When it comes to accessibility features Chrome web browser does not actually offer much. Chromebook, in contrast, comes with a bunch of interesting accessibility features that you can easily turn on. This guide from Chromebook Help shows you how to access and turn on accessibility features. As for Chrome web browser, to empower it with assistive technology to help students with learning disabilities, we need to install third party extensions which you can find in Chrome Web Store. We have spent hours checking the options it has there and came up with the collection below. These are add-ons to help students with LDs learn and perform better. This is a work in progress and we will be adding more to the list in the future. If you have other suggestions to add, please share with us through email or via our Facebook page.
‘Snap&Read Extension for Chrome™ reads both accessible and inaccessible text aloud from websites, Flash websites, images, Google Docs, eBook Readers, Kindle Cloud Reader, email, PDFs, web-based tests, and more. Snap&Read also adjusts complex text to be more readable, translates text into over 100 languages, and allows you to capture information and cite your sources for use in writings.’
2- Read&Write for Google Chrome
‘Wonderfully intuitive and easy-to-use, Read&Write for Google Chrome™ provides personalized support to make documents, web pages and common file types in Google Drive (including: Google Docs, PDF, ePub & Kes) more accessible. It’s designed to help everyone engage with digital content in a way that suits his/her abilities and learning styles.’
3- Mercury Reader
‘The Mercury Reader extension for Chrome removes ads and distractions, leaving only text and images for a clean and consistent reading view on every site.’
‘Open-Dyslexic is an open sourced font created to increase readability for readers with dyslexia. This extension overrides all fonts on webpages with the OpenDyslexic font, and formats pages to be more easily readable.’
5- Speech Recognition Anywhere
‘With “Speech Recognition Anywhere” you can control the Internet with your voice. Use Speech Recognition to fill out any input, textarea, form or document on the web! ’
6- Colorblind
‘Software for colorblind people.Dalton is software allowing people with different kinds of color blindness (colour vision deficiency) to see more colors. ‘
‘The scrible Toolbar Extension offers the best way to annotate, tag and share online articles and webpages and save them to your scrible Account. The Extension places a scrible Button to the right of your Address Bar.’
‘BeeLine uses a color gradient to guide your eyes from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. This seemingly simple tweak makes reading substantially easier and faster because it allows you to transition between lines quickly and effortlessly.’
