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SECTION THIRTEEN
HYPERACTIVE WINDOWS
13.1: INTRODUCTION
In section 7, we talked about the standard windows 0-9. These windows could
be setup as Neutral, Silent, Speak or Float. These windows offer much
flexibility but for certain programs, you need the power of hyperactive
windows.
As we've mentioned, not all software programs use DOS screen service to
display their information on your PC's screen. This is not necessarily a bad
thing, however. After all, you wouldn't want your word processor to reread
your entire business letter every time you type in a character, or use a
cursor key to change lines. Certainly you wouldn't want your spreadsheet
repeating every cell when all you've done is add or modify the data in a
single cell.
As you can see, when it comes to certain kinds of software, often silence is
golden. Well, almost golden. After all, even though you wouldn't want to
hear everything on your screen repeated ad infinitum, occasionally there is
going to be some critical information that you'd like to hear read to you as
soon as it pops up. This is where Vocal-Eyes' "Hyperactive" windows come
into play.
13.2: WINDOWS A-E
In addition to the standard ten windows 0-9, Vocal-Eyes offers an additional
five windows A-E. These five windows are dedicated as hyperactive although
they can each be enabled or disabled independent of all other windows.
Whenever prompted for a hyperactive window, simply supply a letter from 'A'
- 'E'.
When a window is set to "Hyperactive," Vocal-Eyes checks and rechecks that
window for changes. If it detects your specified change, the hyperactive
window will trigger. Once the window triggers, you can specify up to three
things Vocal-Eyes should do.
This feature can best be demonstrated with a few examples.
Let's say your working in a spreadsheet. Your particular spreadsheet has a
small area in the upper right-hand corner where your program's present work
status is displayed. It says either "READY," "RECALCULATING" or "ERROR,"
depending on what's happening at any one moment. Lets say you'd like to know
when your spreadsheet is busy with a recalculation so you won't attempt to
enter new data while it's in progress. And of course you'd want to know
about any error messages. You could setup a hyperactive window to this area
and monitor for any change. Once a change is detected, you can instruct
Vocal-Eyes what should be done.
Here's another example. Lets say you are using a program which at certain
times displays the word 'EDIT' in a certain area of the screen. When this is
displayed, you may want Vocal-Eyes to do several tasks automatically. With
a hyperactive window, you can instruct Vocal-Eyes to monitor for the word
'EDIT' either in a specific location or anywhere within a certain window.
Once Vocal-Eyes notices the appearance of the word, it could then be
instructed to handle your bidding. This could be to read something or even
load a completely new .SET file into memory.
13.3: WHAT HYPERACTIVE WINDOWS CAN LOOK FOR
There are actually 13 different ways to configure a hyperactive window to
trigger. By trigger, we mean a certain condition as been met. Once the
condition has been met, in other words, the hyperactive window has triggered,
you can tell Vocal-Eyes what to do. Should it read something or switch to
another window or load a new .SET file or all three. A hyperactive window
like the standard windows can be from a single character to the full screen.
Your first step is to setup the coordinates of the hyperactive window. Once
you have the area confined, you must tell Vocal-Eyes what to look for. Lets
discuss each of the 13 ways in detail.
Any change:
If any change in the specified hyperactive window's coordinates occurs, the
window will be triggered. It does not matter if there was a text change or
a color change. Anything can be taken literally.
Any text change:
This gets a little more specific than any change described above. This
option will only trigger if a text change occurs in the hyperactive window.
Color changes will not be noticed. If you don't care about color changes but
you do care if characters are changed within the hyperactive window, this
would be a good choice.
Any Attribute change:
You probably already guessed what this option does. This one does not care
if there is a text change in the hyperactive window but it does care if there
is a color change. This is the exact opposite of the any text change
described above.
Exact match:
This option will take a snap-shot of everything in the current hyperactive
window's coordinates. It will remember every single detail. Where each
character is placed, the case of each character and even the color of each
character. Vocal-Eyes than takes this information and stores it for later
comparison. Now, instead of any type of change in the hyperactive window,
Vocal-Eyes is looking for a very specific occurrence. This window will not
trigger until it is restored to the original state it was when Vocal-Eyes
took a snap-shot of what was already there. Every character must be in the
exact same position, the case of each character must match and the color of
each position must be the same as before. Then and only then, will
Vocal-Eyes trigger the hyperactive window.
