Mk13, Superwhy is designed to explicitly teach children to read. A child who learns things watching the show is being taught them by the show. I don't know anything about leapfrog, but I suspect it's not dissimilar.
So much of what's around for small children is designed to teach them to read, though, that I'm not sure it's useful to say that a child who has been exposed to any of it cannot be called self-taught. Mine used to like starfall.com as a toddler, and I let him play with it sometimes; it was one of a handful of sites and DVDs that I used to put him in front of when I needed a few minutes' peace (and the only one that taught reading, that I remember). He had alphabet books, too, and picture books with only a few words on each page that people used to read to him, and there were letter posters on the wall at the nursery he went to; it was probably all useful information to the toddler cracking the code! I describe him as self-taught because no person ever intended that he should learn to read (I had positively decided that it would be better if he did not learn to read until he went to school - but I didn't go so far as to ban this stuff!). He'd have been more self-taught if he'd lived without internet and with no written material below the level of The Times, but not many children do!
I think calling my DS a self-taught reader is still making a somewhat useful distinction between him and a child whose parent did daily flashcards with them from birth, because a very small percentage of children exposed to the material my DS got read at 2 while a very high percentage of children deliberately taught by their parents to read do so; "my child taught himself to read" is information about the child while "I taught my child to read" is information about the parent! Given the huge grey area (just how available were these resources, who made the choices between this TV programme or website or book and another, what was the parents' reaction to any signs of interest in them from the child?) though, it's true that it's not all that useful as a distinction for purposes of gauging anything about the child. The main use of calling DS "self-taught" to me is heading off people who would otherwise use the fact that he could read well before starting school as proof positive that I was a horribly pushy parent. I used it on school application forms to what seemed to be good effect.
