ZoomText Magnifier/Reader, Single User

The ultimate accessibility tool

ZoomText Magnifier/Reader is a fully integrated magnification and reading program tailored for low-vision users. Magnifier/Reader enlarges and enhances everything on your computer screen, echoes your typing and essential program activity, and automatically reads documents, web pages, email.

Features

Flexible Magnification

Full range of magnification levels up to 36x (up to 60x in Windows 8). Levels include: 1x to 8x in steps of 1, 10x to 16x in steps of 2, 20x to 36x in steps of 4, and fractional powers of 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x and 2.5x. 30 levels of magnification in ZoomText 10.1: 1x to 2x in steps of 0.2; 2.25x, 2.5x, 2.75x, 3x, 3.5x, 4x, 4.5x, 5x, 6x, 7x, 8x; 10x to 16x in steps of 2; 20x to 36x in steps of 4; 42x, 48x, 54x, and 60x.

You can zoom in and out using All Zoom Levels, Favorite Zoom Levels Only or Whole Power Levels Only. Favorite Zoom Levels uses a custom set of user-defined zoom levels for zooming in and out. You can choose any combination of zoom levels to define your favorite zoom levels.

Support for Touch Screen Devices

ZoomText 10.1 features support for touch screen devices including tablets, laptops and desktop monitors. ZoomText follows along as you tap, drag and swipe your way through all of your applications. And you can instantly access key ZoomText features using the ZoomText Touch Icon and gestures. Note: Requires a 5-point or greater multi-touch device.

Exclusive to ZoomText 10.1 for Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

Reads aloud in natural sounding voices

ImageReader comes with premium male and female voices for reading captured text. English-Only versions of ImageReader come with NeoSpeech English voices, while the new Multilingual Edition comes with NeoSpeech English voices plus the new library of “ZoomText Voices”. You will have over 70 premium-quality voices for the most commonly spoken languages and dialects from around the world to choose from.

Complete Screen Reading

Automatically speaks all program controls, including menus, dialogs, list views and messages. Three verbosity levels give you complete control over the amount of information spoken.

ZoomText’s powerful screen reading options let you hear what you are doing. As you type text, use the mouse and navigate through your applications, ZoomText narrates and confirms each of your actions. By adjusting ZoomText’s echo settings, ZoomText can speak as little or as much as you want.

Typing Echo Typing Echo allows you to hear the keys and words that you type. You can choose to have individual keys, words, or both spoken. Whatever your choice, you’ll be able to type with greater speed and accuracy.

Mouse Echo Mouse Echo automatically reads text beneath the mouse pointer. As you move the pointer across the screen, single words or complete lines of text are echoed. Mouse echo is great for exploring the layout of your desktop and applications, or for spot reading in documents, web pages and email.

Program Echo speaks window titles, menus, dialogs, list views, and all other program controls as you navigate and use your applications. As each window or control becomes active, program echo announces its name and description, so you always know where you are and what choices are available. Program echo is your personal navigation system.

Verbosity allows you to adjust the amount of information spoken by the program echo feature. Three verbosity levels – Beginner, Intermediate and Expert – allow you to quickly increase or decrease the verbosity. Beginner verbosity provides more information, while Expert verbosity provides less information. Each of these verbosity levels can be fully customized according to your personal needs.

Enhanced Screen Colors

Innovative color controls improve screen clarity and reduce eyestrain. Special effects include color dyes, two-color modes and replacement of problem colors.

NeoSpeech provides human-sounding male and female voices that are closer to the real thing than ever before (English only). ZoomText also includes classic TruVoice and Microsoft speech synthesizers.

ZoomText provides a library of built-in speech synthesizers, providing a variety of male and female voices to choose from. The impressive ZoomText Voices provide human-sounding voices that are closer to the real thing than ever before.

Automatic Document Reading

ZoomText’s AppReader automatically reads documents, web pages and email within the parent application. ZoomText’s DocReader reads documents in a special environment where text is reformatted for easier viewing.

ZoomText offers a variety of tools for quick and easy reading of documents, web pages and email. Each of these tools has unique characteristics that lend themselves to particular reading tasks.

