Image from Iconfinder
Microsoft is expanding its education training materials, research & products to help & support dyslexic students realize their brilliant potential, the company announced on its blog. The tech giant has partnered with Made by Dyslexia to empower dyslexic students & offer them better access to technology.
The 1st to sign Made by Dyslexia pledge, Microsoft has vowed to help 700 million people with dyslexia around the globe thrive with technology. Which, it believes, will give them much-needed boost in academics as well as in life.
Learning Tools, that help improve reading & writing comprehension, are provided to educators & students for free. However, Microsoft now aims to expand its access & also ease implementation for dyslexic students in the following manner:
- It plans to develop materials & training for educators supporting dyslexic learners by building free teacher & parent training materials on Microsoft Educator Community by late January 2019.
- Students can be asked to write with their voice (speech to text) using the dictation tool in Learning Tools. Microsoft launched Dictation for Office 365 desktop apps earlier this year.
- With Immersive Reader built into the social learning tool Flipgrid, Microsoft plans make it accessible to learners. Whether connected to Google or Microsoft, Immersive Reader will work with any accounts being used with Flipgrid.
- To help students understand math problems, Immersive Reader, later this week, will make available its features like read aloud, line focus & page theme colors.
- Real-time translation in Immersive Reader will support students in their native language. With the use of Microsoft translator, anyone will be able to translate a page, word or sentence into another language, in real-time & inside of the Immersive Reader. The new feature will support read aloud, parts of speech, syllables & picture dictionary.
- By partnering with the University of Washington’s Brain Development & Education Lab, it plans to build & test tools designed to help struggling young readers sound out words.
- Through Microsoft Edge browser updates, it plans to make the Web friendlier to all learners. In the offing, are new features for ePub, pdf, or reading view in the Edge browser.
- Students will now be able to capture text from any Android phones, tablets & read in Immersive Reader on Office Lens on Android. Immersive Reader uses optical character recognition (OCR) on the image which allows the user to turn it into accessible text content by using read aloud, voice speed, text spacing, font size & forward/backwards.