[gui-talk] Does anyone use it?

[Griffiths, Steve]

Hal is available from Dolphin (http://www.yourdolphin.com/) for £575. Every screen reader has its champions, but I would say Hal is more powerful than System Access and less powerful than JAWS or Windows-Eyes. It ships  with RealSpeak and Orpheus synthesisers. Orpheus was the original Dolphin synth and a lot of people thought it sounded more robotic than things like Eloquence or DecTalk Access, but it can be cranked up to very fast speeds without losing its pronunciation and is available in a very large range of languages. I think the RealSpeak engine has been added for people who aren't bothered about speed or languages.

One of the best things about Hal is that Dolphin also do a magnification application called Lunar, and the two are sold together as one product called Supernova. That means people who are losing their sight can start using Lunar, then switch to Supernova and then to Hal with a much smoother learning curve than moving from most magnification products to quite different screen readers.

One of the worst things about it is its keystroke command set. They only started using their own modifier recently, which means many of Hal's commands use Ctrl and Shift and a letter and there may be a lot of clashes with other applications.

You can get a 30-day demo on-line and it should sit alongside any other screen reader you have on XP, Vista or 7. Details of their international dealers are on their website and they used to have at least one office in the USA - California, I think.

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Kenlawrence124 at aol.com
Sent: 09 January 2010 19:25
To: gui-talk at nfbnet.org
Subject: [gui-talk] Does anyone use it?

Hi Gui-talk list ken here.  Yesterday I posed a question on another  list and the one reply I got mentioned the screen reader Hal.  I didn't  think it was still made, but does anyone use it, how much does it cost, and how powerful is it compared to Jaws, Window-eyes, and System access?  Also what  is its default synthesizer?  I seem to remember Dean using it on one of his tutorials for window 98, but only in one chapter and I seem to think the synthesizer was kind of questionable.  
 
I pledge to  participate actively in the efforts of the national federation of the blind to  achieve equality, opportunity, and security for the blind; to support the  policies and programs of the federation; and abide by it's constitution.
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