AppReader

AppReader reads documents, web pages and email, within the parent application. As you enter and exit AppReader your view of the document does not change, providing quick and seamless transitions between document editing and reading. AppReader can automatically read through the entire document, or you can manually read by word, line, sentence or paragraph. As reading occurs, each spoken word is highlighted. AppReader settings allow you to customize the appearance of word highlighting, including the highlight shape, size, color and transparency level.

DocReader

DocReader reads documents, web pages and email, in a special environment where text is reformatted for easier viewing. Text is presented in a single line (Ticker) or wrapped lines (Prompter), with your choice of fonts, colors, word highlighting, and magnification level. DocReader can automatically read through an entire document, or you can manually read by word, line, sentence or paragraph. As reading occurs, each spoken word is highlighted. The DocReader screen occupies the entire display with a toolbar at the top of the screen and the document text below it. The document text is formatted and displayed according to the current DocReader settings.

ZoomText Recorder

The ZoomText Recorder allows you to turn text from documents, webpages, email, etc. into audio recordings that you can transfer to on your mobile device and listen to at your convenience. Recordings can be saved directly to a ZoomText Recorder playlist in iTunes or Windows Media Player and automatically synced to your mobile device. Each recording is created using your choice of ZoomText voices or any other voices available on your system.

ZoomText Background Reader

ZoomText’s Background Reader allows you to listen to documents, webpages, email, etc. while you simultaneously perform other tasks. You simply select the text you want to listen to and press the Background Reader hotkey, Background Reader begins reading the text while you go about other work. At any time you can pause and resume reading and skim forward and backward by word or sentence.

Reading Zones

Reading zones let you instantly see and hear selected locations in an application window. For example; your database application may display a dozen or more fields of information. In your normal work flow you may be interested in only a few of these fields. With reading zones, you can instantly see and/or hear these select fields with the press of a hotkey.

You can create up to 10 reading zones for each of your applications. As you open and switch applications, zones defined for the active application are automatically loaded and ready to use.

Full Internet Accessibility

ZoomText reads any web page, in the proper reading order. You can read automatically or manually navigate by word, line, sentence and paragraph.

Text Navigation

Navigation keys make it easy to read while creating and editing documents. With simple commands you can read by character, word, line, sentence and paragraph, even while selecting text.

Typing Echo

Each key or word that you type is automatically spoken. You can choose to have all keys spoken or only selected groups of keys. Typing Echo allows you to hear the keys and words that you type. You can choose to have individual keys, words, or both spoken. Whatever your choice, you’ll be able to type with greater speed and accuracy.

Mouse Echo

Mouse Echo automatically reads text beneath the mouse pointer. As you move the pointer across the screen, single words or complete lines of text are echoed. Mouse echo is great for exploring the layout of your desktop and applications, or for spot reading in documents, web pages and email.

SpeakIt Tool

The SpeakIt tool allows you to read selected areas of the screen by clicking or dragging the mouse.

Special Application Support

Built-in support for popular applications – including Internet Explorer (IE 10 supported in ZoomText 10.1 for Windows 8), Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook; Office 2013 is supported in ZoomText 10.1), Adobe, Firefox, OpenOffice, iTunes and Java – allow you to read and navigate your documents with 100% accuracy.

Powerful Zoom Windows

8 different zoom windows allow you to choose which part of the screen is magnified. A zoom window displays a magnified view of the computer screen. You can think of a zoom window as a magnifying glass held in front of the screen. A zoom window only displays a portion of the screen at any one time, but by scrolling its magnified contents, you can view any area of the screen. ZoomText provides eight zoom window types: Full, Overlay, Lens, Line and four Docked positions. Each of these windows offer a unique way of viewing what is on the screen. At any time, you can switch zoom window types to accommodate a different task or application environment.

Enhanced Screen Colors

Innovative color controls improve screen clarity and reduce eyestrain. Special effects include color dyes, two-color modes and replacement of problem colors.

