That's exactly what I used to see on my old computer. I got around it by clicking on areas just to see what happened. He can click on the writing for "new character" and then click in the lower right hand corner to find the button that will move him to the next screen. But he will probably have trouble seeing the options on the next screen.
I never had any real problems running the game once I got into it though. I had a few issues with items showing up as white boxes instead of icons, and crashing pretty regularly, but could still manage to play just fine.
If he has the issue I had, with my computer not having good enough graphics or processor to use the character generation, he might need to use a different computer [like yours

] to set up his characters, unless one of the devs can suggest a fix I haven't found.