Read & Write Gold 9

• Product Names: Read & Write Gold
• Manufacturer/Publisher: Texthelp Ltd

Read and Write Gold the text to speech software, provides literacy support for dyslexic people

Read and Write Gold was shortlisted for the prestigious Education Resource Award 2010 in the category of Best Special Education Resource.

For those people who struggle with reading and writing due to disabilities such as dyslexia; text to speech software is the perfect solution.

Read and Write Gold is an easy to use toolbar which sits discreetly on top of any open Windows application. Users are given the opportunity to work in an inclusive manner with their peers by offering additional support when reading or composing text by providing text-to-speech facilities throughout the software program; making it an ideal solution for literacy difficulties, people who have dyslexia or for those learning English as a second language.

Benefits for Reading:

Screen Masking: Blocks any text that is not being read to provide valuable concentration aid. Other options include: whole screen tinting, underlining the line being typed to help with tracking and others.

Read & WriteText-to-Speech: Simple and accurate way to read text from word documents, email and from the web. Audio-visual reinforcement provided when the option for words to be highlighted is chosen. High quality natural sounding voices are available.

PDF Aloud: Enables user to read PDF files.

Scanning: OCR (Optical Character Recognition) facilities provided which allow the user to scan a text document such as letter or a page from a book to convert it into a readable format.

Screenshot Reader: Makes inaccessible on-screen text accessible; with option to save to MS Word.

Benefits for Writing:

Translator: Easy access to the Spanish, French, German or Italian translations of English words. Works with any digital content, on-screen selections, accessible applications, website content or digital textbooks.

Spell Checker: Corrects even more spelling mistakes than before. Corrections are based on the users own spelling patterns. Dictionary definitions of the suggested corrections can be read aloud.

Sounds-like/Homophone Checker: Highlights homophones in the passage of text being written and offers solutions which can be read aloud. Words such as 'there', 'they're', and 'their' where the sound of the word is correct but the context maybe wrong.

Predictions: TextHelp word prediction is a very useful tool which will learn the user's vocabulary and provide dyslexic people the opportunity to have the correct spelling at their fingertips, as unusual spelling can be added to the dictionary.

Talking Dictionary: is a dictionary with definitions which can be accessed from any application and is an invaluable comprehensive writing aid.

Benefits for Research:

The Fact Folder from Read and Write 9 Gold will enable the collation of key facts from websites and other applications with the date and website address being automatically saved; ideal for any bibliography that maybe required.

Study Skills Toolbar: Toolbar that enables to highlight and collect marked text from MS Word and web pages in Internet Explorer.

Key Features of Read and Write Gold:

• Text-to-Speech functionality with natural sounding digital voices
• Phonetic Spell Checker which picks up more complicated errors than standard spell checkers
• Homophone Checker - Sounds Like
• Word Prediction
• Dictionary with definitions
• Web Highlighting
• Daisy Reader (makes format for people who are blind or print disabled accessible)
• Word Wizard (acts as thesaurus providing choice of alternative words)
• Scanning function allows for any paper-based document to be scanned into Word, PDF or HTML formats
• Screenshot Reader (speech-enables inaccessible text such as some PDF, Flash and text embedded in images)
• Screen Masking (provides ability to block out text, screen tinting and spotlights paragraphs and sentences)
• Study Skills Toolbar (highlighting and collecting of text)
• Calculator
• Speechmaker (text conversion into audio file)
• PDF Aloud (makes PDFs accessible for text-to-speech)
• Research Tools - Fact Finder, Fact Folder & Fact Mapper

You will need:

• Pentium 4 1.8GHz Processor
• 512 MB RAM
• (1 GB RAM recommended on Windows Vista)
• 1.2 GB Free Disk Space
• Sound Card
• Internet Connection (for Fact Mapper & Translator)
• Good Quality Speakers
• Microphone (for Speech Input)
• DVD Player (for Install purposes only)
• Windows 2000 SP4 or above