Simtel MSDOS - Coast to Coast/simteldosarchivecoasttocoast2.iso/handicap/scandemo.zip/SCANDEMO.DOC

Text File | 1990-03-11 | 15KB | 259 lines

                       SCANDEMO.EXE 1.04
     Copyright (c) 1990 Charles Broome & Linda Stubblefield

  This is a demo version of a somehwat unique - or maybe "bizarre" is a
better word - file-reading program designed to be used with braille terminals
only. I'm not sure which of us is to blame for it - it just kind of evolved
between Linda's efforts and mine to find a better way to read files with a
braille terminal. Linda loves it, but then she has a talent for reading any
grade of braille right-side up, upside-down, or sideways, with one finger or
with all eight and maybe even with her thumbs. I suspect she could probably
do the same with her toes. Despite my challenges, she won't say whether she
can read braille with her nose - but I wouldn't put it past her!

 The full program can read any size file; this demo version has been limited
to reading about two pages (4000 characters) of information, which is about
all anybody can probably take anyway.  Here's the theory behind it all:

  Normally, when reading large text files braille users have to expend a lot
of energy sweeping across the braille display and then pushing the right
combination of buttons to advance the braille cursor. Meanwhile words are
frequently split at the margins of the braille display, making it necessary
to distract one's thoughts from the message itself while putting words
together from pieces.

  SCAN is an attempt to minimize all of that motion and distraction. The
general idea to allow the braille user's hands to remain relatively
stationary on the braille display by displaying only one word at a time,
meanwhile automatically advancing through the file.

  The concept is strange, but it works - with practice, that is. Even if you
can't read with eight fingers like Linda, the program minimizes the amount of
motion involved in reading the display. (This will doubtless be one of those
things that people either love or despise). There is a way to configure the
program to use the entire width of your display to show more than one word at
at time while still keeping the feature that avoids splitting words, and I'll
tell you about that in a moment.

  (Quite aside from using SCAN for reading files, it also makes a nice
program for improving your braille-reading speed using the computer. You can
make up practice text files and then use SCAN to read them. We're also
thinking now about doing a Grade II version of the program).

  SCAN lets you select the maximum number of cells that it uses when
displaying words. Two different widths have to be set - the "single-word
width" and the "multiple-word width".

  The "single-word width" is the maximum number of cells to be used when
displaying a single long word. Generally you will probably prefer to use the
entire width of your display for this, but as Linda has gotten better she's
been making it shorter and shorter to minimize hand motion. Any word longer
than the "single-word-width" will be broken up, hyphenated, and displayed in
chunks.

  The "multiple-word width" is the number of cells that are allowed for
multiple words, and MUST be less than the single-word width. The idea here is
that when several two- or three-letter words appear together, it's better to
display them all at once rather than one at a time. Just how many cells you
want to allot for this is a subjective matter, but generally it will be
around ten cells or so. If you don't want this feature, just enter "1" as the
multiple-word width.

  It just happens that if you don't like the idea of limiting your beautiful
new zillion-column terminal to one word at a time, you can set the
"single-word width" to the exact number of cells that your display holds plus
one, and set the "multiple-word width" to the exact number of cells that your
terminal displays, and the program will then act more like a normal
file-reading program tailored for braille terminals.

  Naturally, SCAN's scan rate is adjustable. A slight delay is added for each
character to give you time to take in longer words. Some braille terminals
work better if spaces are written to them between each display, so a "refresh
time" is also adjustable. The program also includes a phrase-search feature
and permanent bookmarks.

  Now with all that said, you're ready to configure the program. Just be sure
that SCANDEMO is not write-protected and that you're logged into the
directory with the program. Run "SCANDEMO /setup" and you'll be presented
with a series of self-explanatory questions about what single- and
multiple-word widths to use, what keys to assign functions to, etc.  You
should not assign anything to the function keys or number keys, with the one
exception of F10 which is up for grabs.

