What's New in the MAGic 9.0 Update

The MAGic 9.0 update (released in July 2004), contains the following enhancements and bug fixes.

Features and Enhancements

Read Columns of Text

You can now press MAGic Key+C to begin reading a column of text from your current location.

New Keystroke for the Say Clipboard Command

The keystroke to hear the contents of the Clipboard has been changed from MAGic Key+C to MAGic Key+X. The keystroke MAGic Key+C can now be used to read a column of text from your current location.

Spanish Help System

MAGic now includes online Help topics in Spanish. This lets you use the Enable Bilingual Interface option to change the language of the help system to Spanish. To change the language of the Help system and user interface, do the following:

Note: You can also specify Spanish as the primary language and choose another language as your secondary language. When you switch to English or Spanish with MAGic Key + F11, the user interface and Help will also switch to that language. If you switch to a language other than English or Spanish, MAGic only changes the synthesizer language.

Bug Fixes

The following issues have been resolved in this update:

• MAGic no longer speaks some dialog box control information twice when you use the TAB key to move through dialog boxes.
• Improved dialog box reading is now more direct when reading the control with the focus when the dialog box first opens.
• Occasional spelling of the current line when you use ALT+TAB to switch back to a text editing window is fixed.
• Punctuation is now spoken properly when you type or navigate documents with the arrow keys.
• In Windows XP, tracking and speech is synchronized correctly when you navigate the classic Start menu.
• MAGic now interrupts speech correctly when you close submenus in the classic Start menu
• The Dynamic Lens view now resizes correctly when you navigate the Start menu. When you select an item in the Start menu, both the icon and the text are now visible, as is the submenu symbol (when applicable).
• MAGic no longer turns on personalized menus for the classic Start menu in Windows XP.
• Mouse, cursor, and color enhancement scheme names can now contain extended characters, such as umlauts and accented letters.
• The Say "Cap" before uppercase letters option in the Typing Echo dialog box now recognizes umlauts and accented characters.
• Settings for inverting colors are now saved properly for Windows 95/98/ME systems.
• MAGic now returns visual focus to the cursor location in a document when exiting menus.
• The Yes and No buttons in some dialog boxes were not being spoken correctly. This has been fixed.
• The Say Word and Spell Word commands now say and spell the word at the cursor or mouse pointer correctly.
• In the View Properties dialog box, the Size group box is now handled properly. Previously, MAGic moved to the unselected item "Line" first. Pressing the TAB key again returned the focus to the selected item.
• In the Color Enhancements dialog box, MAGic reads the Active Color Switches list label correctly when color switching rules are defined.
• MAGic reads the Length and Height sliders in the Unmagnified Area tab of the Mouse Enhancements dialog box.
• On all the enhancement schemes tabs, MAGic now reads the Scheme list properly when a Windows XP theme is in use.
• In the Quick View Frames dialog box, MAGic reads the Border Color list correctly.
• In the Document and Text Reading dialog box, MAGic no longer announces the Color list as, "HT Style," instead of, "Color.”
• You can now replace gray with other colors when creating color switching rules. The color Windows assigns to dialog boxes (the default is gray) is the color that MAGic replaces when you choose “Dialog Gray” in the Color list.
• MAGic now moves the magnified area to the cursor after you open or close a dialog box. This fix affects programs such as Microsoft Word, Notepad, and WordPad.
• You can now turn cursor enhancements on and off with MAGicKey+F8 in Microsoft Word.
• In multi-page dialog boxes, MAGic now reads tabs when you move to them by pressing CTRL+TAB or clicking the tab.
• The Mouse Echo Toggle command (MAGic Key+M) now correctly announces when you toggle mouse echo between line, word, and off.
• Network MAGic functionality has been restored.
• The Magnification button is no longer missing from the MAGic user interface on systems configured to use enlarged fonts.

Other features in MAGic 9.0
Download the MAGic 9.00.499 update (26.8 MB)
Download the MAGic Dongle required 9.00.501 Update (30.1 MB)