For example, if you wanted the window to trigger when line 5 columns 10
through 20 contained the characters 'Spreadsheet' and each character is blue
on red, you could setup a hyperactive window with coordinates, top=5,
bottom=5, left=10 and right=20. Vocal-Eyes will take a snap-shot of the
current contents which would be the word 'spreadsheet' being displayed blue
on red. Once Vocal-Eyes saw this occurrence again, the window will trigger.
Remember, you can match a single character or the entire screen.
Exact text match:
This works like the exact match above except Vocal-Eyes is only concerned
with the text on the screen. It does not care about the color. Like before,
Vocal-Eyes will take a snap-shot of the hyperactive window but only of the
text, not the color.
Vocal-Eyes will not trigger until the screen matches character for character
as it was when the original snap-shot was taken. The color of each character
is not even considered.
Exact Attribute match:
This is just the opposite of the Exact text match above. Again, Vocal-Eyes
takes a snap-shot of the hyperactive window but only of the color. It does
not care about the text on the screen. Vocal-Eyes will not trigger until the
screen colors within the hyperactive window are exactly as they were then the
original snap-shot was taken. The current text on the screen is not even
considered.
Different match:
This option will preform the opposite of the exact match option, described
earlier. That is, while exact match will trigger any time the contents of
the hyperactive window exactly match the snap-shot, different match will
trigger any time the contents of the hyperactive window are different in any
way from the snap-shot. Any change - text, color, what have you - within the
coordinates of the hyperactive window is enough to trigger the Vocal-Eyes
command you have specified.
For example, if you wanted the window to trigger if a particular text and
color was not currently displayed on the screen, this would be a good choice
for different match.
Different text match:
Just as different match works opposite exact match, different text match
works precisely opposite exact text match. At any time the text in the
hyperactive window is different in any way from the text of the snap-shot,
the Vocal-Eyes command(s) you have specified will be triggered.
Different attribute match:
Following suit, different attribute match works opposite exact attribute
match. Instead of triggering on a specified set of colors in the snapshot,
the specified Vocal-Eyes command will be triggered any time there is a color
change in the hyperactive window from that of the snap-shot.
Contains attribute:
This option allows you to specify a particular color. Vocal-Eyes remembers
this color and will trigger if the specified color is present anywhere in the
hyperactive window. It does not matter where in the window the color is
located or how much of the color is there. The simple fact of its presence
there will cause this to trigger.
Does not contain attribute:
This works exactly opposite of the contains attribute option above. Once
again, you specify a particular color and instruct Vocal-Eyes to trigger if
the color is not in the current hyperactive window's coordinates.
Contains string:
This option allows you to specify a string of up to 5 characters in length.
If the specified string is contained anywhere in the hyperactive window's
coordinates, the window will trigger. The string can be in upper or lower
case letters. When Vocal-Eyes looks for the specified string, it ignores the
case of all letters. The string can be located anywhere within the
hyperactive window. It could be in the middle of another word. It really
does not matter. If Vocal-Eyes sees the same pattern, the window will
trigger.
This would be a good choice if you want something to happen if a certain word
appears in a certain area but it is not always in the exact same location.
Let Vocal-Eyes scan an area for the string.
Does not contain string:
This works exactly opposite of the contains-string option above. Again, you
setup a string of up to 5 characters in length. This time however,
Vocal-Eyes will only trigger if the specified string is not located in the
current hyperactive window's coordinates.
13.4: HYPERACTIVE WINDOW COMMANDS
Now that you know of the ways a hyperactive window can be triggered, it is
time to see what it can be triggered to do. Once a window has been
triggered, Vocal-Eyes will act upon your requests. You can specify any three
of eight optional Vocal-Eyes commands to execute when a hyperactive window
triggers. Lets discuss each of the 8 options in detail.
Speak window:
This tells Vocal-Eyes to speak the specified window. You can specify any of
the standard windows 0-9 or any of the 5 hyperactive window A-E.
Speak string:
You can specify a string of up to 20 characters in length to be spoken. For
example, maybe you want to say, 'data base active' when a hyperactive window
determines your specified criteria for determining if the data base is
loaded.
