If you have used activities, or built activities, in IntelliTalk 3©, then you probably have used the Read All button action from a button on either a standard or custom toolbar. | |
 Read All button on a custom toolbar. |
 Read All button on a standard toolbar. |
Although these two buttons look different, they do the same thing because of the action each of them has: Read All. In IT3, the effect is straightforward, and the button reads aloud everything on the page when clicked. If you have attempted to use this action in IntelliPics Studio 3®, however, you may find that it is not so simple. In fact, if you click a button with that action and the cursor is outside any text box, nothing happens! So let's look at how to use this action successfully in IPS3 | |
The difference in behavior for this action between IT3 and IPS3 is because while the IT3 page is all one single text box, a page in IPS3 may have one, zero, or multiple text boxes. The action must be directed to a specific text box or text boxes in IPS3 in order to function. To do this, we must team up the Read All action with another action, Select Object, and then add the name of the text box we want to have read out. For a second text box, we need a second Select Object action (with the second text box name) followed by another Read All. | |
 | To see how this might be applied, let's look at a page from an IPS3 activity that has two text boxes, "Book Title" and "Author's name". This is the cover page of a writing template book from the Learning Magic Reptiles CD. We would like for the "Read Page" button on the custom toolbar to read out both the name of the book and the name of the student author. Of course, if text is set for Read Only, as is the "Book Title" text box is here, then a student could click on the text box to have it read out. But since we had to leave the text open on the "Author's name" so that a student could add a name, clicking on it would not cause it to read out. Also, having one click read the entire page is a better interface for scanners. |
| Here's how the actions in the Read Page button should look in order to read out these two text boxes: | |
 | One caution in setting up a string of actions like this: the text box name you enter as the object name must match the name you gave to the text box exactly, with the same spaces, spelling, and same case for the letters. For example, typing "Author's Name" for the second object name will not function in this case, and would generate an error message. |
| Notice that our Read Page button would only apply to this page, or to another page with two text boxes with these exact names. In contrast, a button with the "Read All" action only, such as the one on this toolbar from the Science News template, will read out only if the cursor is inside a text box, and will read only that text box, but will work on any page. | |
 A generic Read All button only works when the cursor is within a text box. | |
| We can put as many of these action pairs as needed into a button, to read all the text boxes on a page. Or we might want several buttons, each reading a different set of the text boxes on the page. For example, we might have a button to read all the questions, and one to read only the paragraphs the student had written to answer a question. | |
Your next question might be, if the button with the list of action pairs will only work on one page, how can it be used in an activity toolbar? For this writing template, we had only two types of pages: the cover, with the two text boxes we have been working with, and the writing pages with a single text box named the default "Text Box". So we made two different toolbars which looked exactly the same, but differed in the actions in the Read Page button. One toolbar (with the two action pairs above) was displayed on the cover page only, while the second one (with the paired Select Object "Text Box" and Read All) was displayed for all the other pages. For details on how to set up that toolbar switch, see the Toggling Toolbars tip. | |
| We hope this will add one more spell to your wizard's kit. Keep experimenting, and have fun creating more magic! | |
