Just Read!: Making Reading Easier

Changing the font's style, size and colour can help you to read more quickly and easily.  Many people also find changing the background colour helpful.  Explore a range of options below, focusing especially on how to set up your device. 

Device Set Up and Software

Windows Immersive Reader
Accessibility features for vision on Mac

Reading Ebooks Online

Some ebook suppliers have 'read online' interfaces which allow you to change fonts and backgrounds.  What you can do varies between ebook supplier and is indicated in the company's accessibility statement.  Links to accessibility statements can be found in the Locate record for each book - under the View It section.

A list of accessibility statements from our top ebook providers.

Ebook Central,  EBSCO,  Taylor & Francis,  Elsevier,  Springer  

Using PDFs - Adobe Acrobat Reader

• Changing the background colour
  Go to Preferences > Accessibility > Tick the box Replace Document colours >  select Page Background.
• Changing the font colour
  Go to Preferences > Accessibility > Tick the box Replace Document colours > select Custom Colour > select Document Text colour

Note: font style cannot be changed in the free reader version

Browser extensions can help you improve your reading speed

EyeRead - uses a custom algorithm that bolds a portion of each word to help guide your eyes scan more quickly over the text.

Swiftread - helps to improve the speed of your reading. Either copy-paste text into SwiftRead from sources such as Word docs, or on webpages, highlight the text, right-click and click "SwiftRead selected text"  You can also adapt fonts and background colours. 

Listening to text - known as text-to-speech - is increasingly popular as a means of consuming large amounts of digital data. It gives our eyes a break and allows us to multi-task.

Microsoft uses Read Aloud which is built into Windows Immersive Reader.  You can also use it offline and on mobile devices using the MS Edge app.

Apple uses VoiceOver, Speak Screen and Speak Selection. 

Ebook platforms - currently only Gale Cengage, VLe and the Kortext app offer in-built text to speech.  If you wish to hear other ebook platforms you need to use a screenreader such as Windows Immersive Reader, Apple VoiceOver, NVDA (Windows only) or JAWS (Windows only).  Ebook Central has a 'text only' mode which enables the ebook to be presented as plain text and read by a screen reader.

Adobe Acrobat Reader Read Aloud - enables PDFs to be read aloud, although the sound is quite robotic. Click on ‘view’ and ‘read aloud’. A whole page or sections can be read out, and you can customise the experience under ‘preferences’

Natural Readers WebApp - drag & drop or upload documents or read web pages. Free users can try Plus Voices for up to 5 minutes per day, or use Free Voices with no limits (Arthur and Martha free voices are best).  Some advanced features are only available to paid users.

Chrome Read Aloud Extension - Read Aloud can read your current webpage with one click, PDF, Google Docs, Google Play books, Amazon Kindle, and EPUB docs.