Using a Talking Browser

AW (a 10-year-old dyslexic girl) and I spent several delightful sessions exploring the features of Web Talkster. I had previously downloaded it onto my own computer and had briefly looked at most features.

AW's mother reported that AW had used the internet at home to try and find information for school assignments but had given up because she always had to get someone else to come and read things to her and couldn't work out what links to follow.

Her mother was keen to download the program. Once she had done this I sat with AW and showed her some of the features.

She is very interested in dinosaurs, so to begin with I loaded the Zoom Dinosaurs site, which we were both familiar with. She enjoyed clicking on the wizard character and hearing him speak. I told her to click on the speak button and we listened to the character read the page.

AW was amused to hear him read everything on the page, not only the main text.

I then showed her how to highlight a small area of text and the click on the selected button.She thought this feature was great and tried it out on different sections of text and individual words.

In our next session I suggested we try out some of the different options. We had fun in the character options trying out the different voices, pitch and speed and size.

Once we had tried them all I got AW to select the ones she felt were the easiest to understand. She decided that a male voice at medium speed was best for listening to large sections of text but liked the monotone on slow for when she wanted to take notes etc.

Next we tried out the balloon text option. She felt this was helpful as the words appeared in the balloon as they were being spoken.

Then I showed her how to hide the character by right clicking on it and clicking hide. To get the character to return we had to go to options - character - load character. So we felt a better way to hide the character was to go to options - character - move - on or off screen. This eliminated the need to load the character and more importantly still allows the page to be spoken without showing the character.

We used the search facility and listened to the links being read. AW felt this would speed up her searches, as she would have more idea of what to click on.

A few things that AW thought may cause difficulties were:

• The very small address bar for typing URLs
• The way the character spells each letter individually if a word is written in uppercase characters.

Younger children may have difficulty highlighting the relevant text to be read, if nothing is highlighted the character reads everything on the page including the ads.

AW loves using Web Talkster for research now as she can work much more independently.

R.M., South Australia