Penfriend XL

Approved Product

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

For dyslexia and physical disabilities including visual impairment
Modern language teaching (MFL)
English as a second language (ESL)

Penfriend XL Features:

Penfriend XL is built on the well established Penfriend XP. As well as multiple languages it adds screen reading and multiple onscreen keyboards. It will be of value to anyone learning foreign languages. It will provide 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 the soon to be added 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..

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 both Clicker from Crick Software and SAW4 from the ACE Centre. Open Clicker or SAW, choose prediction, and it opens Penfriend and the Penfriend predictions come up in the Clicker or SAW grids. New preferences have been introduced. For instance you can now set the minimum length of word predcited. 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.