## BumperCar Manual

- Introduction
- Setting Up Mac OS X
- How to Use BumperCar
- Safety Settings
- Preferences

### Introduction

Welcome to BumperCar. Like the amusement park ride of the same name, BumperCar aims to provide a safe haven for your children to have fun. It allows you to dictate which World Wide Web sites your children can visit, within the parameters you set. The available options allow you to gear BumperCarÕs sensitivity toward a range of ages, from preschoolers to teenagers, and control who views what.

BumperCarÕs most important feature is its set of whitelists, which you can use to control the sites your children can visit, as opposed to filtering out content based on keywords, ratings, or other criteria (options that you can also use, if youÕd like). The browser comes with long lists of sites that weÕve visited and determined are kid-friendly; you can add your own.

YouÕll notice when you launch BumperCar that it defaults to a start page which allows kids to browse sites in different categories and even enter a mystery tunnel that whisks them away to a site plucked at random from the whitelists. Kids can also have fun using the arrow keys to move the bumper car around the screen and bounce off the walls.

Read on to learn more about the start page as well as the rest of BumperCarÕs features. Any time youÕre stuck while using the browser, pull down the Help menu and click ÒBumperCar HelpÓ to access an HTML version of this manual. You can also access it by clicking the question mark in the Safety Settings and Preferences windows, which are found under the Safety menu.

### Setting Up Mac OS X

[configuring Mac OS X for new user accounts without admin privileges and how to disable apps like Safari and Explorer; hopefully Apple will have such info]

### How to Use BumperCar

[come to page not on list; can click to authorize or perform random teleport. If you click to authorize, you must enter your password to authorize the site and add it to the whitelists. [?]
[Bar at top that you can drag URLs to and click them for easy access later]

### Safety Settings

YouÕll find the Safety Settings under the Safety menu. Make sure you know your administrative password for Mac OS X when you click it, because you wonÕt be able to access them without it. And if your children know your password, itÕs time to change it so that they canÕt access this area of BumperCar.

The first tab in the Safety Settings dialog box is ÒGeneral,Ó which offers three basic settings of surfing restrictions: high, medium, and low. YouÕll notice that clicking each radio button changes the settings in the other tabs, so you can use this as a basic way to set restrictions. If youÕd prefer a set of custom settings, you can make those changes in the other tabs.

The next tab is ÒContent.Ó The ÒFilter search engine resultsÓ check box will match Internet searches against the level of restriction youÕve set and eliminate Web pages accordingly. And if you activate ÒBlock pages containing profanity,Ó BumperCar will check Web pages against the list and block any that contain one word or more from the list. YouÕll notice that you can add your own words to the list.

The final safety setting in the ÒContentÓ tab is the ÒPrevent use of personal dataÓ box. Once checked, it restricts anything in the fields below from being entered into online forms. For example, you can enter names (first and last should be listed separately, as theyÕre usually apart in online forms), addresses, credit card numbers, or anything else you donÕt want your kids to transmit on the Web. If they enter any of the data in an online form, it will be automatically deleted upon submission.

Next is the ÒWhitelistÓ tab, which allows you to restrict your childrenÕs surfing to only Web sites listed in this tab. You can check the box next to ÒUse WhitelistsÓ and then turn on and off individual lists in the box on the right. WeÕve set up three lists of sites, organized by maturity level, that weÕve already checked out for you; a fourth list compiles all the sites submitted by Freeverse staff members. You can add and delete Web sites to and from these lists, or click on the ÒAdded by UserÓ list if youÕd prefer to keep your additions separate.

YouÕll also notice that you can double-click the URL or name of each site in the whitelists to edit them, and clicking ÒVisit SiteÓ will take you to the highlighted one so that you can view it for yourself. In addition, if youÕd like to make a whitelist available as a set of bookmarks in another browser, simply highlight it, click ÒExport This List,Ó and save it to your hard drive. Similarly, you can import a set of bookmarks from another browser by clicking ÒImport New ListÓ and locating it on your hard drive.

The fourth tab, ÒRatings,Ó relies on Web site ratings to block sites that contain varying degrees of violent and sexual content, as well as explicit language, unmoderated chat rooms, and other subject matter. The checkboxes turn them on and off, and the drop-down menus under each one display a range of offenses, from mild at the top to extreme at the bottom. We use the ratings provided by the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA; www.icra.org); Web site designers can embed the ratings in their code and warn a user what content to expect before they arrive.

