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 ways. It 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 its text size, style, and color. The tool will even highlight different parts of speech and provide a picture dictionary for keywords. People who would like the text read aloud to them can select the play button; the tool will begin reading at a speed of their choosing.
Please note that this feature is currently only available in the online versions of Office 365 apps.
Immersive Reader
Read Aloud in Word
The offline version of Word also offers a setting for reading text out loud. The Read Aloud setting, under the Review tab, allows users to have their documents read aloud with a variety of options. People who just want to hear text read but who don't need to change the way it looks (like they can with the Immersive Reader) can use this setting.
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, with both a standalone application for MacOS and Windows and a web extension for Chrome. In addition to its read-aloud features, it also offers a number of learning tools, such as highlighting, a picture dictionary, spelling and verb checkers, and a translator. You can learn more and download Read & Write GoldLinks to an external site. by visiting the Student Disability Resources website.
Read & Write Gold Toolbar
Additional Read-Aloud Tools
Additional options are available for anyone looking for a quick, easy, and free way to enable reading aloud in their online course content or other websites. Browse the tabs below to learn more about the 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.
Although the Immersive Reader is not yet available in Firefox, Mozilla offers a very similar feature, called Reader View, that works with printable web content.
On any page with a Print button, click it and choose the "Lesson" option.
Enable Reader View by selecting the corresponding icon from the address bar. If the icon is not appearing, you can activate Reader View in two other ways:
Press command + option + R.
From the menu bar, click View, followed by "Enter Reader View."
Watch the following video to see how it works and to learn more about how to use it.
For Chrome, we recommend using the Read & Write for Google Chrome extensionLinks to an external site., which offers many of the same features as the standalone app. Once the extension is installed, click its icon in your list of Chrome extensions, and the toolbar should appear at the top of the browser winder. From there, highlight a portion of text that you'd like it to begin reading and click the play button.
Safari Read-Aloud Options
Spoken Content Feature
Under System Preferences and Accessibility, choose the "Spoken Content" feature. Here, you can enable reading aloud by either selecting text and using a keyboard command to start reading (option + esc by default) or, on a Mac, hovering your pointer over text. 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 Toolbar
Other Browser Settings
Apple's Safari browser also offers a built-in text-to-speech feature that can read content pages in a course, but will not visually highlight the text.
Text-to-Speech
On any course page with a Print button, click it and choose the "Lesson" option.
In the new window, open Safari's Edit menu.
Click "Speech," followed by "Start Speaking." To read a particular section of the page, select it and then choose "Start Speaking." Speech settings will be based on your selections under System Preferences > Accessibility > Spoken Content.
Reader View
Reader View provides a simpler interface for reading text that allows you to customize page appearance by changing the font, font size, and color.
To enter Reader View, go to Safari's View menu.
Select "Show Reader."
Note: If web page content is not displaying in Safari, open the 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.
Because Immersive Reader is a Microsoft product, it is integrated into the Microsoft default browser, which comes preinstalled on recent versions of Windows. To use the Immersive Reader in Edge to read course content, do the following things:
On any page with a Print button, click it and choose the "Lesson" option.
In the new window that options, click the Immersive Reader icon in the toolbar, or press F9 to activate it.