- [Instructor] I'll be doing the Immersive Reader
which is built-in, free, and part of many Office apps.
(swishing)
(keyboard clicking)
(light music)
I'm gonna launch Word for web, right here.
Now I'm in the free version of Word,
and I'm gonna go to the view menu,
and I'm gonna click Immersive Reader.
Now I'm in the Immersive Reader,
and what we did, was we took the latest science
and research around reading,
and we focused, inclusively,
to help solve all sorts of challenges around reading.
So first off, let's make this full screen.
In the upper right, I'll click here.
Now at the bottom, you're gonna see a play button,
and when I click play, you're gonna see text to speech.
- [Female] The study of Earth's landforms
is called physical geography.
- [Narrator] Now that's a high-grade,
neural, text-to-speech voice,
and also, text-to-speech is now built-in to Word
along with Word and line highlighting,
which is a proven technique for some people to help
with focus and comprehension.
I can click voice settings at the bottom,
and make it faster or slower voice,
and I can choose male or female voice.
I can also change the way the page looks.
So when I click on the AA in the upper right,
I've got some options.
So we know, for some people,
who have experienced visual crowding,
if I click increase spacing,
this can reduce visual crowding for some people.
I can change the background colors of the themes.
So many people don't like to read with the white
or a black background.
I've got many options to choose from,
and these are tuned for accessibility,
so I can choose a color theme that works for me.
I chose Comic Sans.
This is designed for younger readers.
Many students prefer the way the A and the G are written
and that's how younger children are taught to write.
I can make the text size much bigger if I scroll up here,
so think about short line mode,
or think about English language learners,
or think about students with vision impairments.
It's really easy to customize the way that the page looks.
Now next up, I'm gonna click on grammar options.
Now we know there's a very common technique,
breaking words into syllables,
and I'll clap my hands like this (claps hands).
Syl-la-bles.
Many students are taught that way.
Some students with dyslexia will prefer syllable breakdowns
so by clicking syllables,
I can break the words into syllables, with a single click,
I can highlight the nouns on the page, with a single click,
or the verbs,
I can highlight the adjectives, or even the adverbs,
and I can customize the colors very easily.
Maybe I want the verbs to be red,
and maybe I wanna turn a couple of these off,
and maybe I wanna show labels,
which puts a visual distinguishing mark
in case I have challenges with colors.
So you can see it's very personalizable
and it's easy for me to do.
Next, if I'm gonna make the background color blue,
and I'm gonna go to reading preferences
and choose line focus.
Now let's think about students with ADHD,
or maybe students with cerebral palsy,
students with dyslexia,
this is like a reading ruler, like an overlay.
And see how I can scroll up and down with these arrows?
I can read it out loud.
- [Female] Glaciers or rivers.
Land forms are sometimes called physical features.
- [Narrator] So it's really easy to customize
and I can choose one line, or three lines, or five lines.
It's really easy to customize
in the way that works best for me.
I can click on a word and get pictures.
We call this Picture Dictionary.
- [Female] Earth's, Earth's.
- [Narrator] Click on mountains.
- [Female] Mountains.
- [Narrator] Or valleys.
- [Female] Valleys.
- [Narrator] I can also translate
and this is really powerful.
We can translate in over 67 languages here,
and so I've chosen Spanish,
and I'm gonna turn on by word,
and now I'm gonna click on Earth.
- Earth's. - English.
- Tierra. - Spanish.
English. - Mountains, montanas.
- But I can also translate the entire document.
So I'm gonna click on document
and now let's read that out loud.
(speaking in Spanish)
And if that's too fast, I can slow it down a little bit.
And I can go back to the original or Spanish.
And you can see it still highlights the parts of speech,
the nouns, the verbs, and the adjectives in Spanish.
So all of these capabilities
are built right into the Immersive Reader
which is free in part of Word,
it's also in Teams, OneNote, Flipgrid,
Minecraft, Forms, Whiteboard, and Office Lens.
(uplifting music)