Sean, Cerebral Palsy sufferer
I have been using Penfriend for about five years. I’ve tried much word predictor software over the years and in my opinion Penfriend is the most updated and improved, with its facilities, in being able to save new words, view onscreen keyboard, abbreviations and the brilliant synthesizer clipboard reader. This makes Penfriend the best word predicting package around. I will point out how I feel it could be improved further on.
I have cerebral palsy and for me typing and reading is a slow process due to my lack of co-ordination and word tracking. This is where Penfriend comes in to it’s own for me. Without Penfriend I can only type three words a minute but with it installed on my computer I can type at least nine words a minute. With the smart punctuation it makes typing much quicker. Therefore this now means I enjoy typing whereas before I did not, it was a too slower process. The onscreen keyboard I used only once because my keyboard wasn’t working. It seems to work well. The abbreviations, I only use this for typing my address. I should use the abbreviation part a lot more. The brilliant synthesiser clipboard reader helps me to read my email and I can use it on the web to read articles. It works like this, you select the text that you want to read and then you copy and paste it in the clipboard reader and it reads the text back to you. It is as simple as that. You can choose from a number of different voices.
My only criticism of Penfriend is when the smart punctuation is on and you are on the web. You type in a web address or an email and it does this (Www. Penfriend. Com) instead of (www.penfriend.com ) putting capital letters and spaces where it shouldn’t. (as a reult of these comments, Penfriend has since been modified, making it easier to switch off smart punctuation when required.)
Penfriend has made a big difference to my life and it is very reasonably priced.