Dear ZDSR community,
I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being a part of this project, for using it, reporting bugs and issues and "spamming" me about licenses. That means a lot. Today is a special days, as with the release of version 1.7.0.0 we get many important and long-awaited updates and features. Let's celebrate together!!!
What's new?
Completely redesigned authorization model
A new licensing and authorization model consolidates the free version, youth version, commercial version and LAN-authenticated version into one package. It greatly simplifies installation, update process as well as management of your installed ZDSR. The following changes have been made:
- The Public wellfare version is now called Free version.
- Youth, Youth Plus and Youth pro have become the online version now, and their functions are consistent with the commercial version.
- Business version now becomes Dongle version.
- The version used at schools and other institutions is now called LAN-authorized version.
Enhanced speech module
Speech is a core part of any screen-reading program. This version of ZDSR significantly updates its speech module as follows:
- Added Microsoft OneCore voice support.
- Added 7 new iFlytek voices.
- Added speech acceleration. If your voice of choice is too slow even after reaching 100%, you can double its speed in order to tune it to your needs.
- Added Volume boost: if your voice of choice is too quet you can increase its volume.
- Added pitch adjustment.
- Greatly improved the voice performance as well as switching between voices in a multi-voice environment.
- Added ability to manage broken voice schemes. Now you can delete them in order to clean your ZDSR installation.
- Added ability to set a punctuation scheme per vvoice scheme. By default, the global setting of ZDSR is used.
- When creating or editing a voice scheme, now you can filter your voices by speech engine, simplifying selection of the voice on a system with many installed speech engines.
- Fixed a bug that prevented SAPI 4 voices from changing the sound card.
- Fixed a bug that caused ZDSR to crash if a SAPI5 version of the Microsoft Natural Voice was installed.
- Optimized quality of the Lansheng voice when accelerating its speed.
- Optimized sound quality of some voices.
- Added ability for the Open TTS voice engines to be used on a Windows secure screen.
- Adjusted capital letters reading settings.
15.1. Moved Capital letter reading settings to the Voice Scheme settings.
15.2. Changed the way pitch changing setting works. Now it is changed by percentage, where a positive number means increasing, negative number means decreasing and 0 means no change.
New Text to audio converter
This tool allows you to use any speech engine available to ZDSR to convert text to an audio file. It supports adding files and folders, clipboard contents as well as entering the text directly. It is possible to convert the text to both .wav and .mp3 formats.
Added the new Vivo Blue heart model
Vivo Blueheart is a large language model designed to enhance accessibility of graphical content. Currently 3 modes are supported.
- OCR: performs an accurate OCR of content.
- One sentence description: describes content in one, concise sentence, e.g. "A website with text and images".
- Large model description: creates a detailed description of content.
In the future we hope to add more large language models to ZDSR. Meanwhile, thanks to Vivo for their strong dedication to accessibility.
A new Quick Launcher to make your operation faster.
You cann add frequently used files, directories, scripts or URLs to this convenient quick launcher to access them when needed. Press ZDSR+1 twice to access it. Here you can create groups and assign commands to those groups.
When you want to access it, press ZDSR+1 and then press keys assigned to your shortcut. You can also use the arrow keys to navigate between shortcuts available to the virtual layer.
Channel splitting
When participating in meetings or listening to media, you could have used Audio Ducking in order to decrease the volume of other sounds while ZDSR was speaking. Now, in addition you can switch ZDSR to one side and other sounds to the other side to increase the convenience of listening to many things at the same time.
The following shortcuts can be used to control this feature:
- ZDSR+CTRL+SHIFT+Down arrow: Switches ZDSR's sound between left, middle and right audio channels.
- ZDSR+CTRL+SHIFT+Right arrow: Switches other audio between left, middle and right audio channels.
- ZDSR+CTRL+SHIFT+Left arrow: Switches the audio of a specified process between the left, right and middle audio channels. Note that you first need to choose a process you want to adjust with the ZDSR+WIN+ALT+NUMPAD 7/9 hotkeys.
- ZDSR+CTRL+SHIFT+Up arrow: Turns off audio splitting.
Other bug fixes and improvements
- Optimized the overall stability of ZDSR, making it faster and smoother to use.
- When Clipboard Editor has unsaved changes it will prompt you to save them.
- Adjusted the position of some menus in the clipboard editor.
- Added ability to see the hex codes and the decimal codes of characters. First, use ZDSR+Left/Right arrow keys to locate a character and hold ZDSR+Down arrow to read the characters information.
- Added a new shortcut (ZDSR+CTRL+C), it copies the replaced text (if a dictionary replacement occured).
- Added an ability to read characters and/or words while typing in English. You can choose to read characters and/or words always, in edit boxes only or turn it off completely.
- Added a function to lock the microphone volume. Once enabled, no other process can control the volume of your microphone.
- Added support for sound schemes. The following changes have been made to the "Sounds" directory:
8.1. The Sounds folder in "Program Files (X86)\zdsr\zdsr" contains the "Default" folder. This is the default ZDSR sound scheme. Other directories are built-in sound schemes.
8.2. The files stored in the root folder of the folder "Sounds" in the user configuration directory have the highest priority and can replace existing sounds.