  WHen you get to the part about assigning keys, for now you should assign
keys as follows. You can come back later once you know how to use the program
and assign your own preferences, but for now I need to know which keys to
tell you to press:

  Spaceber              -  toggle autoscan on and off
  ESCAPE                -  cause the program to exit to DOS
  Left Arrow            -  step backwards
  Right Arrow           -  step forwards
  Keypad-minus          -  scan slower
  Keypad-Plus           -  scan faster
  Up-arrow              -  go to previous sentence
  Down-Arrow            -  go to next sentence
  HOME                  -  go to start of file
  END                   -  go to end of file
  F10                   -  hunt for a phrase
  Shifted-keypad-plus   -  lengthen refresh time
  Shifted-keypad-minus  -  shorten refresh time
  Alt-W                 -  configure with speed and refresh info
  Shift-Tab             -  toggle sound off and on

  While in the setup mode, you'll note that currently-assigned keys are
indicated with each prompt. On some clone computers or on extended keyboards,
the actual key may not be as described (for example, "keypad-plus" may not
actually be the keypad-plus key).  However, if you assign a key by pressing
it during the setup mode then that key will be the one that causes the
indicated action whether or not the description is accurate.

  When you exit setup, the SCANDEMO will configure itself with your choices.

  To use the program, at the DOS prompt just type "SCANDEMO" followed by the name
of the file that you wish to read, then press the ENTER key.  The program
will come up in it's pause mode, on the first word of the file. Some of the
keys you assigned during setup can manually step forwards and backwards
through the file, going to the next or previous word or sentence.

  Press the right-arrow key and you will step forward through the file one
word at a time. Press the down-arrow key and SCANDEMO will seek out the start
of the next sentence. do this several times, then press the left-arrow key
several times and SCANDEMO will step backwards one by one word each time.

  This is the "manual" mode. Now get ready, get set, - and press the spacebar,
and SCAN should start scanning forwards through the file. Until you get the
speed and refresh time set up to your liking, the scan may seem erratic or
may be extremely slow or fast. Use the keypad-plus and minus keys to adjust
the scan rate, and use shifted-keypad-plus and minus to control the refresh
time between each word. The two sets of keys will interact somewhat.

  Once the scan rate is set up to your liking, and assuming that SCANDEMO.EXE
is located in the current directory, you can now press alt-W to write the
current speed and refresh rate to SCANDEMO, and from now on it will default
to these values whenever you run the program.

  We suspect that some people will appreciate an audible cue each time the
display changes, so you will have noticed a tiny chirp with each word. You
will also have noticed a longer chirp whenever SCAN thinks it's reached the
end of a sentence, and SCAN will pause a few extra moments at the end of the
sentence to give you a chance to digest what you just read. The shift-TAB key
toggles the chirps off and on.

  When you do just about anything to activate any of SCAN's functions, the
scan will automatically be stopped and you'll be placed back in the manual
mode. You can toggle the automatic scan off and on using the spacebar.

  To get out of scan, you can always use either control-C or whatever other
key you assigned during setup (in thsi case, ESCAPE).

  To search for a phrase, press F10. You'll be prompted for the phrase to
search for. Type it in, press the ENTER key, and the search will begin at the
current position and go towards the end of the file. If a match is found,
you'll be taken there. If not, you'll be left where you are.

  To repeat the search, press F10 again. Again you'll be prompted to type in
a phrase to search for, but you'll notice that the previous phrase is
indicated in parentheses. Just press the ENTER key to search for that phrase,
or you can optionally type in a new phrase.

  SCAN (and SCANDEMO) features 9 bookmarks. When you assign a bookmark, all
that really happens is that SCAN saves a number that tells it how many
characters into the file you are. When you "jump" to a bookmark, SCAN takes
you that many characters into the file. These bookmarks can optionally be
saved to disk when you exit SCAN - you'll be prompted only if you set a
bookmark while using SCAN. The file that the bookmarks are saved to will have
the same name as the file you read with SCAN, but will have an extension of
".BKM".

  When you later read the file again, the bookmarks will be read back in, so
you can jump to the locations you've set. The only problem comes in if you've
edited the file in the meantime and added or deleted characters between the
start of the file and any bookmarks you've set. If the text has been moved
around, then the bookmark still takes you the same number of characters into
the file but the text that previously was at that particular location will
have been moved elsewhere, so bookmarks only work properly on files that
haven't been edited. (I've fixed this problem with a large-character
file-reading program, but need a few spare days to duplicate the routines in
SCANDEMO).

