Re: orbit reader 20 now on sale
and just in time for Easter, orbit had come up with yet another upgrade to their firmware. I normally do not announce them here as its a bit irrelevant and the information can be publicly browsed, but this time it was a big surprise. I normally was just fine reading the way I was doing it, and then I upgraded just today that I had time (life does really get in the way of reading, sadly) and was delighted to find out that they now have done autoScrolling in stand-alone reading mode! (the screen reader handles this automatically when the display is connected to whatever device)
yeah, for the fancy expensive displays/notetakers this is probably a no brainer, and probably laughable at best, but I took it for a spin and it went really well. The only minor downside (that I could change myself but I am lazy lol) is the really poor translation they used in the displayed Spanish messages for naming the feature.
But, OK. Here is the quick review on it.
When you are reading a document and press space bar to start or stop auto scrolling, you have a default time of 10 seconds per line which I found to be way too slow, but its sensible if the readers are beginners. Pressing space to start will advance the display right away, as well. I had to shorten it to about 4 dot something seconds and it still gave me time to really double check what I had read (I say this because grade 2 in Spanish is still a bit difficult for me as we normally used grade one during pretty much all of our lives but I am enjoying it a lot)
so I think in terms of speed I can do pretty decently. I would really congratulate a person who could read with auto scrolling using the max speed which is every second, that would be amazing!
Setting the speed is a bit counter intuitive, at least for me, because if you think in number terms, pressing space bar plus up arrow should increase the number, not decrease it, but then.. well, it would increase the speed, so there is that. I really liked that you can actually use every command that is listed in the manual for the reading mode without interrupting the braille pacer feature as they call it. Which means that if you were reading something and were not quite finished yet but the display scrolled, you can scroll it back, and then either wait for the next 4 seconds to go by to scroll again, or scroll it forward again, and the timer gets reset each time you issue a command, so its pretty flexible.
As for checking the current speed besides the number you get when changing it, you can do so from the menu too, but you cannot modify it from there, and it is better if you change it with auto scroll disabled because if you change the speed when auto scroll is on, you will not get any numbers telling you the new value. Lastly, the value is saved every time it is modified, and it should be that way until you change it again or restore the display to the defaults.
So, I now will enjoy reading even more!
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