A potential customer would like to understand the difference between ZoomText and Fusion.

At first, both ZoomText and Fusion may appear to provide much the same facilities with magnifico\tion and speech but there is more it than that. 

This is primarily a magnification product with the option of low vision speech to assist a user on the assumption that the user has enough functional vision with the greater weight being placed on visual information and navigation and speech supplementing the magnification.  ZoomText provides tools fore reading finished documents in the form of the DocReader and AppReader tools.  Speech designed to supplement magnification is typically called low vision speech to disgtinguish its capabilities from that of a full screen reader which may provide too much and overly complex environment for users.  Therefore ZoomText with its low vision speech lacks some of the abilities of the JAWS screen reader to interrogate the screen.  A certain percentage of ZoomText users may experience changes or deterioration of their eye condition, ZoomText can magnifiy up to 64x to compensate.  If one considers that even at 2x magnification you only see one quarter of screen output when running full screen magnification one may apreciate even less total screen area can be seen at any time at higher magnificatrion powers.  When higher powers are used users may begin to experience difficulties with navigating around the operating system and applications and generally finding it harder to carry out tasks or read back text.  At this point one may come up against the limitations of both low vision speech and using a mouse as primary navigation tool.

The Fusion package extends ZoomText by replacing the low vision speech component with the JAWS screen reader to provide a way for a user to transition away from using a mouse to navigation as with ZoomText and progress to using a full screen reader and using the keyboard for navigation whilst still retaining magnification as confidence reinforcement.  In this situation the primary information gets flipped with the screen reader providing for more information with magnification supporting the speech output.  Users who derive the greatest benefit from Fusion are typically those that embrace keyboard navigation because it improves the speed they can work without the extra load panning a mouse around the screen and consequent navigation problems when at high magnification levels.  The adition of JAWS which replaces ZoomText low vision speech provides a significantly richer speech environment and greater ability to interrogate the screen.  Additionally Fusion can provide a one stop shop when used in multi-user or public access workstations setting allowing JAWS or ZoomText to be run individually if required for the user.