Office 365

Immersive Reader

The Immersive Reader, available within Office 365 apps like Outlook and Word, as well as on Canvas pages, allows the user to customize their reading experience in a variety of different ways. This tool works by removing pretty much every element from a page other than the text, providing a much cleaner and simpler view of the content. Once a page or document is viewed within the Immersive Reader, the user can change the text size, style, and color. It will even highlight different parts of speech and provides a picture dictionary for keywords. For people who would like the text read aloud to them, you can select the play button and it will begin being read at a speed of their choosing.

Please note that this feature is currently only available in the online version of Office 365 apps.

text customization options within the immersive reader — Immersive Reader

Read Aloud in Word

The offline version of Word also has several helpful learning tools, including the Read Aloud feature. This setting under the Review tab will allow users to have their documents read aloud using a variety of different settings. It may be useful for people who just want to hear text read but do not need to change the way it looks like can be done with the Immersive Reader.

the read aloud setting in a word document — Read Aloud Feature in Word

Read & Write Gold

Read & Write Gold is a University-supported text-to-speech tool that allows users to have text highlighted and read out loud within Word documents, PDFs, and web pages. This tool is available to all students, faculty, and staff, and has both a stand alone application for MacOS and Windows, as well as a web extension for Chrome. In addition to the read aloud features, it also includes a number of learning tools such as highlighting, a picture dictionary, spelling and verb checkers, a translator, and more. You can learn more and download Read & Write Gold by visiting Student Disability Resource's website.

read and write gold toolbar with read aloud play pause and stop buttons and other features described on page — Read & Write Gold Toolbar

Additional Read Aloud Tools

There are additional options available for anyone looking for a quick, easy, and free solution to enabling read aloud in their online course content or other websites. Browse the tabs below to learn more about read aloud settings and tools available in different browsers and how to get them to read World Campus course pages that don't have the Immersive Reader button.

Firefox
Chrome
Safari
Edge

Firefox Read Aloud Options

While the Immersive Reader is not yet available in Firefox, Mozilla has a very similar feature called Reader View that does work with printable web content.

On any page with the Print button, select it and choose the Lesson option
Enable Reader View by selecting the icon from the address bar. Alternatively, if the icon is not appearing, you can activate Reader View via two different methods:
1. Press command + option + R
2. From the menu bar select View followed by Enter Reader View.

Watch this video to see how it works and learn more about how to use it.

Read more about using Reader View in Firefox.

Chrome Read Aloud Options

For Chrome we recommend using the Read & Write for Google Chrome extension. This has many of the same features as the stand alone app, including read aloud. Once the extension is installed, select the Read & Write Gold icon in your list of Chrome extensions and the toolbar should appear at the top of the browser winder. From their highlight a portion of text that you'd like it to begin reading and select the play button.

Safari Read Aloud Options

Spoken Content Feature

Under System Preferences and Accessibility, choose the Spoken Content feature. Here you will be able to enable read aloud either by selecting the text and using a keyboard command to start reading (option + esc by default) or by hovering your pointer over text on Mac, or by using touch on an iOS device. You will be able to choose the voice and speaking rate, as well as whether or not text is highlighted as it is read. Please note that the highlighting feature only seems to work in Safari.

apple spoken content tool bar highlighting text — Apple Spoken Content Toolbar

Other Browser Settings

Apple's Safari browser also has a built-in text-to-speech feature that can read content pages in this course, but will not visually highlight the text.

Text-to-Speech

On any course page with the Print button, select it and choose the Lesson option
In the new window, open the Safari Edit menu
Select Speech followed by Start Speaking. To read a particular section of the page, select it and then choose Start Speaking.
These speech settings are based on your selection under System Preferences > Accessibility > Spoken Content

Reader View

Reader View will provide a simpler interface for reading page text and allow you to customize the appearance by changing the font, font size, and color of the page.

To enter Reader View, go to the Safari View menu
Select Show Reader.

Note: If the web page content is not displaying in Safari, open Safari preferences and under Privacy uncheck Prevent cross-site tracking.

Watch the following video to see how to enable these settings on your Macbook.

The following video will show you how to use similar features in conjunction with the Canvas app on your iOS device.

To learn more, read Safari's documentation on Reader View.

Edge Read Aloud Options

Because Immersive Reader is a Microsoft product, it is integrated into their browser. This browser comes preinstalled on recent versions of Windows. To use the Immersive Reader in Edge get to read content in your course, do the following:

On any page with the Print button, select it and choose the Lesson option
In the new window that options, select the Immersive Reader icon in the toolbar or press F9 to activate it

You can read more about using the Immersive Reader in Microsoft Edge (Links to an external site.) and watch the following video to see it in action.

Updated October 2024