Speak box:
This informs Vocal-Eyes to look for the current box and speak it. This would
be as if you pressed the read box hotkey only of course, Vocal-Eyes would do
this automatically based on the hyperactive window triggering.
Speak light bar:
Upon seeing this command, Vocal-Eyes will automatically speak the current
light bar on the screen. This would be as if you pressed the read light bar
hotkey.
Activate window:
This will make the specified window the currently selected window. This
would be just like hitting F3 in review mode or hitting the select window
hotkey. Remember by switching to a different window, you not only constrain
the reading to the new window's coordinates but you can also turn the
lightbar mode to on, off or auto along with setting the new lightbar color.
Load disk SET:
This feature gives Vocal-Eyes a tremendous amount of power. Now, based on a
particular criteria, you can instruct Vocal-Eyes to load a completely
different .SET file. You specify the name of the .SET file and Vocal-Eyes
will look in the directory it was started from for it. If found, it will be
loaded automatically. At this point, you can have a completely new voice
environment. You could, for example, have 5 more hyperactive windows doing
completely different functions. The possibilities are endless.
The load process used here is exactly as if you loaded the file manually from
the files menu and specified the file name only. If the specified .SET file
is loaded in one of the RAM locations, Vocal-Eye will load it from there.
Load RAM SET:
This works just like the load disk SET only instead of specifying a file
name, you specify the RAM number which contains the desired .SET file. There
are a couple advantages of using a RAM location instead of the disk while
loading a new .SET file.
1) The load process is much faster. Loading from RAM is much faster than
loading from disk.
2) If DOS is busy doing other things, Vocal-Eyes can not instruct it to load
the desired .SET file from disk. The RAM locations are always available.
There are also a couple disadvantages of using the RAM locations instead of
the disk.
1) It requires more computer memory to allocate the RAM .SET files.
2) You have to preload the .SET files into the specified RAM locations ahead
of time.
Beep:
This instructs Vocal-Eyes to issue a simple beep tone.
13.5: SETTING UP THE HYPERACTIVE WINDOWS
You know what a hyperactive window can trigger on and what it can do once it
has triggered. Lets now go through the details of how you actually setup a
hyperactive window. In order to setup the hyperactive windows, you must be
in review mode. The following discussion will assume you are already in
review mode.
SHIFT-F3:
In order to change a particular hyperactive window settings, you must first
select that window. Remember to select a standard window you press F3 in
review mode and type a number from 0-9. To select a hyperactive window,
press SHIFT-F3 instead. You will now be asked to select the hyperactive
window. Simply type the desired window A-E. Once you press the letter,
Vocal-Eyes will verify by saying 'Window x' where 'x' is the window of your
choice. Unlike the currently selected standard window, the only reason to
have a hyperactive window selected is so the following commands know which
hyperactive window to work with. Other than for this reason, it makes no
difference which hyperactive window you currently have selected. Whenever
you load a new .SET file from disk, hyperactive window A will always be the
default window. As for the standard windows, which ever window you had
active when the .SET file was saved will become active when the .SET file is
loaded.
Notice how the shift key was used to enhance the standard F3 command. F3 by
itself relates to the standard windows 0-9 but a SHIFT-F3 relates to the
hyperactive windows A-E. You will notice the shift key has been used to
enhance several of the other standard window commands as well.
SHIFT-F4:
Pressing F4 alone will prompt you for the coordinates of the currently
selected standard window 0-9. However, pressing SHIFT-F4 will prompt you for
the four coordinates of the currently selected hyperactive window A-E. You
fill in the data exactly as you would using the F4 command.
SHIFT-F5:
Pressing F5 alone, will set the top left of the currently selected window 0-9
to the review cursor position. However, if you press SHIFT-F5, Vocal-Eyes
will set the top left of the currently selected hyperactive window to the
review cursor position. Vocal-Eyes will respond 'top left'.
SHIFT-F6:
Pressing F6 alone will set the bottom right of the currently selected window
0-9 to the review cursor position. However, if you press SHIFT-F6,
Vocal-Eyes will set the bottom right of the currently selected hyperactive
widow to the review cursor position. Vocal-Eyes will respond 'bottom right'.
