Penfriend XL is a powerful tool for those with dyslexia or physical/sensory disabilities including visual impairment, adding screen reading with text magnification, word prediction, and on-screen keyboards to almost any other software. It predicts and screen reads in Microsoft programs such as Internet Explorer and Word and non Microsoft programs such as Open Office and Firefox. It offers considerable support for users with special needs, helping with spelling, confidence and speed of composing text. It will also read out almost any text, such as web pages or word processed documents.
Penfriend software benefits users who have dyslexia, visual impairment or physical disabilities, including Cerebral Palsy, Multiple Sclerosis, Motor Neurone Disease, Stroke, limb deformities and any condition which impairs the ability to write with a keyboard.
Penfriend helps users to write faster by predicting the next word they want to type, allowing faster writing for longer tasks, promoting better spelling and grammar and encouraging users to overcome low self esteem and become more confident writers.
Features include powerful word prediction, on-screen keyboard, screen reading, lexicon editing and the ability to learn new words as you type.
Features
- Word prediction in many European Languages
- Screen Reading with Text Magnification using Native Voices
- On-screen Keyboards for Multiple Languages
- Spelling, thesaurus and dictionaries
- Integration with Clicker
- Switch Access
- Lexicon Editing and Topic Lexicons
- Abbreviation Expansion
- Smart Punctuation
- Sensible Options
- Free demonstration copy!
- Portable version available
- Version 4 available
Penfriend XL is built on the well established Penfriend XP. As well as multiple languages it adds screen reading and multiple onscreen keyboards. It helps anyone learning foreign languages. It provides speech feedback and screen reading of virtually any text from web or word processor in native voices, highlighting words as they are spoken. It will also simplify the typing of European languages when your computer is set to operate in the UK. It comes with several lexicons for each language which currently include French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Swedish as well as UK English and Scottish Gaelic. It even has Latin lexicons. It will also help those with dyslexia and physical disabilities in English and any of the other languages it covers, providing the highest quality word prediction available.
Penfriend XL comes with high quality CereProc voices, currently Scottish Heather, Sarah (Southern English), Katherine (US East Coast) and William (Southern English). Suzanne (French) will be appearing soon in the next version of the programme.
Topic vocabulary can easily be added. Thus if you are working on a specific textbook and the text is available in electronic form, in about a minute you can teach Penfriend the new words in that book.If we don’t have a lexicon for a language you want to use you can produce your own if you have substantial amounts of text in that language in electronic form.
Penfriend integrates fully with Clicker from Crick Software. Open Clicker, choose prediction, and it opens Penfriend and the Penfriend predictions come up in the Clicker grids.
New preferences have been introduced. For instance you can now set the minimum length of word predicted. Thus when selected, Penfriend will only predict words longer than a length you set.
