As part of our committment to accessibility, we have incorporated a number of features into this website that improve the experience for the vision-impaired, those with dyslexia or low literacy skills, or who have English as a Second Language.
We have installed BrowseAloud Plus on this website which offers text-to-speech conversion, the ability to create an MP3 file from selected text, a text magnifier, a screen mask and foreign language translations into 75 different languages, with 33 of those offering full text-to-speech rendering.
To use BrowseAloud Plus, simply click the icon — a toolbar will appear with a number of text-to-speech and visual enhancement options. By default, hovering the mouse over or clicking on any text invokes the text-to-speech reader. Vision-impaired and dyslexic users will find this feature useful, as well as those with low literacy skills or who have English as a Second Language. Please note that in order for BrowseAloud Plus to function correctly, your browser must be set to allow cookies from third-party sites.
You can also increase and decrease the font size, and return it to defaults, by using the text size buttons. Your preferred font size will be remembered for subsequent visits.
When you click on the BrowseAloud Plus icon, the following toolbar will appear:
People with dyslexia can often find that reading black text on a white page can cause letters to become jumbled. In many cases, displaying text on a pastel coloured background can help. The use of a specially-designed font can also help, particularly with distingushing characters with ascenders and descenders: letters like "b" and "d" or "p" and "q" can appear transposed to someone with dyslexia. To help with this, the toolbar allows you to choose both the site's background colour and switch from our default font to one of two specifically designed for people with dyslexia; Open Dyslexia – Font 1 – and Lexia Readable – Font 2.
Select a colour chip to change the background and/or choose your preferred font. Your background colour and font preferences will be remembered for subsequent visits.
To hide the toolbar, simply click the minus icon on the right. You can show it again at any time by clicking the plus icon. If you wish to hide the toolbar but still use BrowseAloud Plus, click the help button on the BrowseAloud toolbar to reveal a special bookmark that you can add to your bookmarks list.
"I see things from a different perspective."
"I can come up with solutions no one else has thought of, and I think fast on my feet."
"When I am reading, occasionally a passage will get all jumbled up, but when it happens I have to read and re-read the passage over again."
"I know what I want to say, but I can never find the right words."
"In formal situations, although I know what I want to say, I struggle, lose focus and then my mind goes blank and I panic."
"I have the right ideas, but I can't get them down on paper."
"It's like my computer crashing with too much information!"
"Sometimes when I am being told what to do, the words I hear get all jumbled up in my mind and I just can't take in what is being said to me."
"In general conversation with family, friends and colleagues they usually accept that I tend to ramble, forget and repeat… because that's part of me."
Here are a few famous people who have dyslexia:
BrowseAloud Plus is developed and maintained by those fine people at Texthelp Ltd.
Parts of this text reproduced by kind permission of the British Dyslexia Association and the BDA Technology Group.
The Open Dyslexic font used on this site is by Abelardo Gonzales and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
The Lexia Readable font is a commercial font licensed from K-Type Foundry.
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