The Window-Eyes screen voice is the voice that reads information on the display screen. The keyboard voice is the voice that echos your keystrokes as you type, including information put there by your application program. The mouse voice is the voice that responds to the mouse pointer, whether you move the mouse pointer with your physical mouse by moving it around on its mouse pad or with the Window-Eyes mouse hot keys.

So if you type information onto the display screen, you hear the keyboard voice. If you read it back with cursoring keys or hot keys, you hear the screen voice. If you go over it with the mouse pointer, you hear the mouse voice. All three of these sound the same in the Window-Eyes default speaking environment.

Window-Eyes has separate voices for screen, keyboard, and mouse pointer because speech-access users need them. For example, if you were using your word processor to read a rough draft, you would generally not want to have punctuation marks read. But if you were editing as you read, you would probably want to hear the punctuation marks as you typed them in order to minimize the frequency of keying errors.

Window-Eyes can also control how you hear each of the voices through various verbosity options. All of these settings can be saved either globally (affecting all set files), or locally (affecting only the current set file) by changing the Global Settings option on or off in the Window-Eyes Global menu.