Several companies offer third-party screen magnification and screen reading solutions. These products generally offer more features than the built-in accessibility options in Windows. They can also be more easily customized and modified to fulfill a particular user’s education or employment accessibility needs.

Third-party magnification software offers more powerful magnification, and can produce highly magnified screens with sharper contrast and smoother fonts than what is offered through Windows Magnifier. Most third-party solutions also “process” the screen, rewriting it into a single column that's easier to scroll. If you consider that at a magnification level of just 4x, only 1/16th of the screen can be shown on the computer’s display at a time, reducing the amount of scrolling required can save a great deal of time and frustration.

Third-party screen readers generally offer a wider selection of text-to-speech voices, and you can often mix them, using one voice, say, to read a document, and another to follow and read your mouse cursor. They also include many more keyboard shortcuts to help you get the screen information you want to have spoken without extra verbiage that can slow you down.

Many users with partial sight are best served with one of the screen magnifier and screen reader combination packages described below. It can be quite restful to your eyes and mouse scrolling hand to have the screen reader speak long passages of text. Also, if your vision is changing, a combination pack can offer a relatively smooth transition from being able to view a computer display with just a bit of help to not being able to see it at all.

If you spend any time at all using Magnifier or Narrator, you owe it to yourself to at least try a third-party solution. They range from completely free to upwards of $1,000. Happily, all of the products we will describe here offer a free trial or a timed-demo mode, which means you can run the software for a limited time (usually less than an hour), restart your computer, then run it again. This gives you ample opportunity to evaluate the paid products before you or your sponsoring rehab agency plunk down any cash on a specific program.

In alphabetical order below is a list of several of the major companies that offer screen access solutions, along with contact information and links to their products All of the third-party screen access companies mentioned here offer accessible product documentation and various levels of technical support—over the phone, via e-mail, or online. Most of these companies also offer online training sessions, webinars you can attend in real time or download to review at your convenience, and a host of additional learning opportunities.

Ai Squared

800-859-0270 or 802-362-3612

Ai Squared is the publisher of ZoomText, the most widely used screen magnification product. After a recent merger with GW Micro, Ai also offers the screen reader Window-Eyes. All Ai Squared magnification products can run in full-feature demo mode for up to 60 days.

Dolphin Computer Access

This UK-based company offers a suite of software and hardware products for people with visual impairments. Dolphin Computer Access offers a free 30-day demo for all their screen access software products, which can be purchased through the company’s dealer network.

Freedom Scientific

800-444-4443 or 727-803-8000

Freedom Scientific offers full-feature demo modes of both its screen reader and screen magnifier that allow you to run the software for up to 40 minutes before you must restart your computer.

NV Access

NV Access is a registered Australian charity that develops and distributes a free, full-featured screen reader called NVDA, which stands for NonVisual Desktop Access. When you download the software, you will be offered the opportunity to donate to the NVDA project, but a donation is not required. The free open source text-to-speech voice that comes with NVDA can be a bit difficult for new speech users to understand, but you can purchase other voices for use with the program, and a portion of those proceeds go to help support ongoing product development.

AFB has created a set of free tutorials called Learn NVDA to provide step-by-step instructions on installing NVDA, learning the hotkeys and commands, and using the Internet, among other basic computer tasks. The tutorials are fully described, transcribed, and captioned, to allow a person who is blind or visually impaired to independently learn how to use it.

Serotek

866-202-0520

Serotek is the developer of the System Access screen reader, which is free for students in grades K–12. The software can also be purchased outright, or users can choose a monthly subscription model that includes a variety of other Serotek accessibility products and services.

The company also offers a free, Web-based version of their screen reader called System Access To Go (SA to Go):

  • From any Internet-connected Windows 7 or 8.1 computer running Internet Explorer as the default browser, press the Windows + R key combination
  • Type "www.SATOGO.com" and then press Enter
  • Follow the audible instructions to start SA to Go

Once started, the SA to Go screen reader will continue to run until you close Internet Explorer.

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