  WIth all that in mind, here's how you set and jump to bookmarks: Each of
the function keys F1 through F9 sets one bookmark. To place a bookmark at
your current location in the file and to assign the bookmark to F1, just
press F1. It will give you a fast triple-beep and you'll be asked for a
label.  Type one in to describe the current location. That's all there is to
it!  Now go wandering off through the file, and when you're somewhere else
let's jump to a bookmark. F1 places a bookmark, so shift-F1 jumps to that
bookmark.  Just press shift-F1 and it will announce the label that you gave
it. If you had assigned other bookmarks then you could have pressed other
shifted-function keys to check out their labels. WHen you get the label you
want, press the ENTER key and SCAN will jump to that bookmark.

  Now go wandering off again. We're going to assign a bookmark again to
whatever new place you've arrived at. Press F1 - and this time, instead of a
fast triple-beep, you hear one long beep. This is just a warning that this
key already has a bookmark assigned to it. Your options are press F1 again,
inwhich case the new bookmark will be assinged and you'll be prompted for a
label again, or you can go looking for another key to assing the bookmark to.

 When assigning labels to bookmarks, you can always just press the ENTER key
to accept the current label if you don't want to type a new one in.

  One last feature is the number keys. The "1" key takes you ten percent of
the way into the file you're reading. The "2" key takes you 20% of the way,
and so on up to the "9" key which takes you 90% of the way into the file.
This is handy getting around very large files FAST.

  SCANDEMO does have a few rough spots. If the program wasn't so radical I'd
fix them now, but at a time when everybody's drooling over 40- and 80-column
braille terminals, I'm not sure anybody will like the idea of narrowing down
the display they already have! I'll hold off until somebody sends in $15 for
the full version, and only then will I spend the day or so that it will take
to fix these rough spots.

  The first rough spot - the fact that bookmark placement can be thrown off
by editing a file - has already been fixed in a similar program I've written
with a large-screen display. In that program I save 80 characters following
the bookmark, and if those characters don't appear in the expected place then
the program uses the phrase-search feature to find them. This approach works
beautifully no matter how much the file is edited, and the programs are
similar enough that it will only take four hours or so to move the routines
over to SCAN.

  The second rough spot is when SCAN saves bookmark information to a file. If
the file can't be written to for some reason, then SCAN just exits to DOS
without giving you a second chance to fix the problem. That's child's play to
fix, but after all this is just a demo version and I have a thousand other
more lucrative pots on the fire and just don't feel like bothering at the
moment.

  The third rough spot is towards the beginning or end of a file. SCAN works
beautifully everywhere else, but if you use the END key to go to the end of a
file, and then try to work backwards one word at a time, for some reason SCAN
sometimes misses the second word before the end of the file. That's a
relatively minor problem considering that the program works perfectly when
moving forwards through the file - but I like my programs to be
well-polished and will clean it up if anybody likes SCANDEMO enough to order
the full version.

  So far as I know, SCAN has no other problems, serious or otherwise. Please
let me know if you come across any.

  I have about a half-dozen other programs out so far, all either with their
own built-in large-letter displays or designed to be especially easy to use
with braille or voice.

  Some of those programs include DosZilla (A DOS manager for braille and
voice and soon to have it's own large-letter display, $75 but soon going up
to $150), BigCalc (Braille, voice, large-character scientific calculator,
$15), ADIR and ZDIR (braille, voice, large-character disk/file navigator, $10
shareware), VU (A large-screen file reader with some very unique features
like saveable bookmarks and a display that doesn't split words, $15), PopTime
(a pop-up time-and-date clock for braille and voice, pops up wherever the
computer cursor is located) and an assortment of a half-dozen small programs
like a large-screen clock, etc. For six dollars to cover costs (or if you
order the full version of SCAN for $15) I'll send you some of these programs
in demo or shareware form on a couple of 360K diskettes. -- Chuck

Charles L. Broome, P.O. Box 2270, Rockport, Texas, 78382, phone [phone]