Hello, it is James from the Visual Impairment Team in Devon.
Super Hyper Spider Typer is a free website that develops familiarity with the position of letters on a keyboard using a game format that will be very appealing for children.
The video includes a full set of subtitles but if you want to read a full transcript, please find it below.
Start of Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to this training video.
in this video I want to introduce you to super hyper spider Typer
which is a game that develops the letters on the keyboard and familiarity with them young children.
so here we go let's click to continue.
now as we start I've got some music playing I don't know if you can hear it.
so you have three levels here easy medium and hard.
so you Can see straight away that the graphics are quite nice it is done in a game format.
it's all very attractive and when you can listen to the music is more attractive still.
so this is the game we have four lizards it with a letter on their back.
so what you have to do if you have to identify the letter and when you identify the letter and press it then they disappear.
so you can see that there's plenty going on there's lots of lovely graphics There's a spider going up the left-hand screen there’s scoring going on I can hear some music you probably can't hear the music.
you've got to stop these lizards before they reach the end of the branch.
as I touch a letter and the lizard explodes another one takes its place.
So it is all very attractive.
What I would say in terms of the size of it in a browser you do need to use your zooming keys to get it to a nice big size so that it is nice and clear but even then I am not sure how clear those letters are if you've got a visual impairment how easy will they be to pick out on the back of those blue lizards. T
That could be quite tricky. there are adverts running on the site but they are unobtrusive and they don't really get in the way after you have zoomed.
Visit the site have a go at the game let me know what you think. Thank you for watching.
End of video transcript Useful Resources for Super Hyper Spider Typing Play The Game
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.
Hello, it is James from the Visual Impairment Team in Devon.
In this short video, I demonstrate The Big Brown Bear Keyboard Game that is a free website that through the medium of a game allows young children to develop their keyboard skills.
The video includes a full set of subtitles but if you want to read a transcript instead, please find it below.
Start of Video Transcript
Hello And welcome to this training video.
in this training video I will be reviewing the big brown bear keyboard game.
now as you can see it is nice and clear.
and this is it the whole screen is taken up by a picture of the keyboard.
the font used is really nice and clear and basically what you have to do is just identify that letter which is shown by red square and also down the bottom of the screen.
now lots of clarity a really great size for everyone but there's not much else happening is there there's no sound effects no animation.
so in that way it is lacking.
But try it out and let me know what you think. Thank you for watching.
Hello, it is James from the Visual Impairment Team in Devon.
In this video I show you how to make the icons and text larger or smaller on your Windows 8 computer.
Please be careful though because if you make the text too large you will have trouble using your PC!
Unfortunately there is no commentary with this video.
First you need to go into the Control Panel and then under the Personalisation and Appearance section, click on make text or other items larger or smaller.
Hello it is James from the Visual Impairment Team in Devon. In this video I take you through step by step how to change the background colour, font and font size settings in Open Office Writer. The video includes a full set of subtitles but if you prefer to read from a transcript, find it below. Start of Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to do something in OpenOffice writer which is the free equivalent to Microsoft Word.
and what I want to show you is how to change the default colour of the background of a document and also the default font and font size.
Now by describing it as default what I mean is that is the document and the settings that will open up every time you run office so they are like the normal settings.
and so this is how we change them. first of all let's open OpenOffice so to speak and we are going to go here and click on text document.
and we are going to go to the tools menu at the top.
if at any time you are a bit lost with what I am describing then just follow the mouse Cursor and do the same thing. in tools we're going to go down to options.
ok right so the first thing to do Is to go to the top of your options, click on openoffice.org and then I want you to go to appearance.
click on appearance and you get this screen opening up and this is the one we want document background and we are going to change it here and for the purposes of this tutorial we're going to change it to yellow which there we go change it to yellow there, labelled as yellow one and then press OK and it has changed it perfect.
now the next thing to do is to change the font and the font size.
and here you're going to come down here at the bottom of your page and go to openoffice.org writer.
double click on it and then go to basic fonts and double click on that ok.
we want this top one here and we are going to change this. we are going to change this to Arial black and Change the size of it to 24.
now what you don't want to do is to click on the default button because then it will take it back to the default settings that it wants to change it back to. so don't click on the default button and just click on the ok button.
and then you can see here we go there’s our settings.
just to check that they have been made the default settings what we going to do is close open office and then reload it.
and if we changed it correctly we will have a yellow background Arial black font size 24.
and there we go we have changed successfully, yellow background and if we look up here it describes it as Arial black font size 24.
