AssistiveWare on Tuesday announced the release of VisioVoice 1.0.1, an update to their assistive software for blind and vision-impaired Mac OS X users. A free update for registered users, VisioVoice costs $185.
VisioVoice coverts text, Word, HTML, PDF and RTF files to audio files or iTunes tracks that can be transferred to an iPod. It also offers a document and selection reader with fast forward and rewind functions, large cross-hair and target curosrs, text and image zoom windows, spoken interface elements as the user navigates across the screen, and multilingual support for Apple’s own VoiceOver technology.
The new release adds support for document reading with encrypted PDF files. The Text Zoom and Talking Interface are now more responsive and accurate; the Section Reader works more reliably with text selected in Safari; voice volume and speech rate settings now work correctly; highlighting of spoken works works correctly for accented characters; and several other fixes and improvements have been made.
VisioVoice is bundled with iVox, high quality voices from the Acapela Group that can be used with any Speech Manager-compliant application.
VisioVoice is a Universal binary and requires Mac OS X v10.4 or later. A downloadable demo is available.