We are proud to announce Text Type, the final version of our touch typing activity. Please read these notes carefully.
Text Type is designed to work with browsers; Microsoft Edge and Chrome and should work with Firefox.
Chromebooks and Compatibility – If you are having problems with Text Type on your device, please try using an older version as it may work on your device, try Text Type Phase 2 or Text Type Phase 3. Increasingly people are wanting to use Text Type on devices such as Chromebooks. Unfortunately, Text Type was not designed for Chromebooks and speech is unlikely to work on these devices plus there may be other problems.
Guidelines for successfully learning to touch type.
- Touch Typing is predominately a motor skill. If you look at the keys you are not learning to touch type. It becomes a visuo-motor skill, You will always have to look at your hands.
- Cover your hands with a scarf or a cloth . Look at the screen for the information you need to listen to the audio cues.
- Headphones are a good idea. Do not look down.
- Typing Speed is not important at this stage, accuracy is. It’s best to type to a beat, even a very slow one. This will allow you to speed up considerably, once you have mastered the keyboard at a slow speed.
- Typing Accuracy is very important because, as with other motor skills, a learnt mistake is very hard to eradicate. For this reason we recommend thst you do not move to the next exercise until you have achieved 97% accuracy.
- Practice is best done regularly and often in short sessions.
Updates to Text Type
We have made numerous changes to Text Type to make it more accessible:
- Enhanced speech feedback echoing all keypresses and on-screen text. This makes Text Type accessible to leaners with extremely low vision, with some support.
- We have increased the size of the target text to make TextType more accessible to visually impaired learners.
- As far as possible, Text Type can be navigated by keypresses. These are the standard keys to navigate web browsers. TAB, Enter, the Up and Down Arrow Keys.
Doorway Single Handed Typing has been added to Text Type. This allows learners with use of a single hand to practise typing using exercises developed for their particular need. Select Left or Right from the title screen.
Teipio Testun Text Type is now a totally bilingual activity The Welsh Governement has paid for this development including the above improvements. Text Type/Teipio Testun is also available on their education website, The Hwb.
An important notice about the Speech Output
In previous versions of Text Type, the target letter (female voice) and any mistyped letter (male voice) were spoken by recorded human voices. Text Type now uses text to speech voices. The first time you use Text Type, you will need to choose the voices.
These voices are specific to the browser:
- In Microsoft Edge, Sonia Online and George might be a good choice
- In Chrome, the choice is between the Microsoft voices and the Google voices, female and male.
- In Firefox, you can use a favourite pair of SAPI voices such as Cerevoice Heather and Stuart which are particularly clear in differentiating the names of the letters. You will have to use Firefox, which still supports SAPI voices. Firefox is not officially supported, but we have found no issues with Text Type and Firefox.
Documentation. We have produced a guide to Text Type/Teipio Testun in English, for learners in both languages.
To download this documentation, use the link below:
Two previous versions
For the moment we are keeping two previous versions on the site, TT3 phase 2 and TT3 phase 3. These are no longer supported and may not be kept here much longer.