Keybr.com- Free Touch Typing

Hello, it is James from the Visual Impairment Team in Devon.

In this video I review a website that allows you to practice your touch typing for free. It is Keybr.com.

The video includes a full set of subtitles but if you want to read from a transcript, please find one below.

Start of Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to this video training.

In this video I am going to do a review of a touch typing website  called keybr.com and you can see the address up here in the address bar Within the browser.

now I am using the chrome Web Browser.  this will work on Internet Explorer and also Firefox  as well.  so it doesn't just work in one browser.

what this is this is a free website for touch typing  and it hasn't got a lot of bells and whistles.  it hasn't got a lot of features to it but I think there's some of the basics well.

 one of the negative parts of it is that there is an advert running along the top of the screen  but then again this advert may be filtered out of your screen any way within your school environment  so you may not be seeing it at all.

now if you look at the screen you have got a keyboard at the bottom  with a photograph of fingers on the keyboard.

and that keyboard is quite clear What are quite clear although they might be harder for some people to see.

Now we cannot change the view we cannot get rid of that keyboard  unfortunately and then sitting above the keyboard  is the text that needs to be typed in  and that is also quite small.

although the keyboard and the text that needs to be typed in are quite small they are on very clear backgrounds  and that part of the website is not cluttered with adverts or anything.  the colours are nice and plain.

and I also think that if we just go in and  see if we can just magnify  we can actually make the letters on the screen larger  and as you can see by doing that we then have to manually move up and down the screen  in order to see the keyboard and the text that we need to type in at the same time.

there are no audio clues as part of this website to tell you what the next letter is to Type in  but you can see that there is a visual marker,  green dot  over the letter that you need to type in.  so that when we type in “o”, “f”  appears and a green marker  appears over the F on the keyboard  the show that to us as well.

so that the general .  now if we go back up and let's go back here  to  let's get the zoom Back Down to.  there we go.

now let's have a look at some of the features  in this touch typing.  there are three levels here-  as level 1 as level 2 and there's level 3.  obviously level 1 is the simplest typing exercises and level 3 is the most complicated typing exercises.

And then what you've got here  is random text or and this is something that I really like custom text and you can see here on the screen you can put in  practice a piece of writing to type  or if you want to practice the string of letters that you want to type  and totally personalize it you can.

you can put the you can put exactly what you want into custom  text box here.

so for instance if I'm in here and you can probably see from the speed of my typing that I could do with practicing touch typing.  so I can put in there some of my own text,  hello my name is James and then when I do  I will actually click on start Those are the letters that I'm encouraged to type in.

and what's also interesting  at first I just went to type in the h  but it didn't like it because I wasn't pressing the shift and the h  because of course it started with a capital letter.

so that's a nice touch it's a shame that there are no audio  clues to this either.

so another part of this is that this will draw  contacts from a website or from a blog  and actually then use that to practice your typing.

So for instance I am a keen fan of the BBC website  and I am on it manyl times a day  so actually if I put in the address of the BBC and click on start and you can see the what it is doing is  the stuff that I've got to type in is actually the text that appears on the BBC site  which is good.

you may have a Blog of your own that you want to practice  used to practice typing this webpage will actually draw the letters  and the words from that blog for you to practice yourself.

so that level of flexibility is fantastic for this website.

and you can change the keyboard layout and you can change the language as well which is another aspect of the flexibility.

fairly fairly simple perhaps part of the visual stuff we can criticise  but in certain respects this is a good website to go back to some touch typing.

Thank you for watching.

End of Video Transcript

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