SHIFT-F7:
Remember, pressing F7 alone pops up a box allowing you to customize the
standard windows? We did not talk much about the F7 key but it will be
discussed in section 14. SHIFT-F7 also pops up a box but deals with the
currently selected hyperactive window. This is where you setup the details
of a hyperactive window. There are six different settings which can be made
with this option. You can use the up and down arrows to move to the next or
previous option. Pressing the space bar will toggle to the next selection
and the backspace will toggle to the previous selection for the current
option. At any point, you can press the ESCAPE key to exit the options. All
the new settings will be saved. Also pressing ENTER from the last option
will save and exit the options. Lets discuss each option in detail.
Status: Off/Hyperactive
Although Vocal-Eyes offers 5 hyperactive windows, you probably will not need
all 5. Therefore, use this setting to active or deactivate the hyperactive
windows you want or don't want to use. A setting of hyperactive will enable
the window. By default, all 5 windows are turned off. Unlike the standard
windows, the order in which you use hyperactive windows will probably not be
important. However, you may want to keep in mind that Vocal-Eyes monitors
the hyperactive windows from A to E. Therefore, if both hyperactive windows
A and D trigger at the same time, window A's commands will be issued first.
Interrupt: Yes/No
When a hyperactive window triggers, you have the option of telling Vocal-Eyes
to silence the speech and then do the specified commands. If you don't
silence the speech, anything spoken by the hyperactive window will be
buffered to the end of the text currently being spoken. It normally is a
good idea to interrupt the speech so you know instantly your hyperactive
window triggered. The default is to interrupt the speech.
If you have set the window to interrupt the speech and you have
interruptability enabled, Vocal-Eyes will temporarily disable
interruptability for about 2 seconds. Lets say you are typing at the
keyboard when a hyperactive window triggers. If the window was requested to
read something, you don't want your keystrokes to instantly silence the
speech before it had a chance to speak. If you really want to silence the
speech, simply press the SHIFT, CONTROL or ALT key. These keys with
interruptability enabled will always silence the speech.
Also, notice if two hyperactive windows trigger at the same time or if one
triggers before the first has finished speaking, the second will not
interrupt the speech even if you have it setup to do so unless something has
been spoken between the first hyperactive window triggering and the second
window triggering. If something has been sent to be spoken between both
hyperactive windows other than the text from the first hyperactive window,
the second hyperactive window will indeed interrupt the speech.
Again, this technique is used so hyperactive windows do not interrupt other
hyperactive windows.
Trigger On:
This option allows you to toggle through all 13 ways to trigger the
hyperactive window. We discussed each option above. Simply toggle to the
desired option and move on.
First Command:
Second Command:
Third Command:
The final three choices allow you to set up to three commands Vocal-Eyes
should do based on a hyperactive window triggering. We already talked about
the 8 choices available. All three commands by default are undefined. Just
because Vocal-Eyes supports three commands, you can use however many you seem
fit. For example, the first command may be speak string, the second command
could be speak lightbar and the final option could be to load the disk set
FILES.SET. Let your imagination soar with the possibilities.
If you select Speak Window, Speak String, Activate Window, Load Disk SET or
Load RAM SET, you must then press ENTER. Once you press ENTER, Vocal-Eyes
will prompt for the needed information. For example, if you select speak
string, you will be prompted for the string itself. If you selected load
disk SET, you will be prompted for the name of the .SET file to load. If the
selection only requires a single character input such as the speak window,
activate window or load RAM SET, simply type the single digit. Do not press
ENTER.
If you are supplying the .SET file to load, you are limited to 8 characters.
Therefore, do not include a path or .SET as part of the file name.
Vocal-Eyes will use the standard loading procedure.
If you selected the speak window option, the valid windows are 0-9 and A-E.
This means you can speak any of the standard windows 0-9 as well as any of
the hyperactive windows A-E.
In order for Vocal-Eyes to conserve memory, it has allocated 80 characters of
storage for text strings to be spoken and the disk SET file names. Although
there are 5 hyperactive windows and each supports 3 commands, you could not
setup all 15 commands as speak string if the total number of characters
exceeded 80 characters. It if very unlikely you will ever encounter this
type of problem but if you do, Vocal-Eyes will give the following error
message:
Allocation table full. Unable to save entry.
If you receive this error message, Vocal-eyes is telling you there is no room
to store the new string or set file name. What you typed has not been saved.
If this happens, you may want to shorten your string lengths to conserve
memory.