Four checkboxes under the ratings settings allow you to make exceptions to these ratings for educational, sports, medical, and artistic sites. For example, a medical site might have a detailed drawing of male or female genitals, something ordinarily not allowed if you set the sexual content drop-down menu to its highest level.

The fifth tab is a history field that works like the history feature found in other Web browsers. You can use it to check which sites your kids have visited; because thereÕs no Clear History feature in BumperCar, they canÕt cover their tracks.

The final tab, ÒAdvanced,Ó gives you a finer degree of control over your kidsÕ Web surfing habits. The slider at the top, ÒMaximum distance off whitelist,Ó dictates whether they are restricted only to whitelisted sites or if they can move off those sites by up to five links. For example, if the slider is set to two, a child can visit a whitelisted site, click a link and go to a second site, and then click a link from there and go to a third site, but any links clicked on the last site will result in an error page. However, a child can go back to the first or second site and click new links, but theyÕre still bound by the number you set.

Under that, you have checkboxes that dictate whether the Web sites your kids visit can run Javascripts or Java applets, or whether they can download files. The former execute simple commands that submit forms, display the local time on a Web page, or perform other interactive functions. Note that a separate box must be checked if you want Javascripts to open new windows.

Java applets are small programs that allow you to play a game, watch a short video clip, or enjoy some other multimedia experience in a browser window. By their nature, Java applets canÕt be filtered, so keep that in mind when deciding whether to allow this function. And because thereÕs no way to filter the content of a file either, you may want to keep your kids from downloading files from Web sites by leaving the box unchecked.

Finally, you can limit your kidsÕ Web surfing to certain times of the day as well as a total number of hours. For example, they might be constrained to Web surfing between 8 AM and 5 PM, with a total of 5 hours, so if theyÕre online from 8 AM straight through to 1 PM, theyÕre done for the day because they hit the total hours limit.

### Preferences

You can also find BumperCarÕs preferences panel under the Safety menu. ItÕs broken into five panes that you can access from the icons along the top. As with the Safety Settings, you can click the question mark in any pane to access the online help for that pane. ThereÕs also a Reset button at the bottom of each pane that will reset the preferences for that pane only to their original settings. Notice that if you hold down the Option key, the Reset button turns into Reset All; clicking it then will reset the preferences in all five panes to their original settings.

The first pane contains the General preferences:

- Start page: BumperCar will go to this URL whenever it opens a new browser window, or when you click the bumper car in the upper left of the window, next to the arrow that takes you to the previous page. The default start page is bumpercar:/StartPage/. If you leave this field empty, new windows will open blank.

  Note that if BumperCar has no open windows and you click its icon in the Dock (assuming itÕs still running), youÕll switch to it and a new window will automatically open.

- Speech Recognition: Turning on Speech Recognition in BumperCar allows you to navigate the Web using spoken commands. A recognizer tool will appear to give you feedback.

  In order to use this feature, your computer must have a microphone set up as the primary sound input. You also need to turn on Speakable Items in the Speech pane of System Preferences. That pane also allows you to set the sound input channel and contains helpful tips and tests for getting your computer set up to listen to you.

  The speech recognizer tool has four parts. The top is an indicator that shows whether BumperCar is listening, and if it is, whether it is understanding a word you're saying. When BumperCar is listening, the microphone will display in full contrast and moving arrows will appear on either side, along with a tooltip that shows any commands BumperCar thinks it has heard. If the microphone is grayed out, press the key or keys named in the middle section to make BumperCar listen to you. The default key is Escape, but this can be changed in the Speech pane of System Preferences.

  The third part is an indicator of volume. When BumperCar is listening, it will color one or more of its four bars to indicate how loud the noise is, whether or not it understands it. This is good for telling you whether you are speaking loud enough, too loud, or whether there is too much background noise.

  The fourth part is a pop-up menu, which you can access by clicking the down-pointing arrow at the bottom of the tool. It allows you to open the Speech pane of System Preferences or a window which shows what commands are available to you on the bottom and what commands BumperCar has recognized so far at the top.

  BumperCar's speech recognition feature allows you to speak menu or toolbar commands, such as "Reload This Page", but also the text of links in order to follow those links. In a page where images may be links, speak the command "Toggle Link Labels" in order to see tooltips with the text BumperCar needs to hear in order to recognize those links. Additional commands may be obtained by turning on Speakable Items in the Speech pane of System Preferences. They include "Page Up" and "Page Down,Ó as well as "Make New Item" (to open a new browser window), "Close This Window," and "Quit This Application.Ó

  BumperCar recognizes the following commands for all Web page windows.

- Load Images: Fetches images that have not been displayed yet.