GhostReader Version History
New in version 1.5.1:
- Export to iTunes now: (1) Sets album, album artist, and year to default values; (2) Puts the date and time of audio creation in the iTunes comments field; (3) Uses the GhostReader logo as default album art.
- Fixes spinning cursor issue with Pages 2008
- Acapela Group provided fixes to the following voice issues: (1) Activation problem with American Spanish; (2) Occasional crash with the Italian Chiara voice; (3) Text encoding problems with Czech and Polish voices.
- Adds new natural sounding voices for Czech, Polish, Swedish and Finnish while existing voices have been enhanced
- Adds a pronunciation editor, which can be used to modify the way a word is pronounced or to add new abbreviations
- Adds direct export to iTunes of documents and selected text for playback on iPhone or iPod
- Adds user-selectable encoding for export to iTunes (AAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless)
- In Leopard now also reads DOCX and ODT documents
- Export to iTunes now runs in the background
- Enhanced responsiveness when speaking selected text or text below the cursor
- Speaking selected text now also works in floating windows such as those of the Leopard Help Viewer
- Speak Text Below the Cursor now speaks the alt. tags for images and buttons in web pages, Mail and widgets
- Speak Text Below the Cursor now also speaks just the paragraph below the cursor in Mail, TextEdit and Pages 2008
- Many other enhancements and fixes
- Now creates a true, bookmarkable audiobook file when exporting to iTunes 7 AAC format, ready to load onto an iPhone or iPod
- Now Leopard-ready
- Improved PDF import with smart-stripping of end-of-line hyphens
- Improved performance when speaking long texts
- New languages with high quality female voices: American Spanish (Rosa) and Canadian French (Louise)
- New languages with medium quality voices: Turkish, Icelandic and Czech
- New high quality voices for Dutch (Max) and British English (Peter)
- Adds a German localization (English and French were already available)
- Enhanced listening experience with buttons to re-listen the current paragraph or sentence or to skip to the next one
- For school use preferences can now be locked and the content of the reader window can be exported to an RTF document
- Many other interface and usability enhancements, including an expanded Help facility
If you have a vision impairment, you should look at the Infovox iVox with VisioVoice bundle from AssistiveWare, because, unlike GhostReader, those products are optimized for blind and vision impaired people. Infovox iVox provides system-wide voices compatible with VoiceOver and other applications, whereas the ConvenienceWare voices only work in GhostReader. VisioVoice, in addition to the features offered by GhostReader, offers a talking interface that speaks menus, buttons, text, Finder items and so forth. It also includes text and image zoom windows and large cursors.