TG StudiosAmerican Explorer
Fifty states, the District of Columbia and five territories, read aloud. A geography lesson you can take with the screen off.
Free. Version 2.0.1. Windows. No account, nothing to configure, install it and it starts talking. It also keeps itself up to date from 2.0.1 onward, so a fix reaches you without you going looking for it. There is still a zip if you would rather not install anything.
It works out how to speak to you
If you run a screen reader, it speaks through that, in the voice you already use, at the rate you already like. If you do not, it speaks through the Windows voice instead. You are not asked anything on the way in, and it starts talking the moment it opens.
That detection happens every time it launches, not once. A saved preference for a screen reader is worth nothing on a morning you have not started one, and an app that opens silent is an app that looks broken.
Everything is a list, and every list works the same way
Type to narrow it down. Typing R, H, O finds Rhode Island. Escape clears what you typed, and Escape again leaves the list.
No command sits on a bare letter, because a letter reserved for a command is a letter missing from the alphabet, and the state you cannot type is the one whose name starts with it.
What is in it
- Browse by region, the five mainland regions, plus the territories.
- All states and territories, all 56, filtered as you type.
- Quiz, capital cities, state nicknames, or which region a state is in. Ten questions, four answers each, scored honestly.
- Compare two states, population, area, order of statehood, region. Any pair of the 56, including territory against state.
- Random fact, 224 of them, one keypress away from anywhere.
For every entry: an overview, the capital, population and area, major cities, industries, agriculture, history, what it is famous for, geography and bordering states, and its own collection of facts.
Made to be listened to
Numbers are said the way a person says them. A population is "39.5 million", not thirty-nine million five hundred and thirty-eight thousand two hundred and twenty-three, because the second one is impossible to hold in your head and tells you nothing the first does not.
Lists have an "and" before the last item. Sentences end. Nothing is read out as a row of digits.
Settings
Speech rate and pitch, music and sound volume, menu sounds on or off, high contrast, four text sizes, and braille output. Left and right change the setting you are on. Everything saves the moment you change it. There is no Save button to forget.
The screen is there for anyone reading over your shoulder: a teacher, a parent, a classmate. It scales properly, and high contrast means high contrast everywhere rather than in most places.
Free, and free for classrooms
Use it at home, in a school, in a library, on as many computers as you like. No licence to buy and no seats to count.
The geography is compiled from public sources and offered for learning rather than as an authoritative reference. If something is wrong, or reads badly, tell me and I will fix it.
Watch
Three short clips. Each one has burned-in captions, and the narration carries everything the picture does, so nothing is lost either way.
A geography lesson with the screen off
What it covers, and how it works out on its own how to talk to you.
There is a quiz
The three quiz modes and the two-state comparison tool.
No seats to count
What free for home, classroom and library use actually means here.