Richard. I believe Lunar is the Magnification part of Supernova, but without looking at the Dolphin website I cannot say absolutely that you can buy it without the HAL speech element. Its bound to be competitive I'd say, if only because it doesn't suffer the usual US Dollar mark-up scam that its competitors face in the UK. Zoomtext Level one is the obvious competitor to Lunar. It does have some speech elements included. I am certain that the document reader is included with this magnification package, which as the name suggests, will read a whole document out to you, and magnify the part of the screen being read at the same time. It also has the option of highlighting the word being read simultaniously. In my view this is very good for people with much less usable sight. The level two Zoomtext includes interactive speech access to matterial which is much more like a screen reader, while retaining all the magnification options of the Level one product. As such, it is pretty competitively priced if this is the sort of interaction the nearer-blind than partially sighted user wants. I should point out, finally, that Lunar does have 'environment' file support, meaning that it can be tailored to magnify according to the conbtext of the application being used, i.e. magnification tailored to the word processor, speadsheet etc in use.. I'd say its a pretty tough decision to make between these two products, but I do not think I'd be far short of the mark in saying that these two are the main contenders for an IT budget for screen magnification. HTH. Ray Personal emails: Email me at mailto:ray-48@xxxxxxxx ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Godfrey" <richard.godfrey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Access-Uk@Freelists. Org" <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 10:01 PM Subject: [access-uk] MAGNIFICATION SOFTWARE QUESTION I know someone whose been asked to set up a resource centre, and she needs to know what's the most widely used magnification software. Think she wants to know what's the best/most cost-effective package - presumably this comes down to Lunar or Supernova - and I don't know anything about their relative merits. Any thoughts would be extremely helpful. Thanks. Richard Godfrey Telephone: +44 (0) 1656-657516 Office 01656-643146 Can't get through? try mobile 07791-452593 -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 14/02/2005 ** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe] ** If this link doesn't work then send a message to: ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** and in the Subject line type ** unsubscribe ** For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the ** immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq] ** or send a message, to ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- faq ** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe] ** If this link doesn't work then send a message to: ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** and in the Subject line type ** unsubscribe ** For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the ** immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq] ** or send a message, to ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- faq