Tell Me A Story
Brief Description:
Mac version 1.1.1 improves compatibility with Leopard. The current Windows XP version is 1.0.1.
Tell Me A Story speaks a story or text. This could be used for children who can not read or for people with poor eyesight after texts are added to the bookshelf. Click on a title to start the story. You can pause, continue or stop at any time by clicking on the buttons.
Care has been taken to use large buttons and fonts and keep the user interface simple.
Above you see the screenshot of the Mac version. The Windows version does not have the Pause/Continue button or the speaking rate slider.
When you first launch this application, a StoryTime BookShelf folder is placed in the User/Documents folder. Saved stories will be placed there and all files in that folder will appear in alphabetical order in the Story List.
The top two stories are built-in; they cannot be deleted. All other stories are listed alphabetically as they are saved; these stories can be deleted by clicking on a title, then clicking on the "Delete Story" button.
To add to the stories in the StoryTime Bookcase, open Manage Stories from the menu bar and enter text into the Text Field a number of ways:
- a. Type into the Text Field.
- b. Select a source folder using the radio buttons (Mac version only), click on the "Load File" button to navigate to a plain text file and click on OK.
- c. Paste text into the Text Field. This text could have been copied from a web page. (The menu bar has a link to a free internet site with thousands of free eBooks. You can find a story, copy the story from the web page, paste the story into the Text Field and edit as necessary.)
When you are ready to save the story, click the "Save File" button. You will be prompted for a story name (no suffix should be used - the ".txt" suffix is added automatically).
As noted on the Manage Stories window, words in capital letters will be spelled out; change such words to uppercase and lower case letters (Mac version only).
On the Mac, it is suggested that you start with Vicki's voice (System Preferences/Speech). You can, of course, have lots of fun trying out the other voices. The speaking rate can be adjusted using the slider. On Windows, set the speaking rate to normal.
Downloads:
Click here to download the Universal Binary version (2.5 MB) for Macintosh (OS 10.2 or later).
Click here to download the version (1.1 MB) for Windows XP.
Please send comments and suggestions to youngpr@myactv.net
