Free Screen Reader: Screen Daemon
Published: Jun 22, 2007
Screen Daemon is a very simple screen reader utility with limited feature set, written in Perl. It should mainly be thought of as a way to complement Narrator, the screen reader supplied with Windows 2000 and XP. The creator wanted to create a mouse tracker program, but decided to expand on the basic idea of adding features and fixes.
According to the creator, it is a simple way of reading material under the mouse pointer without shifting to any kind of special cursor mode. Most of the features were only recently developed and the keyboard support is still a bit experimental, to say the least. Implementing mouse reading doesn’t require any kind of model of screen contents. Many of the quirks of this reader are also due to the technical issues associated with Perl.
Features:
- Follows the mouse pointer
- Tracks keyboard focus changes
- Reads control names, types, states and additional information
- Speaks the information excluding repetitive bits
- Select the voice and adjust its speed and volume
- Read text files starting from the desired line
- Monitor the clipboard and read the new text placed on it
- Low CPU usage
- Self-contained (apart from SAPI and MSAA)
- Free and open-source
Limitations:
- Using hotkeys while the screen reader is in the background
- Reading of controls that don’t provide a basic MSAA representation
- Reading of DOS windows
- Tracking editing operations in text fields
- Detecting the context around the keyboard focus
- Doing something else while waiting for keyboard or mouse events
Source: Screen Daemon
