Texthelp Read and Write is a lot of program for a lot of money, even with the hefty discount available for students assessed as requiring assistive technology. It has: a text predictor that suggests what you might be wanting to say; a feature that picks out all the homophones and turns them all blue and another which displays their alternatives; a dictionary; a talking calculator; a talking spell checker talking anything, in fact, with the speech facility; and you can even talk back to it with the speech to text notepad. It also has a button to find facts on the internet, another to store them and yet another to operate a scanner. Just about every sort of support older pupils and adults with dyslexia could ask for.
Designed to bolt on to any open Windows program, a tool bar floats on the screen where these functions are available at the click of an icon. Sometimes they open new windows, like the speech to text pad that requires you to cut and paste the text into the document you are working on from the open window, or the fact folder that helps you to organise your information. The calculator has a very useful tally roll sidebar that shows the calculation and, with speech switched on, reads out not just the individual entries but also the complete sum when the answer is given.
The spell checker can be set to work as you type, to pick up phonetic misspellings, and to read out words and definitions if the speech button on the toolbar is clicked. In fact, anything highlighted will be read - in the dictionary, on a webpage, in a document - although again it sometimes needs to open another window to do this.
All the functions have videos available to demonstrate how to use them, particularly useful for those who don’t like using manuals, in other words most of us.
All together this is an impressive array of tools, which the computer-committed will enjoy exploring and exploiting. However, it is not without glitches. The facility to turn homophones blue turned all subsequent text blue and couldn’t be reversed through the software. That which picks them out told me that a ‘bow’ is ‘a curve or an implement for firing arrows’, but didn’t mention nodding one’s head, a knot in your shoelaces or the front end of a boat.
All of the functions present here can be found elsewhere as standalone programs. When deciding to invest in software packed with these facilities, users will need to consider whether they really need them all or if they can get what they want from discrete programs. This is an impressive array of tools, although they sometimes don’t seem to work just as you might want.
www.texthelp.com
Price £320, or discounted £240 + VAT
|
