[blindkid] Keyweb Friendly Sites for Kids

[Richard Holloway]

We've finally gotten our BrailleNote Apex on-line as of today. For some reason the version 9.0 software wanted nothing to do with ethernet, either wired or by WiFi (and ethernet is how we get to our internet around the house here) but version 9.1 does appear to be "plug-and-play" just like the manual says. That's the good news since we upgraded to 9.1 OS today. The bad (though not terribly surprising) news is that Keyweb (the factory web browser) doesn't seem to work with many of the sites Kendra enjoys the most such as brainpopjr, nor does it seem to give proper access to things like youtube. (I seriously doubt keyweb will deal with any sorts of videos just to strip out and play the audio...)

Some of this may be operator error but for example, on brainpopjr, we cannot seem to select "go" after we enter the login and password so we're stuck on the main page. I'm not looking for specific tech advice here. What I'm wondering is if anyone has some fun web sited for kids that they have found which work reasonably well with a web browser on their braillenote. Maybe there is a better browser to load? I know we'll still be able to do more with her main computer and Jaws, but she really wants to have web access (at least to some degree) and to be able to just "surf" from her BrailleNote as well.

Kendra, BTW, is 8 years old and in second grade. She is very bright though so if a site seems slightly old for a child her age, it might still be of interest. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Unrelated to the above, I have also read that some people use USB (qwerty) keyboards with Braillnotes at times. This could be handy for me when I'm trying to do some of this with her, but when I plugged in an Apple USB keyboard I gad handy, it seemed unrecognized. Is there a trick to enable an external keyboard or do only certain models work, etc.? (Maybe the qwerty external was just for qwerty Braillenotes?) I can put in a call to Humanware about the keyboard but I figured I's ask while I was posting the first question. I do suspect I'll get much better information about the web sites from fellow parents though.

Thanks!

Richard