
Setting up my e-mail in Speak Easy needed to be done in Preferences. I was required to fill in the standard information for a POP3 account. After doing this, Speak Easy retrieved my e-mail with no problem. I was able to Arrow Up and Down through the list of messages in my inbox, and receive pertinent information such as sender, subject, and date received. Pressing Enter on a message read the body of the e-mail instantly. I was able to delete messages from within the body of the e-mail or from the list of messages simply by pressing the Delete key. Single letter commands such as W to write an e-mail, R to reply to a message, and Ctrl + Enter to send a message make this area of Speak Easy a breeze to use. Beginning computer users should find e-mail to be very satisfying when using Speak Easy.
Address Book
When entering contacts into the Speak Easy address book, I found it necessary to hit Enter after completing each field of the available contact information. This wouldn't be a problem, except that I needed to Arrow down through the list of fields that I had just completed in order to get to the one I wished to update. All in all, this should work well for the new user who simply needs to store information about contacts. I did not see a way to generate a new e-mail from the contact list.
Notes
The Notes program is as straightforward as one might imagine. After composing a note, it is possible to save a note to your computer, or to the portable player which you can purchase from New Designs Unlimited (more about this later). You are required to type a title for your note and press Enter before you can begin typing text in the body of the note. Speak Easy reads characters as you type, confirms selected or deleted characters, and pretty much everything else you would expect from a screen reader using a simple, Notepad-type application.
Calculator
Most baffling of all the applications I used in Speak Easy was the calculator. It is possible to type using the keyboard, or select items from a menu. To type 4 + 4 = 8, type "4" on the keyboard. To type the plus sign, use the number row at the top of the keyboard as you normally would. Here is where things get tricky. In order to insert the plus sign, you must press the Enter key. Press "4" again, and then you need to Arrow up to the equals sign and press enter to get the desired result of your calculation. It might be easiest for the new user to only use the menu to perform calculations, rather than using the keyboard.
Calendar
The Calendar app in Speak Easy is very easy to use, and should be intuitive for the beginner. It is easy to set reminders for appointments, which are heard as a series of beeps when it is time for the reminder to sound.
Talking Clock
Although it would be nice to have a hotkey to check the time in Speak Easy, hearing the current time as well as setting and configuring alarms and timers is very easy to do and works as expected. Again, this most important activity of daily life is handled well in Speak Easy.
The Speak Easy Scan and Read Category
Speak Easy does a nice job of handling the scanning and reading of documents. It is possible to magnify scanned documents without using speech, to use magnification and speech together, or to simply scan and read using the Speak Easy voice. Surprisingly, Speak Easy does not begin reading documents automatically after they have been scanned, even when appending new pages to a document. I did not try storing a scanned document on my computer.
Other Features of Speak Easy
Reading news articles, (my own local newspaper was recognized after I entered my zip code in preferences), playing simple games, and storing content on your portable player or a USB drive are all available from within Speak Easy. Should you wish to browse the web or perform more advanced screen reading tasks, NVDA is easily configured to work with Speak Easy. The software also contains an onboard user guide, and a typing tutor for those who need help improving their keyboarding skills.
The Bottom Line
Whether you wish to purchase the Speak Easy software for your own computer, have Speak Easy installed on a Netbook, or buy a laptop, flatbed scanner, and a portable player—I was told that this player resembles an iPod Shuffle—New Designs Unlimited has you covered. I believe that this suite of products is definitely worth considering for someone who is absolutely new to computers. The fact that the product interfaces easily with the free NVDA screen reader allows the user to grow into more advanced computing tasks. For a one-man company, New Designs Unlimited has packed a lot into the Speak Easy Media System.
Product Information
Speak Easy Software Lite: $495
Speak Easy Basic (runs on a Netbook): $1,095
Speak Easy Media System Complete (preconfigured laptop with flatbed scanner and portable player): $1,995.00
Available From: New Designs Unlimited (Comes with a 2-year warranty; 30-day evaluation available.)
Phone: 888-868-6159
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