Once you have all options set the way you want, either press ENTER, right
arrow or down arrow from the last option or press the ESCAPE key from any
option. The entries will be saved as you exit.
There are certain considerations you need to be aware of for some of the
triggering options available. For example, the exact matches and different
matches somehow have to know what the original data it is suppose to use as
a model for later comparisons. Also, the contains and does not contain
attribute settings must know what the particular attribute color is. Lets
discuss where, how and when Vocal-Eyes gets this information.
1) If your trigger string is set for any of the 3 exact matches or any of the
3 different matches, the data must be on the screen and the hyperactive
window coordinates must be setup for the area before you press SHIFT-F7.
2) If your trigger string is either contains attribute or does not contain
attribute, the review cursor position must be sitting on the character which
contains the color you wish to use when you press SHIFT-F7.
Vocal-Eyes does not actually update what it is looking for every time you
enter the SHIFT-F7 menu. For example, if you already have the window
triggering correctly but you wish to set the interrupt setting or any of the
commands, you should not have to worry about fulfilling the two requirements
above. And you don't.
When you first enter the SHIFT-F7 menu, Vocal-Eyes makes a note of the
current status setting and the current trigger on setting. When you exit the
menu, Vocal-Eyes compares the settings it saved when you first entered the
menu with the current settings when you exit the menu. If either of the two
settings have changed, Vocal-Eyes will update what it is looking for using
either of the two methods above depending on what the trigger condition is
set for. However, even if one or both of the values have changed, the status
must be set for hyperactive. After all, why update the values if the
hyperactive window is not even activated?
It is very important that you understand when Vocal-Eyes updates what it is
looking for in the exact matches and the different matches as well as what
attribute it is looking for in the contains attribute and does not contain
attribute settings. If your trigger string is any of the other 5 settings,
there is no problem since nothing is needed by Vocal-Eyes which is not
already supplied.
Lets say you have a hyperactive window all setup. It is enabled, triggering
if the window contains the color yellow on black. But now, you decide to
trigger the window with blue on black instead. How can this be done? If you
press SHIFT-F7, there is nothing on the menu to change so when you exit the
menu Vocal-Eyes will not update the color under the review cursor position.
Although this may be a rare case, you need to know how to handle this
situation should it arise. Since Vocal-Eyes only updates if the status is
set to hyperactive and either the status setting or the trigger setting has
changed from when you entered the menu to when you exited the menu, you need
do it in two steps.
First, enter the menu with SHIFT-F7 and set the hyperactive window to off.
Then press the ESCAPE key to exit the menu. Now make sure your review cursor
is sitting on the new color (blue on black) and press SHIFT-F7 again. Now
you can change the setting from off to hyperactive and exit again with the
ESCAPE key. This time, Vocal-Eyes will notice that the status setting has
changed and it is set for hyperactive. Vocal-Eyes will than take note of the
color under the review cursor and use that for its future comparisons.
Although this is not a difficult procedure, it can be a bit confusing at
first. If you remember when Vocal-Eyes updates what it uses for comparison,
you should be able to master the hyperactive windows.
F8:
We already talked about this command. Remember, it will read the coordinates
and status of the currently selected window as well as the coordinates and
status of the currently selected hyperactive window.
SHIFT-F8:
Remember, ALT-F8 will read through all 10 standard windows giving you the
status and coordinates of each. SHIFT-F8 on the other hand will read through
all 5 hyperactive windows and give you the status and coordinates of each.
13.6: TYPING IN HYPERACTIVE WINDOWS
If you have a hyperactive window setup for any change, any text change or any
attribute change and you type within the window, Vocal-Eyes will not consider
your keystroke as a change and will not trigger the window. This is because,
normally you do not want your actual keystrokes to be considered a change.
If the keystroke causes a change to the screen other than just printing the
character typed at the cursor position, the window will trigger as expected.
13.7: GLOBAL ENABLING AND DISABLING OF ALL HYPERACTIVE WINDOWS
At some point, you may wish to disable all hyperactive windows. Of course
you could enter review mode and manually disabled each window by selecting
the window and toggling it off. But if you later wanted them to be active
again, you would have to reverse the process. This can be very time
consuming.
