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"Read Mode" is a phrase used to describe reading digital information without the targeted ads, connected articles, pop-ups and all other distractions. There are different ways to achieve "Read Mode": this way is through a chrome extension called Mercury Reader or Postlight Reader, from the digital engineering company Postlight. The chrome extension they developed scans the content on a webpage and narrows it down to just the stuff you need to read- no ads, no distractions. This is a great accessibility option for students who are easily distracted or need to be protected for anything that would slip through a school's age-appropriate filters. The words are also a little bit bigger, which prevents eye strain- a feature I think we can all appreciate. Extensions like this one are probably the best way to achieve 'Read Mode', but I'd also like to shout-out justtherecipe.com, specifically for cooking. I often find recipes to be hidden behind several mouse-clicks of backstory, clickbait ads and affiliate links. Justtherecipe.com has a function where you paste a recipe web url and it gets rid of all of that.

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Accessibility options in Chrome browsing

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Chrome supports accessible options for most websites opened in its browser. Although it doesn't allow for the font to be changed, one can 'zoom in' by hitting the vertical 3 dots in the right-hand corner of the webpage. To test different accessibility options, I went to one of my favorite websites- the New York Times- and found a recipe. Using a test word (potatoes) I was able to right-click and access three options that I think really contribute to accessibility: translate, look up, and speech. The 'Translate' function can offer successful translations of English words into other languages. A quick test of Spanish words on another website (Spanishdict) allowed for successful translation into English. The 'Speech > Start Reading' function prompted the selected text to be read aloud to me and the 'look up' function let the selected word be defined for me.

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Pebble Go is, in their own words, "a curricular content hub specifically designed for K-2 students". They feature content in Spanish as well as English, and have a feature where hovering over a word will read it aloud to you. I would say this support- audio versions of text- is their most prevalent literacy support, and one of the website's biggest strengths. They obviously have bilingual support, but only in Spanish from what I can see. Their second most supportive feature for early learners on pebble Go would be the sheer amount of iconography/visual scaffolding. There are pictures for representing different topics and a visual pathway in the top middle so you can track how you got to where you are and how to go back. The last feature I'd like to talk about is Pebble Go's definition system- some words, which may be new to some audiences, are blue and can be selected so a student can understand the word's definition.

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Epic!'s features, in English and Spanish read-aloud books

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Epic! is, in their own words, a "digital reading platform... that safely fuels curiosity and reading confidence for kids 12 and under." They are primarily entertainment-based, unlike Pebble Go, but like Pebble Go, they do have a significant amount of visual scaffolding for its user base to rely on. Not every book on Epic! available can be read aloud, but the ones that can have good pacing and a real person reading, with proper fluency and pronunciation (which doesn't always happen with all technology platforms, especially those that use an AI for its verbal output). It has the ability for words in stories to be defined but which words have definitions is pretty inconsistent- in an eyebrow-raising discovery, I was unable to define a single word in any of their rather limited Spanish book collection. I could recommend this resource for monolingual early learners but I would say that its multilingual accessibility (and content) is lacking.

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Voice typing, English and Spanish, in Google Docs

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This is one of my favorite accessibility features google offers. I personally use it every day to produce lots of written work in a short period of time. I have learning disabilities that make typing difficult, and this has been a lifesaver for me. One of the things I enjoy most about it is the ability to dictate in multiple languages. For Spanish specifically, you can narrow it down by country. My Spanish is Ecuadorian, and being able to select a language that has AI trained to recognize the specific phonemes of my accent is both welcoming and convenient. There are, of course, drawbacks: as far as I know, you do still have to physically type the title of your document instead of using the voice-to-type tool. You also have to say your punctuation out loud- as in verbally saying "period", "exclamation point", "comma", etcetera. For inexperienced voice-typers, this can definitely throw off a train of thought the first couple of times. The good news is that the AI is really good at picking up your voice alone and filtering out those in the background. I tested this by doing my voice-typing in a highly-trafficked study area. Only mine was picked up, even when I spoke in low tones.

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Google translate is one of the most-used softwares/functions Google has produced. Although it can now rely on AI contextual features, Google Translate is technically a "multilingual neural machine translation service". I use google translate on a daily basis in order to check individual words in Spanish- words I'm unsure if I'm pronouncing or spelling correctly, or words I don't know at all. In app form, google translate can scan a written document via the camera lens on a smartphone and translate in real time. It can also listen to you speak and translate your verbal utterances in real-time. Via web browser, Google translate has a few pre-set translation options: Text, Images, Documents, and Websites. I tested the document function. What's nice about that function is that you don't have to copy and paste the text from the document, you can translate the whole document itself- which means headers, footers, and sections are maintained. Furthermore, you can send a translated copy of the document to other people, which is very useful. Of course, the translations aren't perfect- in my experience, they're best for one word inputs- but the technology is improving daily.

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Immersive Reader is a feature offered through Microsoft OneNote that allows a reader to customize the text they're looking at. You can adjust the size, color, and spacing of the font in attached articles so as to read them better. The way a font is laid out has a lot of impact on whether or not it is readable. For example, Comic Sans is actually one of the best fonts for dyslexics to read! The spacing and shape of the letters means a reader is less likely to make errors when processing what they see. Immersive Reader acts as one's own personal comic-sans-ification tool. I like to make my letters bigger and bolder because I have poor eyesight, but the benefits of OneNote aren't only associated with passively reading. Writing on OneNote is easy, with the option to include audio as well as text in a note (shown in the screen recording above).

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This Padlet was created by Nora Wilson for IT 442 at Western Washington University