ZDSR screen reader: questions

How good is it? I tried searching for a sample but no luck.

Hmm, I can pay you in cirial, or perhaps some lovely floor wipes? They're awesome! They're big and cover a huge space and you can just get things clean with them, no more small wipes!

Yo .

I am quite curious to try ZDSR, but the official Github links for dl are broken. Not a good first impression for potentially paid software if someone uses something other than the Public Welfare edition. I'm already against having a billion paid tiers for software and imposing false limitations. Unfortunately I can understand both sides.

So some questions: And yes I read the thread first :)

1. I run an offline machine mostly. I activate music software / plugins on that machine online, but immediately turn Airplane mode back on. Is a ZDSR license persistent between launches of the screen reader, and does it only query the internet when you activate it? In other words: If I boot my pc in airplane mode will ZDSR still be activated, or is it naggy and checking every five minutes whenever it runs? That will not work for me on an offline audio machine.

2. TTS. Is there only this SkyVoice or whatever thing, or can you use SAPI or other voices? Is there even an English voice, or is this strictly Chinese with no proper localization yet?

3. Braille displays. Working or no? What is supported? The manual goes into detail about just about everything else.

4. If this Sr is so magical, how come more people aren't talking about it? And what's up with the broken dl links? Again, you can't tell me this thing's super fast and does all this great stuff NVDA is hopeless and useless at, then not have a working download. Have I just wasted 30 mins trying to learn about a potentially amazing piece of software, or am I chasing a red herring?

Thx for any help

I can't seem to find any relevant information on ZDSR these days. If it is still in development, I'm thinking it's for it's native market only. If you happen to find anything out, do let us know. 🙂

https://www.zdsr.com/

and

https://www.zd.hk/

, which both require Translation.

In addition, latest documentation can be found here:

https://www.zdsr.com/docs/zdsr/

Same note above about translating said docs to English, also applies.

Hi HMC,
I have been using ZDSR as a secondary, backup screen reader for more than a year and have some experience with older versions of it back to 2015 since when I follow its evolution.
So I try to answer some of your questions:
1. Online license check seems to be somewhat random. There is a distinctive sound played when it happens and another is played when the validation is successful. I have nearly always heard these after waking up my laptop from sleep mode. There were times when there were multiple checks in a single afternoon during normal computer usage, but these were rather rare. As my laptop is always online, I cannot comment on what the chances are with a mostly offline machine, but I think that online license is called so for a reason, so it presumes that the machine is usually online. I know that if the online license check fails then it reverts back to public welfare edition functionality. It happened once or twice for me too when the license server had some technical difficulty, but it didn't last long at all.
I note that there is a dongle license option that is totally suitable for offline usage, but it is way way more expensive than an online license. However a dongle license is permanent, while the online license is valid for some years (1, 2 or 3)
2. ZDSR supports SAPI 4 and 5 synths. SAPI 5 support is quite good, in fact that's the way I use it. My native tongue is Hungarian, so I hook up the SAPI 5 version of Espeak to ZDSR, and that is very fine this way. I cannot comment on SAPI 4 as I never used that with ZDSR. By the way there are English voices among the built-in ones, and there are dual (English / Chinese) ones too. I especially like the Catherine voice (that is an English-only female voice) despite its many pronounciation quirks.
ZDSR has good English localisation with some exceptions, the most important of which is the help system which is Chinese only. Localisation is by the way simple and can be done from the UI or through simply editing text files. I did that for Hungarian punctuation symbols and they work great. I could do a full Hungarian localisation if I wanted to, but cannot justify that effort even for myself.
3. As I have never ever used any braille displays and am not planning on using any, I cannot comment on that.
4. ZDSR is not magical at all. Its response speed is faster in some complex situations, but for ordinary workflows it is the same as NVDA. There are scenarios too where it is markedly slower than NVDA: one example is alphabetical navigation on websites. There are some edge cases when it performs significantly better screen-readerwise than e.g. NVDA, but for ordinary workflows it performs the same as all screen readers basicly rely on the same sets of APIs. There exist some edge cases when ZDSR makes a better guess when those APIs feed false information to it due to bad accessibility design of software or when they don't work at all due to even worse design. In those cases it can be a lifesaver (and it did that to me in some occasions too), but other than those it is not magically better than NVDA. In China lot of folks also use NVDA by the way as it is free and quite performant.
In my experience for example ZDSR is often better with complex web apps and helps with focus jumping around or focus stuck problems with these. ZDSR tends to handle dinamically scrolling content more smoothly, like on Facebook (by the way, I regard the screen reader "accessibility" of Facebook as an insult and a mockery on accessibility, and I have quit using it entirely for that reason). ZDSR can be better for some software with a very cluttered user interface, because it simplifies object trees and that makes navigating keyboard-inaccessible controls easier in those cases.
ZDSR is in active development withusually one or two updates per month. For example a captcha recognition facility was introduced last August. It has some shortcuts for each type of captcha it can solve. The uniqueness of it is that it can handle slider captchas: when you must drag your mouse over a graphical symbol in a particular motion pattern to unlock the captcha. You cannot solve these with anything else. I haven't had the chance to try that out, as that kind of captcha is fortunately not popular in the Western world, but frequent in China.
Finally I can say that the really "official" ZDSR homepage is rather www.zd.hk. You will find the download section near the top of the page, but it needs translation as the whole page is in Chinese.

Hey,

thanks so much for the clarifications! So it sounds like what I thought, overall the SR works similar to other products using the same Windows API's and hooking. I'm going to hold off for now, but it's definitely in my mind to give ZDSR a good long testdrive. Any program that can deal with those tricky apps or websites is worth having.
Maybe I'm spoiled, though. After I got out of the JAWS update SMA cycle and switched to NVDA in 2009, I just don't want to pay for screen reading. I'm not bashing anyone who does, it's just not my thing. THEN again, if my tests prove really promising I might pick up the commercial edition.

Nvda's very powerful, but for apps that need addons and don't have them, it's game over. Thesame is true of any SR. So I guess if I like the flavor of ZDSR and how it behaves, I'll consider going full time with it for a good month or so.

Cheers and thanks again for the help! Have a good weekend!!