There are actually two ways you can very quickly disable and enable all
hyperactive windows at once. Even though they are disabled, each individual
window will show a setting of hyperactive. However, until you re-enable the
windows, Vocal-Eyes will not monitor any of them.
The first approach uses one of the Vocal-Eyes hotkeys. Option 56 (Hyper
On/Off). This hotkey will toggle the hyperactive windows on and off. Simple
press this hotkey and Vocal-Eyes will either say "Hyperactive windows off" or
"Hyperactive windows on" depending on the current state of the hyperactive
windows.
The second approach can be done through option 10 (Hyperactive Status On/Off)
located in the General submenu. Simply move to this option and press ENTER.
Each press will toggle the windows off and on.
Feel free to use either approach. If you are going to use the hotkey, you
first must assign the function a keystroke. Using either of the above two
techniques will directly effect the other. In other words, you can turn off
hyperactive windows with the hotkey and later turn them back on using the
general submenu if you wish.
13.8: HYPERACTIVE CHECK DELAY
Option 18 (Hyperactive Check Delay) located in the General submenu gives you
control over how often Vocal-Eyes should check it's hyperactive windows for
changes. This also effects how often Vocal-Eyes checks for boxes if the auto
box read feature is enabled.
You can supply a number from 1 to 99. Each number represents 1/18th of a
second. For example, 36 would tell Vocal-Eyes to check every two seconds.
A setting of 1 would tell Vocal-Eyes to check every 1/18 of a second. By
default, Vocal-Eyes waits 6/18th of a second or 1/3rd of a second. This
means each of the active hyperactive windows will be checked 3 times per
second for changes.
Why would you want to slow Vocal-Eyes up? There are two good reasons.
1) If you have the value too low causing Vocal-Eyes to check too quickly,
Vocal-Eyes may trigger on a hyperactive window or a box before the screen has
finished changing. If this happens, you may not get the results you
intended. In other words, you may get only a portion of the new information.
2) The more often Vocal-Eyes checks the hyperactive windows and popup boxes,
the more time Vocal-Eyes steals from your machine. If you have several large
hyperactive windows and you are running on a very slow machine, you may wish
to increase this value to give you a better over-all response.
However, If you are using a relatively fast machine and are using an
applications program which updates the screen fast, you may wish to decrease
this value. The smaller the number, the faster Vocal-Eyes will notice a
change.
Lets say you have a hyperactive window monitoring line 25 for any change.
Once a change has occurred, you have instructed Vocal-Eyes to read the entire
line 25. Lets also say if you press F1, your applications program
immediately modifies line 25. If you have the hyperactive check delay set at
99, Vocal-Eyes will wait 99/18th of a second or 5 1/2 seconds before reading
line 25. Setting this value to 1 would cause Vocal-Eyes to read line 25
immediately. The default setting of 6 should work with most applications.
If you feel a need to change this value, option 18 in the General submenu is
the place to do it.
13.9: HYPERACTIVE WINDOW EXAMPLE
Now that you know everything about hyperactive windows, lets go through an
example of actually using them.
Lets say you are using an integrated program which offers a word processor,
spreadsheet and database. When you first start it up, you get a menu
offering the three options. By picking any of the three choices, you active
the desired function. Lets say at the top left of the screen, the
application either prints 'Word Processor', 'Spreadsheet' or 'Data Base'
depending on which option you are currently using.
You will probably want a custom .SET file for each of the three environments.
You could manually load the desired .SET file but how about using hyperactive
windows? Note that the autoloading feature may not function since depending
on the applications program, a program is not necessarily being executed from
disk when you go from one environment to another.
For our example, lets start with the VE.SET file supplied and modify it.
Startup the application program and select the word processor. Since 'Word
Processor' is now displayed at the upper left of the screen, setup
hyperactive window A for an exact text match. You could set the coordinates
at: left=1, top=1, right=14, bottom=1. Now do SHIFT-F7 and set the status to
hyperactive, and the trigger command to 'exact match' or 'exact text match'.
The exact match will consider both the characters and the color but exact
text match will only consider the text. Both would probably work in our
example.
