GuideConnect 1.13

GuideConnect 1.13 is released immediately in UK English, US English, Australian English and Russian, with the following new features, improvements and fixes:

Web Pages

• GuideConnect now highlights and reads aloud larger sections of information, reducing the need to continually press the DOWN ARROW.
• New cursor highlight more visibly indicates the cursor’s location on edit areas such as Google search.
• GuideConnect users that prefer to browse the web with the mouse can now turn the speech off using the hotkey CONTROL + F4. With this option, the text is still announced when adding details into forms on webpages.
• New setting allows you to view ‘busy’ webpages in your preferred GuideConnect colours, or with a simplified view that strips back all the formatting.   

Email

• Block emails from specific senders by adding a sender to the ‘Blocked email addresses’ list.
• GuideConnect now displays the file size of your attachments, so you don’t accidentally add very large attachments to emails.
• When creating a new email it is now possible to choose multiple recipients.

Documents

• When using the UP and DOWN arrows to read through a document, GuideConnect now announces punctuation. (Using F5 to perform a continuous read still reads with no punctuation.)
• Print documents at font size 72pt.
• Import multiple files into GuideConnect’s Documents. Ideal for transferring documents from a USB drive.

Books

• GuideConnect users in the UK can now browse, download and read titles from RNIB’s new ‘Reading Services’ that replaces the OverDrive service.

File Manager

• New ‘Deleted items’ folder has been added to GuideConnect’s File Manager. Deleted items are temporarily stored for 30 days, before being completely removed from the computer. The duration of files storage in the deleted items folder can also be adjusted in settings.

Tools and Settings

• Design your own mouse pointer in colours that suit your sight. Three additional mouse pointer customisation settings have been added to set the fill colour, line colour and line width of your mouse pointer.
• Set the announcement level to “low” and GuideConnect no longer announces how many items are on a menu or in a list. E.g. In email the voice will no longer say “email, 1 of 10”, instead just announcing “email”.

Fixes and Improvements for Those with a Technical Interest:

Website

• A fix has been made for a bug that caused some repeated characters such as “pp” or “tt” not to be announced when typing in forms on webpages.
• Tabbing out of a form on a webpage now performs as expected.

Email

• It is now possible to print PDFs and other files received as an email attachment.
• A new option to re-run the email set-up wizard has now been made available.
• A bug where the email inbox showed no emails over after syncing has now been fixed.
• Using the button to test your email settings no longer causes a hang.
• Authorizing Gmail email accounts in GuideConnect is now working as expected.
• Following changes by Sky, GuideConnect users are now able to sign into Sky email accounts without issue.
• The sent email folder now lists the recipient of the email rather than the sender.
• It is now possible to successfully setup existing GuideMail email accounts.
• After completing the email set-up, pressing ESCAPE no longer returns users to the “getting started” videos.
• After changing email account settings, you no longer need to restart GuideConnect for the changes to take effect.
• Users are now able to send emails with attachments that contain non-English characters in the title.
• After opening a file from the “My saved attachments” list, users are returned to their saved attachments list and not the email menu.
• Improved terminology in the emails Actions Menu to make it make it clearer that you can "Add or view recipients" and you can also "Add or view attachments".
• When logging into Gmail the syncing from server notifications are now behaving as expected.
• Users are now able to delete multiple emails by selecting them with the SPACEBAR.
• Hotmail users are able to move emails to folders as expected
• All email folders are now displayed as expected.
• For Gmail users, the option to ‘Check for new mail’ no longer gets stuck on “loading, please wait”.
• A problem that occurred when replying to an email, where GuideConnect incorrectly added the characters "<" and ">" to the email address has now been resolved.
• GuideConnect now saves and edits draft emails as expected, including retaining the recipients’ details.
• GuideConnect users can now use the delete key to delete email folders.
• When your email inbox is empty, you can now access the Actions Menu to check for new emails.
• All sent email are now visible in the sent folder.
• Email addresses displayed in < > symbols are now announced as expected.
• A fix for a crash that occurred when checking for new mail has been made.
• Sending an email no longer causes the contents of the inbox to disappear.
• Sending a text note via email no causes an error message.
• Calendar events sent to an outlook account are now imported into the Outlook account as expected.

Books

• ‘Book information’ has now been moved from GuideConnect’s Actions Menu to the Download Book screen. This is designed to make it easier for readers to find information about a book before deciding to download a title.
• Pasting a password into the login screens now displays the passwords as stars, presuming “Read password as stars” is selected in settings.
• A crash that occurred when using the using the Back-up and Restore feature has now been fixed.

Documents

• The terminology when choosing print size options has been altered to make the choices more self-explanatory.
• When selecting a recent document and pressing Enter, you no longer have to press ESCAPE twice.
• When printing a multi-page document, lines of text are no longer missing.

Scanner and Camera

• When in the camera viewer, GuideConnect now correctly announces “There are actions available".
• It is now possible to move to the top of a scanned document using the keys CTRL + HOME.
• When zooming in or out of a picture being viewed, GuideConnect now announces “zoom level increased” or “zoom level decreased”.

Address Book

• It is now possible to sort GuideConnect’s Address Book by date.

File Manager

• When attempting to delete a folder, GuideConnect will now ask users to confirm their wish to proceed with the deletion.
• GuideConnect users can now move through the folders of a USB device using the UP and DOWN ARROW keys.
• Moving multiple files no longer causes a crash.
• Users are now able to move files to folders they have created on a USB device.

Tools and Settings

• For languages without voice input, it is now possible to adjust the “Microphone volume” setting which was previously unavailable. This feature has been included so users can adjust the microphone volume when recording audio notes.
• The Typing Tutor scores are now displayed correctly.
• GuideConnect’s Help is now available for the Tools.
• GuideConnect’s spell checker now correctly recognises single words that contain an apostrophe e.g. “I’m”.

Entertainment

• Podcasts are no longer imported into “My Music”.
• Audio books are no longer imported into “My Music”.
• The UK podcasts list now only contains podcasts that are active.
• New announcements have been added to remind GuideConnect users that they cannot skip forwards and backwards when a radio station is playing.

General

• When uninstalling an older version of GuideConnect and reinstalling a new version, an error message is no longer presented after launch.
• Symbols are now correctly announced, including: `! "" - () [] {} ; : ' \ > , . / ?
• GuideConnect’s “Print Now” is now the first option in the Print Menu.
• When leaving Help and continuing to write an email or document, GuideConnect now places the cursor in its last known position in the email or document.
• A new setting to turn the ‘On Screen Keyboard’ permanently off is now available.
• When using a GuideConnect 30-day trial, the messages informing users how many days are left have been corrected.
• The words 'GuideConnect' no longer appear cropped during the installation of the Italian edition of GuideConnect.