Hello, this is James from the Visual Impairment Team in Devon.
In this video I am going to be demonstrating Touchpad Blocker, which is a free piece of software for your Windows computer that disables your touchpad on your laptop when you are typing.
In doing this, the software stops your cursor from jumping all over your screen.
The video includes a full set of subtitles but if you prefer to read from a transcript, please find one below.
Start of Video Transcript
Hello everyone and welcome to this video.
In this video I want to demonstrate how to download and install a free and tiny piece of software called Touchpad Blocker.
It works on Windows machines only.
Touchpad Blocker stops the touchpad on your laptop from working when you are typing only.
This hopefully solves an age-old problem of the cursor suddenly moving around the page when you are trying to type.
And you can see on the screen now I am at the website here.
Now this is an annoying enough problem in terms of the cursor moving around the page if you quickly recognize that the cursor has moved because you can see it in a different position on the page but it is a bigger problem and a much bigger nuisance if you have a visual impairment because it would take you longer to realize that the cursor has moved to a different position on the page and then it would take you even longer to get the cursor back to where it was.
Like anything to do with computers, there are many different ways to do the same things. Some laptops have keys on the keyboard that enables you to switch the touchpad on and off and on other laptops you can adjust the software in order to disable the touchpad.
Now, Touchpad Blocker as I said, is a very small download and it just works in the background, it disables itself after any key on the keyboard is pressed.
The software has a shortcut on the desktop which you can just click to turn it on and off.
And then you can turn it on and off with the keyboard shortcuts now.
Importantly, the software seems to be safe since I downloaded a couple of days ago, nothing horrible has happened on my computer.
I haven’t gone to any surprised pages when I have tried to go on the Internet or anything like that.
So it does seems safe to download.
However, just watch out because as you can see from this page. It is an incredibly busy page.
It has got adverts on it , all of which scream at you to download but in my experience you will need to do this download this is black download button up here or this black download button down here, sorry.
So I will only be using this black download here. So it is of very small software download so you can see it's done it in a fraction of a second.
So let's open it up and then it takes us through a set of wizard and again, we just, like most pieces of software click next or I agree. Now it's asking if we want to run Touchpad Blocker at the moment which we do, we don’t necessarily want to report the installation to the website so here we go let’s have a look.
Right you can see here this is the desktop shortcut formally Touchpad Blocker and this is control panel of the software itself, so these are our options on it, we can automatically run the programme on start up, we can show system tray notifications, which is these notifications down here.
There we are there with Touch Blocker.
We can block accidental tabs and clicks and make sure all of those I would suggest are ticked or checked.
Now this time interval to block clicks, this is after you press a key on your keyboard.
How quickly afterwards does this software disable your touchpad and you have got a choice here. I would suggest you kind of go for quickly as possible. It is also also blocking our wheel and move events if your touchpad has facilities like that and it will bleep when a click is blocked.
It is important to say that of course as well as the touchpad beneath most touchpads are the left and right mouse buttons and it will block the use of those while you are writing as well and it will also bleep to let you know that you have accidentally press the left or right mouse button and here’s our keyboard shortcut by pressing control and F9. We can turn it off as we can see from notification or we can turn it back on.
So I am going to do a quick demonstration here of Touchpad Blocker. Now at the moment to move my mouse around I am using my touchpad. What i am going to do, I am going to go into the address bar up here and with my left hand I am just going to do iI am just going to start pressing different keys to activate the writing and then with my right hand I am going to be moving my mouse cursor around randomly as you can see. So let us see what happens.
Okay so you see I repeatedly pressed the letter “a” as I was pressing that then movement from the touchpad actually froze and then as soon as I stopped, I got the movement back again.
So there we go everyone, that is a really, really useful piece of software.
When we go touchpad on our laptop and when we are trying to write whether it be on the Internet or in Microsoft Word or anything like that.
As usual, any comments about this video, any comments about the software. Please leave your comments in the space below the video.