Now setup the first command to speak the string 'word processor'. Since we
know hyperactive window A already contains this message, we could have said
read window A. Either approach would get the same results. Now lets setup
the second command to load a disk SET. Give it the name 'WP'. We will
create WP.SET shortly. Now ESCAPE from this menu and save the .SET file to
disk. Lets call this 'MENU'. Whenever you have a hyperactive window loading
another .SET file, it is always a good idea to save the current .SET file to
disk before you exit review mode. This is because if the new .SET file gets
loaded by the hyperactive window before you had a change to save the old one,
your changes will be lost and you will have to make them again.
Now lets load the 'VE.SET' from the control panel. We want to start with a
fresh SET file for our word processor. You will want to adjust all the
features of Vocal-Eyes to work best with the word processor as before.
However, in this example, we are only concerned with the hyperactive windows.
When you exit the word processor, you will want to load the original MENU.SET
file automatically. We have the MENU.SET loading WP.SET but how can we get
WP.SET to reload MENU.SET when the word processor is exited?
We loaded WP.SET by using an exact match in the upper left corner for the
words 'Word Processor'. How about reloading MENU.SET by triggering on
different match. In other words, if 'Word Processor' is not in the upper
left, load 'MENU.SET'.
Therefore, now that you have VE.SET loaded, lets setup hyperactive window B
to, left=1, top=1, right=14 and bottom=1. Now press SHIFT-F7 to set the
status to hyperactive, trigger to different match or different text match.
You can set the first command if you wish to speak 'main menu' and the second
command to load the disk SET 'MENU'. Now save this SET file to disk with the
name 'WP'.
To give them a try, exit to the menu. You should have heard Vocal-Eyes say
'main menu' and the 'MENU.SET' file should have been loaded. Now pick the
word processor option again. Vocal-Eyes should say 'word processor' and load
'WP.SET' automatically.
Congratulations, you now have Vocal-Eyes working automatically for you. To
continue our example, you will want to setup hyperactive window B of the
MENU.SET to look for 'Spreadsheet' in the upper left'. If there, you may
want to load SP.SET. Then SP.SET will wait until 'Spreadsheet' disappears
from the upper left and load MENU.SET.
You can use hyperactive window C of MENU.SET to load the appropriate set file
for the data base as well.
Feel free to experiment with hyperactive windows. Once setup, they can make
an application program speak and act as if it were written for speech.
13.10: POTENTIAL PROBLEMS WITH HYPERACTIVE WINDOWS
Below are a few potential problems you may encounter while setting up
hyperactive windows.
1) Infinite loop
It is possible for you to setup a hyperactive window which when triggered
loads a new .SET file. That .SET file could have a hyperactive window which
loads the original .SET file. If not setup properly, they may continuously
load each other.
For example, if you have the first .SET file triggering if blue on black is
contained anywhere on the screen to load the second .SET file. The second
.SET file may have a hyperactive window which says load the first .SET file
if the color blue on black is anywhere on the screen. This would cause
Vocal-Eyes to constantly switch between both .SET files. An infinite loop.
If this happens to you, don't worry. Simply enter review mode and fix the
problem. Whenever you enter the voice control panel or enter review, the
hyperactive windows shut down until you return to the applications program.
You could also use the Hyper On/Off hotkey to turn off all hyperactive
windows and then fix the problem.
You should also keep in mind when a new .SET file is loaded with a
hyperactive window setup for any change, any text change or any attribute
change that it will trigger immediately and then only if the area changes.
2) Not saving your new .SET file before a new one is loaded.
If you have setup a hyperactive window to load another .SET file based on a
particular occurrence, you should always save the .SET file as soon as
possible. This is because if the hyperactive window triggers before you have
a chance to save it to disk, all your changes to the current .SET file will
be lost as the new one is loaded.
3) Your hyperactive window is not triggering on the correct data.
If you setup your hyperactive window for any of the three exact matches, any
of the three different matches or contains or does not contain a particular
attribute, you must remember how and when Vocal-Eyes gets this information.
If a window is not triggering as you expect it should, please refer to
section 13.5.
13.11: SUMMARY
This section described the powerful features of hyperactive windows. You
learned there are 13 different ways a hyperactive window can be setup to
trigger. Once a window triggers, you can do up to three different things.
Hyperactive windows can be setup to make a program much more interactive and
automatic. With the ability of loading new .SET files based on a particular
change, the sky is the limit.
Once you master the great power of Vocal-Eyes' hyperactive windows you will
wonder how you ever got along without them.