Preferences

General - customizations that have overarching effects and not likely specific to one of the six specific tab features

The first box is where the Tip of the Day can be toggled off or on. The next box toggles the Welcome Document which offers instructions for getting started. The third check box allows customization of the autosave feature and requires a numerical value measured in minutes.

The next section in the right hand column relates to auditory feedback and tells the program what should be read aloud while typing with the choices being spoken characters, spoken words (after a space has been inserted), and/or the entire sentence (but only after punctuation has been added). Most users will likely find having all characters spoken will become annoying but will be immensely helpful for those with visual impairments. The second and third options will be particularly useful for those who struggle with writing either in spelling, grammar, typing accuracy, dyslexia or other language related difficulties.

The Document View section sets the zoom level so that every document that is open automatically zooms to that level. The last box does as the description suggests and shows column notes.

Note that settings can be reset to the program default by clicking the "Restore Defaults" button at the bottom of the General Preferences tab.

Highlighters - allows renaming of the highlighters and to select which highlighers are visible

To change the name of the highlighter, simply click the text that currently indicates the colour of the highlighter and type the new desired name. Some examples of custom names might be "notes" or "new vocabulary".

To hide a specific highlighter, click the box marked "Hide" next to the coloured highlighter.

Notes: relates to note taking options

Within Kurzweil there are several types of notes: sticky notes and text notes.

Sticky notes are the digital version of the paper product and are always visible. There is an option in this tab to customize and change the colour of the sticky note.

The check box in the text notes section toggles borders off or on.

Finally, in the right hand pane, there are options to adjust the opacity and the size of the markers when taking notes.

Reading

The first section allows customization of the highlighting colour of the text that is being read aloud. This is a two colour scheme where the unit whether it is a sentence, line or a paragraph is highlighted in one colour and the word that is being read is highlighted in a different colour. There are four different preset colour schemes and then there is the option to create a custom colour scheme. An example of what the colour scheme would look like appears in the sample text box on the right.

If having the word being read aloud is distracting or unnecessary, this can be turned off in the box below as well as the ability to skip reading headers and footers.

In the box to the right are tools for reading web content. This will require installation of an app within the program that is being used for browsing and currently Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are supported.

On the bottom are options to change the language that is used for reading (useful for accessing texts in a language other than English) and the voice that is being used for reading. This would be useful for those who are accustomed to hearing English in a different accent or if reading a foreign language text, it would be required to have the text read aloud properly.

Scanning - for users with a connected scanner

Scanning has been a long standing function of Kurzweil and is one of the features that makes it stand apart from its competitors. With an appropriate scanner, documents can be scanned into the program and then used for completing worksheets.

Options within the scanning tab include identifying columns during the OCR (optical character recognition) pass, auto-rotating the document to its appropriate orientation or forcing it to display in a specific orientation, and selecting the way the text colour appears on the originating document for better recognition results.

Text - basic controls for font

The text preferences tab selects the default font when typing in a new document as well as the font for the magnify spoken words window.

Toolbars - customizes toolbar sets

The toolbar tab is an area where specific preset toolbars are displayed depending on the document type: image documents, text documents, new scanned documents or writing path documents. In addition, toolbars can be hidden by checking the check box next to the document type. More information on customizing toolbars can be found in the View tab of the Menu Bar.