We’ve added the ReachDeck Toolbar to our site. If you struggle with reading, have a visual impairment, or prefer to read in your own language, the ReachDeck Toolbar can help.
Try it out for yourself
Click on the blue ‘ear’ button that you can see in the header of all our website pages. This will launch the ReachDeck Toolbar. You’ll see it dock to the top of your screen. Now click on the first ‘pointed finger’ icon on that toolbar and hover your mouse pointer over any text on our site to hear it read out loud.
How does the ReachDeck Toolbar help?
The ReachDeck Toolbar will help you to read and translate the content on our website. Its features include:
Hover to speak
Click on the pointed finger icon on the toolbar, and the tool will read out loud any sentence you hover over. It will then continue, sentence by sentence, until it reaches the end, or you close the tool.
Text-to-speech
Select an area of text and click the play button and the tool will read it out loud. If you don't select an area of text, the tool will read out the entire page.
Translate page
This tool translates the text on the page into different languages. When you click on the tool, a list of languages will appear in a drop-down menu. Choose a language and it will translate the website.
Text magnification
The text magnifier is at the top of the page. You will be able to hear the text read out loud. You can change the size of the magnified text in the settings menu from a choice of five options.
MP3 maker
This will create an MP3 sound file which you can download and play on your MP3 player, smartphone or computer. You need to select the text you want to convert into an MP3 file, then click on the tool.
Screen mask
The screen mask highlights a rectangular section of the screen to help people with some forms of dyslexia or learning difficulties. There are two options for this tool, which you can change in the settings menu:
- the ruler darkens the rectangular section and is like reading a page using a ruler to follow line by line
- the letter box is the reverse: the rest of the page is darkened and the rectangular section is lighter
Web page simplifier
This tool will strip out all the distracting menus and boxes from a page, and leave just the article. It's useful for reading long pages of text, as well as for printing pages.
Picture dictionary
This tool allows you to highlight a word and then displays pictures related to the text selected.