Helpful Videos

• Multiple Monitor Support
• Welcome to ZoomText 11
• ZoomText 11 New Modern Toolbar
• ZoomText 11 New Command Keys
• ZoomText 11 New App Reader

System Requirements

• Windows 10, 8.1 or 7 with Service Pack 1 (or later).
• Processor: 2 GHz i3 dual core processor or similar. i5 or i7 recommended.
• 4 GB Ram. 8 GB recommended.
• Video/Graphics card or integrated graphics with support for DirectX 10 or higher.
• Hard drive space for ZoomText: 1.3 GBSSD drive recommended.
• Note: After installing ZoomText, use of hard drive space can be reduced by uninstalling unneeded voices.
  • 5-point multi-touch display for touch screen support.
  • USB 2.0 for ZoomText Camera support.

Fusion Screen Shade Enhancement

The Screen Shade feature for Fusion prevents others from seeing what you are typing or reading by turning your computer screen black. This level of privacy is useful when working in public environments. Also, for low vision users who take advantage of Fusion’s screen reader functionality, it can reduce visual distractions and improve concentration.

The status message “Fusion Screen Shade, Right-click to exit” has been added to alert visual users that Screen Shade is active. It displays for approximately five seconds on the screen when you move the mouse. Screen Shade remains active until turned off with a right mouse click, or Fusion is restarted. Being able to right-click is a fast and easy way to restore the screen if you accidentally turn on this feature.

Note: Screen Shade is strictly a privacy feature and will not increase the battery life on a laptop or tablet.

Turn the Screen Shade On and Off

If Screen Shade is on and your screen is black, right-click to turn it off and show your computer screen.

To turn Screen Shade on and off, do one of the following:

• In the Fusion menu, choose Screen Shade

1. Press INSERT+SPACEBAR followed by the F11 key

1. Triple tap with three fingers on a touch screen

Note: If you are using a tool such as AppReader, it will stop reading when Screen Shade is turned on or off. To resume reading, you must restart AppReader.

Bug Fixes in March 2024 Update

Word 365

• Resolved an issue where xFont in Word documents was lost when switching between multiple monitors.
• Resolved an issue where xFont was lost when switching between Print Layout and Web Layout views.
• Resolved an issue where items in the File menu were not displaying in xFont.
• Resolved an issue where text in a document would only display in xFont when Word’s zoom level was set to 100 percent.
• Resolved an issue where xFont was missing from several areas in the Backstage view, for example, the Account, Info, and Feedback pages.

Excel 365

• In Excel, there were several fonts that did not display using xFont. These same fonts in Word do display using xFont. This issue has been resolved.

Outlook 365

• Resolved an issue where xFont was missing in the Mail, Calendar, and People windows in Outlook.

Teams

• Resolved an issue where the Teams app would display as a black window after restarting ZoomText or Fusion.

Firefox

• Resolved an issue where mouse echo was not working properly on Yahoo.com.

ZoomText

• If multiple users access ZoomText on the same computer, xFont will not display for all users until the computer was rebooted. This issue has been resolved.
• Resolved an issue where cursor enhancement settings were not migrated correctly when installing ZoomText 2024 over an existing installation of ZoomText 2023.
• When ZoomText is set to Korean, the keyboard echo would announce characters in English instead of Korean. This issue has been resolved.
• Resolved an issue where ZoomText was not reading correctly in NotePad Pro and Notepad++.
• Resolved an issue where the Windows Snipping Tool would not open after pressing Print Screen or WINDOWS Key+SHIFT+Swhile running ZoomText
• When you change the ZoomText user interface to another language, it no longer takes 10-15 seconds for ZoomText to close and restart in the newly selected language.
• Resolved an issue where Chinese and Japanese text was not displaying in xFont in multiple ZoomText dialog boxes, for example, FS Support Tools, Script Manager, Screen Enhancement Settings, and Preferences Settings.
• Resolved a memory leak issue that was observed when adding or removing monitors connected to a computer while running ZoomText on Windows 11.
• When the ZoomText Display Adapter setting was set to Compatibility mode, adding and removing monitors would disable magnification. The workaround was to change the setting or restart ZoomText. This issue has been resolved.
• If Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe) was running, and you switched the ZoomText Display Adapter setting to Compatibility mode, adding or removing a monitor would cause one of the monitors to freeze. This issue has been resolved.