Standalone Accessible Element

Penfriend


A Picture of the penfriend product.

Penfriend is a utility that provides the user with literacy support regardless of which application they are using. It combines a suite of functionality including sophisticated spell-checking and word prediction facilities, speech output in multiple languages, text magnification and highlighting of words as they are spoken.

Excerpt from product page description

Penfriend XL is a powerful screen reader with text magnification, Word Prediction and On-screen Keyboards in many languages.

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 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 program.

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 do not 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.

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.

Over time further lexicons, including topic lexicons will be provided on the Penfriend website. For most of the commoner languages native voices are available.

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