Step by Step Tutorials / Windows XP (published by Microsoft)
"Narrator is a text--to--speech utility for people who are blind or have low vision. Narrator reads what is displayed on the screen--the contents of the active window, menu options, or text that has been typed... Narrator is designed to work with Notepad, WordPad, Control Panel programs, Internet Explorer, the Windows desktop, and some parts of Windows Setup. Narrator may not read words aloud correctly in other programs."
"Narrator is designed to work with Internet Explorer, Notepad, WordPad, the Control Panel and the Desktop. It may work with other programs but this isn�t guaranteed... Unfortunately, it only seems to read editable text. If you�ve opened a document in WordPad, this is fine; Narrator will happily read the contents aloud... However, if you are using it to browse web sites, you hit a problem. Narrator will read out the menu options and any editable areas such as input fields. What it won�t read is the content of any normal web page as these are by definition read-only. A slight problem!"
X vs. XP - Speech/Voice Recognition
"XP's Speech Synthesis program is called Narrator (below), and it can be access by typing Windows-U. Narrator can read aloud menu commands, dialog box options, Announce events on screen and Read typed characters. It comes with one voice, Sam. It doesn't appear to be capable of reading selected text."
Tips and Tricks for MS Access Aids
"Narrator has changed a little between version 1.0 (Windows 2000) and version 1.5 (Windows XP). The strong points of version 1.0 are that it can use any SAPI 4 compatible speech engine in any language where as v1.5 can only use Microsoft Sam in English. V1.0 also includes larger scales for the speed, pitch and volume boxes which is a definite plus when listening to some MS voices real fast. However, v1.5 has got better overall accessibility and it can read balloon help and tooltips, too...
"In the 2k version of Narrator (version 1.0), it is possible to use other Microsoft voices and even other speech synthesizers in foreign languages. This is becaus v1.0 supports the SAPI 4 speech standard. However, the XP version (v1.5) supports SAPI 5 and because SAPI 5 is not backwords compatible with SAPI 4, there's no way to use SAPI 4 voices in the XP version of Narrator. Neither does Narrator v1.5 support other SAPI 5 voices, all other SAPI voices and engines than Microsoft SAPI 5 and the voice Sam are completetely ignored. Not all hope is lost, however, because you can use Narrator v1.0 in Windows XP... You can use both Narrator versions 1.0 and 1.5 in both Windows 2000 and Windows XP."
Tips and Tricks for MS Access Aids
"As a result of Microsoft's active role in accessibility, current Windows operating systems contain basic accessibility aids such as... a screen reader (Windows 2000 and XP only)...
"Narrator is Microsoft's free and simple screen reader supporting Microsoft's SAPI (speech application programming interface) and MSAA (microsoft's acctive accessibility). Unlike in commercial screen readers, you don't have much control over what Narrator reads and what it doesn't, you can only specify whether Narrator will automatically read the contents of new dialogs and whether it will echo your key pressses...
"Generally speaking, Narrator works OK in standard dialogs, windows and menus and also in Windows Explorer reading all the texts (and even tooltips if you are using Narrator in XP)and announcing the graphical user interface gadgets like check boxes, radio buttons, normal buttons and other elements like drag bars, too. however, application support for other than pretty basic applications is pretty poor... The only practical way to use IE or OE with narrator is to copy the text you want to read to the clipboard... Non-Microsoft application support is generally pretty poor, too.
"Unfortunately Narrator is the only free screen read[er] for Windows out there. I know there are free screen readers for Linux but sadly not for Windows..."