The Talklets player can come in a variety of colours and styles but the buttons are always in the same place and perform the same functions, 1 to 4, as shown above.
Listen to main story or highlighted text (Click on and drag cursor over text to highlight)
1A; Clicking the button with the speaker icon on reads the main text block on the page. This control is particularly useful on feature pages rather than home pages, where content is often broken up into many small elements and links.
If you to click on and drag the cursor over any area of text to highlight it, then click the speaker button, the highlighted text will be converted to speech and read to you.
Save main story or selected text
1B: The 'mp3' button allows you to save speech as a file for later listening or moving onto a mobile device such as an iPod. Simply clicking the button saves the main text block on the page. Drag highlighting any text area allows you to save your choice of text on any page.
Talklets automatically suggest a file name for the MP3 file but you can adjust this to any name you wish by overwriting it. Similarly, you can adjust the location in which the file is saved.
Stop the selected text being read
1C: The button with the 'x' is simply used to stop the text being read or to cancel the generation of an MP3 file.
On / Off control for voice
2: This is the on/off control for the point to read function. If the bar is 'on' Talklets will read the word, sentence or paragraph that you point to with the cursor. The size of each text element will, to an extent, depend on how the webmaster has coded the site.
Zoom function
3: Clicking the '+' button on the zoom section will either make the page text bigger or zoom the whole screen, depending on the encoding used on the page. Some sites are very difficult to zoom or, are at best unpredictable, due to inconsistencies of browser behaviour and varying standards and methods of web coding. Clicking the '-' button will step back from any zoomed setting in single increments. Click the 'dot' button in between the '+' and the '-' sets the page back to its default view.
Examples of the zoom control are show below.
Text reading highlight colour
4: The text highlight control provides a useful facility to adjust the background colour of and text element being read by Talklets. Used in conjunction with the zoom control makes this valuable for web users with colour blindness, visual stress or other form of visual difficulty. Selectng 'Default' from the list restores the highlighter to the default light grey colour used by Talklets. Examples of the highlighting are shown below. Note that the highlighting currently works only when Talklets is 'on'.
