Symbol World: Symbol Based News for Kids & Adults

If you like News2You, you will love SymbolWorld! "SymbolWorld is a website created by Widgit Software specifically for symbol users. It has material for all ages and includes news, personal contributions, stories and learning materials." (http://www.symbolworld.org/)

Features of this, FREE, web-based program are:

• easy navigatation, with the option to personalize the layout and colors to suit any reader's needs
• you can create user accounts, allowing you to save style settings, access the "Print Friendly PDFs" feature, rate articles and sign up for email notifications
• all links have visual highlights (i.e., a colored border to show where you are on the page) to make the site more accessible for people using switches or who use the Tab key to browse

• at the bottom of every article is a ‘Print Friendly’ button, which will create a print friendly PDF of the entire article for you to save or print directly from your browser

Speech/Voice Output is currently not available on SymbolWorld :(. But they are working on this feature for the near future! The current, non-speech version of SymbolWorld does not require Flash, which means you can view ALL of the features of the site on your iDevice. I was actually able to use the VoiceOver feature on my iPad to select the text on each news page and have it read aloud. I was also able to touch each word in the article to have the VoiceOver engine read each word aloud one at a time. This could be a great literacy building tool for early level readers! The fact that you can print each symbol-based news story to a PDF file gives you some flexibility with regard to speech output. If your child is currently using an electronic reading program like Kurzwell , the PDFs from SymbolWorld could be loaded and read through that or other PDF reader programs. I can even think of some ways to make this happen on iPad…:) Want to know more about that? :)