What is the Immersive Reader?
The immersive reader is a full-screen reading experience to increase the readability of content. It was designed to support students with dyslexia and dysgraphia in the classroom, but it can help anyone who wants to increase their fluency or needs help decoding more complex texts.
How Does it Work?
When in Word Online, select View and then Immersive Reader. A new screen will launch. You can press the play button at the bottom to have the text read aloud to you. You can also select individual words to be pronounced in English or in the translation of your choice. You can change the text size, spacing, font, and background color to make the content more readable.
You also have the ability to color code and/or label words to indicate their part of speech. This can help readers decode more complex texts.
You can also narrow the focus of your reading experience by highlighting sets of one, three, or five lines.
You can activate the picture dictionary.
You can translate into other languages. There is even a whole page translation option.
Currently, the immersive reader is supported in Word Online, OneNote, Outlook, and PowerPoint. You can also use Office Lens to scan a printed text and place it in OneNote?—?then the program can use text recognition to launch the immersive reader. There is also an extension you can download to use the tool offline.
Guest Blogger
Raina Burditt