8.3. Other folders are user-defined sound schemes.
8.3.1. The custom scheme only needs to provide files which are changed, and the default sound scheme will be used as a fallback.
8.3.2. An utf8-encoded file called "info.ini" needs to be provided in the sound scheme's directory with the following structure.
languagecode=scheme name
author=authorname
````
9. Added a prompt when selecting all text in an edit box.
10. If a focused element contains actionable child elements, you can now press ZDSR+Numpad minus twice and then use ZDSR+Numpad 1/3 to navigate between those elements.
11. When encountering a braille symbol, you can press ZDSR+down to see what dots the symbols is composed of.
12. ZDSR settings have been redesigned to make them more logically grouped.
13. Added displaying of the system information in the "About" dialog.
14. A "Copy" button has been added to the "About" dialog to quickly copy the ZDSR version and other information to the clipboard.
15. Fixed a bug which prevented the non-latin capital letters from being recognized as uppercase.
16. Fixed a cursor misplacement error which could have occured when creating a new track in Reaper.
17. Fixed a bug which prevented selecting whole columns and rows in Excel from being read.
18. Fixed a bug which caused floating window message reporting when pressing the arrow keys on a Xiaomi notebook.
19. Fixed a bug which prevented access to some embedded webpages, for example in the Xiaomi Computer manager.
20. Fixed a bug which prevented the content from being read when opening ZDSR clipboard editor from a terminal window.
21. Fixed a bug which prevented deleting characters in the Clipboard manager search box.
22. Fixed a bug which prevented Sogou input method from being usable in the Windows 11 Notepad.
23. Fixed a bug which prevented reading of Excel's selection when pressing CTRL+Shift+Arrow keys.
24. Fixed a bug which made it possible to switch the keyboard to a numpad state while locked, making it impossible to unlock.
25. Fixed a bug which could cause an ARIA live region to become unreadable.
26. Fixed a bug which could cause an unexpected switching to edit mode when switching window from the browser window.
27. Fixed a bug causing the first string to be discarded by the ZDSRApi, when an independed channel is used.
28. Fixed a bug which caused CTRL+WIN+ALT+NUMPAD plus hotkey to be passed through to the Windows magnifier.
29. Fixed a bug which prevented the microphone enhancement level from being adjusted in some sound cards.
30. Fixed a bug causing the Unigram message list to be read repeatedly.
31. Fixed issues present in VS 2022 code editor.
32. Fixed a bug which caused an incorrectly sorted list to appear when entering a space in the search box of the Clipboard manager.
33. Enhanced reliability of the ZDSR+V hotkey.
34. Improved the detection algorithms of programs playing sounds.
35. Enhanced support of Scintilla-based editors. For example, AkelPad reads selection changes when using the Swift+Arrow hotkeys.
36. Optimized the experience of the Tongdaxin login interface.
37. Fixed reading of total number of Windows (ZDSR+TAB).
38. Optimized the accuracy of CPU usage reporting.
39. Optimized reading unlabelled links. Now, when a link has no label, its target URL will be read.
40. Optimized automatic labeling of controls on webpages.
41. Fixed a message when deleting a selection in a text box.
42. When restoring ZDSR settings to their defaults a confirmation question is asked twice. Moreover, a backup folder is created containing the current settings.
43. Added ability to long press ZDSR+F9 and ZDSR+F10 to restore the respective values to the first element.
44. The following adjustments have been made to the ZDSR menu
44.1. Moved the welcome window to the Help menu.
44.2. Added authorization instructions to the help menu.
44.3. Renamed ZDSR settings to Settings.
44.4. Renamed Exit ZDSR to Exit.
44.5. Deleted the "Differences between editions" menu.
45. Adjusted the soundcard management hotkeys as follows:
CTRL+WIN+ALT+
45.1. Numpad Enter: If focusing an input/output device sets it as a system default device. If focusing a process restores its input and output devices to system defaults.
45.2. Numpad star: If focusing a microphone adjusts its enhancement level. If focusing a process switches its default input device.
45.3. Numpad Plus: Locks or unlocks the selected microphone's volume.
45.5. Numpad Minus: Switches the audio ducking state.
46. Made it so that pressing CTRL stops reading of an Aria live region.
## Changes in the purchase process
The price of the program is still 26 dollars a year, however some changes have been made in the purchase process.
1. Removed authorization key and password. Now, every license is automatically bound to the user's ZDSR ID.
2. When purchasing the program, please provide your ZDSR ID and E-Mail in the purchase nnote.
3. To purchase, send 26 dollars to the following Paypal: nuno69a@gmail.com.
## For existing users
If you still have an unbound authorization key and password you can bind it by going here
https://www.zd.hk/youth-bind.htm
and log in with your ZDSR ID. Then, you can enter your authorization key and password binding it to your ZDSR iD.
If you don't have a ZDSR ID yet you can create it by going here
https://www.zd.hk/user/create?verify_type=email
## Binding a mobile phone
A mobile phone verification is required only when you want to participate in the discussions or an official ZDSR forum. Otherwise you don't need to bind a phone number with your account.