Immersive Reader and accessibility

  • 10 minutes

Ensuring all students can access learning in a way that is suitable for them is a key priority. Using OneNote you can leverage tools such as Immersive Reader, Translator, and Accessibility Checker to support students with a range of complex needs.

This video explores how OneNote can support accessibility.

Activity

Try out Immersive Reader. Add some text to a OneNote page and use the View tab to find Immersive Reader.  

Alternatively, try the Immersive Reader Guide.

Steps for using Immersive Reader:

  1. Navigate to a page with text that students need to read and comprehend
  2. Choose the View tab
  3. Locate the Immersive Reader button, it has an icon with book and audio symbols
  4. At the bottom, select the play button to listen to the text being read aloud
  5. The settings button to the right of 'play' provides options for readers to adjust the speed or type of voice that reads
  6. Use the Text Preferences, Grammar Tools, and Reading Preferences tabs in the top right corner to customize how the text looks, to use the line focus, turn on translation, and use the picture dictionary

Use audio for accessibility

Educators can use audio features to help all learners by:

  • Providing audio tutorials or lectures, which allows educators to flip their classroom, benefiting students who can then pause and replay the discussion as many times as needed
  • Modeling the correct pronunciation of words
  • Providing individualized verbal feedback

Students can use audio features to show growth or demonstrate understanding in:

  • Performing Arts: recordings of playing an instrument, singing a song, reciting a poem
  • World Languages: pronunciation of vocabulary, practice conversations
  • Language Arts: reading fluency
  • Public speaking practice

Translator

Helping students to develop global citizenship is a great goal, but communication across languages can be a huge barrier to achieving it. Luckily for educators and students, OneNote has an easy way to translate information between languages. Give it a quick try to understand how it works.

  1. Select the text you want to translate
  2. Either navigate to the View tab and choose Translate, or right-click on the text and select Translate
  3. Translate will autodetect the original language-you can manually change the language
  4. Scroll down and then you can choose the language to translate to
  5. You can then choose to insert the translation on to the page instead of the original text

Accessibility Checker

Are your materials accessible to all learners? If you're unsure whether what you've created is accessible, OneNote has Accessibility Checker. Accessibility Checker is also available in other Office products.

  1. Simply select the View tab, and select Check Accessibility.
  2. A window on the right side will clarify any issues that users of your material might have. Look through the inspection results to decide what needs changing.

OneNote has useful features to help make your materials accessible to everyone:

  • If using the Researcher tool, alt-text automatically populates for any images brought to your document.
  • Editing hyperlinks to have meaningful text works the same as it does in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.