Serotek Announces an End to Software Maintenance Agreements Industry Standard SMAs No Longer Standard

Serotek Corporation, the leading provider of internet and digital information accessibility software and services, today announced that it will no longer require a fee to upgrade or maintain any software in its product line. Software companies traditional have charged fees under a contract, commonly known as a Software Maintenance Agreement (SMA), to upgrade to newer versions of their software packages. Serotek will continue to provide regular upgrades and software improvements but will offer them free of charge to all Serotek customers. The announcement was formally made today at the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) annual conference in Orlando, Florida, with the company’s “RIP SMA” campaign. The first such offering of its kind, the news was met with great user enthusiasm.

“True to our belief that accessibility is right, not a privilege, we are excited to lead the industry in pronouncing SMAs are dead.” said Mike Calvo, CEO, Serotek Corporation, “Users of our System Access product line can now enjoy one price, one time, forever. And we encourage the industry to follow suit.”

Reactions to this news can be found on the company’s podcast, Serotalk, which is being broadcast live from the conference’s Internet Café, which is being sponsored by the Serotek Corporation. Those unable to attend the conference can listen to the Serotalk podcast by going to www.serotalk.com.

Windows 7 Will Include Full-Screen Magnifier

Michael Bernstein, is a Microsoft development lead on the User Interface Platform team where he focuses on accessibility.
In a Blog on MSDN he announced, that Windows 7 includes a screen magnifier supporting full-screen and lens mode. In his Blog Michael Bernstein wrote:
"The Magnifier came in for a deeper overhaul. The Magnifier in Windows Vista and Windows XP was not an intuitive experience: when you pointed at part of the screen, the magnified content appeared in a separate window, usually docked at top of the screen. You had to point at one place and look at another. We considered two basic solutions to this problem: you could zoom into the entire screen or you could make the magnified area follow the pointer while leaving the rest of the screen the same. These became our two primary modes for the Windows 7 Magnifier: Full-screen mode and Lens mode.

Full-screen mode is great when you want to increase the size of everything on the screen at once. As you move the mouse or keyboard focus around the middle of the screen, the view stays still; if you move towards the edge, the Magnifier scrolls the view to keep up. One downside of this mode is that you can lose track of your context. To address that usability issue, we added a context animation that zooms out to show you where your work area is relative to the whole screen, and then zooms back in.

Lens mode, on the other hand, is nice when you just want to zoom in on one particular thing. In this mode, the lens centers on the mouse pointer, which feels much like using a magnifying glass. You can re-size the lens to be very wide and short, which can be nice if you are reading a document and want to magnify it line by line. We based our design on the popular Microsoft IntelliPoint magnifier, a design you can now enjoy with any mouse.

We also addressed customer feedback about the Magnifier window taking up too much space on the screen. We moved the most commonly used controls like zoom in/out to a small toolbar, which fades out to a semi-transparent watermark when you aren’t using it. The remaining options are available in an Options dialog when you need them. Last, we gave almost everything a keyboard shortcut, so if you really don’t want to see the UI, you don’t have to use it. Win-+ will zoom you in any time you are using Windows 7.

Read Michael Bernstein's Blog on Accessibility tools in Windows 7

DesktopZoom 3.2 Free Screen Magnifier Released

LittleGems.Admin has released version DesktopZoom 3.2.
DesktopZoom is the most popular free screen magnifier for Windows XP and Windows 200. It also seems to work on Windows Vista with Aero disabled.

New in version 2.3:

• Enlarged DesktopZoom Mouse pointer now looks much more like the Windows mouse pointer
• The Start button in DesktopZoom is now default. So after starting DesktopZoom and pressing ENTER, DesktopZoom now starts magnifying.
• Magnification now starts around the mouse pointer

Click here for a free DesktopZoom download or more information about DesktopZoom.