Special Stories User Guide - Language Support

Inbuilt Languages

We don't have a different version of an app for each language, instead we offer one version containing support for all supported languages. This is so we can best help bilingual and multilingual users, and those starting to learn a new language.

Where our apps include recorded audio, we always use native speakers for each language. Where there is no recorded audio, the device's text to speech synth voice will read the words aloud.

The user interface is available in 19 languages. Both editions currently support English, Albanian, Catalan, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

Our downloadable resources are currently available in British English, American English, Spanish and Italian. We will be adding more languages soon, but in the meantime you can still download the resources and change the text to be in any language you wish. Most of our downloadable resources use text-to-speech.

If you are interested in helping us make any of our apps available in additional languages, please contact us.

Adding Content in Your Own Language

You can create stories in any langauge you would like to use. You can find out more about how to create stories in Chapter 4.

Changing the App's Language

By default the app interface and sounds will be displayed using whichever language the device itself is set to use. You can quickly change languages within Special Stories Plus by tapping Actions then Settings. Within the settings navigate to Language and you will see a list of currently supported languages in the app, you may need to scroll to see more. Tap the language you would like to use and a tick will appear on the right, then tap < Settings and the app will refresh to use your desired language.

By changing the language within Settings will only change the language of Special Stories Plus. Other apps will continue to use the language the device is set to use.

If Language is set to Default and you change the device's language, you need to then use Actions > Reset > Flush Cache to tell the app that the default language has changed.

Text to Speech

Where text to speech is used the app will endeavour to select an appropriate voice provided by the web browser or operating system. The quality of these voices can vary, and is not determined by Special iApps. On iPhone and iPad, the voices supplied by Apple are available in standard and enhanced variants. We strongly recommend you download and select enhanced ones. You can do this in the device's Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content > Voices.