Accessibility Reading tools: Speak Selection, Speak Screen, Highlight Content, and Typing Feedback

Why:

These tools can all be used to help scaffold reading for students and make reading more accessible for struggling or young readers.

Step 1: To turn on features, click on Settings

Step 2: From the left hand side, select Accessibility

Step 3: Select Spoken Content

 Step 4: Turn on Speak Selection, Speak Screen, and Highlight Content

How to use each one

For these tools to work, you must be in Safari web browser.

Speak Selection: When this feature is enabled, iPad users can long press on a word on their screen to highlight it. The word will highlight in blue and options will appear including the feature of “Speak.”

To select an entire sentence or paragraph, touch the blue dots on the highlighted word and drag them to the desired locations. Then choose “Speak” from the black option bar.

Speak Screen: Once the feature is turned on, you use two fingers and swipe down from the top of the iPad screen. A back bar with tools will appear.

This feature works best when in Safari Reader View which cuts out ads and other clutter from websites. It also works well with digital PDFs that have been exported to iBooks.

 Typing Feedback:  Turning on Typing Feedback features can be a powerful and customizable tool depending on each students leaning needs.  Feel free to explore all of the features in this section but the two simplest and most powerful are turning on "Characters" which will speak the letter or number that is being typed in real time which is great for emergent readers and ENL level 1 students. The hope is that students will quickly outgrow the need for "Characters" being turned on and move on to the need for the next feature.

Turning on "Speak Words" is the next great step in the scaffold.  Here student will hear the word or number that they have just typed once they hit the spacebar.

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