Aug 27, 2020 Microsoft's new post in a series of blogs to be posted every six week matching the Edge browser's release details the features coming to Edge this. Select the Immersive Reader icon again (or press Ctrl+Shift+R) to turn off Immersive Reader. When using this feature, the Immersive Reader icon turns blue, and Microsoft Edge reformats the web page to improve its readability and removes navigation elements.
Microsoft today announced the general availability of Immersive Reader, an Azure Cognitive Services offering that allows developers to embed text reading and comprehension capabilities into apps to make them more inclusive. Immersive Reader is designed to help users — including those with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — improve their reading skills on any device.
About 30 million U.S. teenagers and adults find reading and writing challenging, according to a 2009 U.S. National Center for Education Statistics survey. Troublingly, low literacy levels are correlated with higher rates of crime, problems navigating the health care system, and financial illiteracy. While factors like income, education, and language background play a role, 35% of the aforementioned 30 million individuals have learning, vision, or hearing disorders.
This reality spurred the launch over three years ago of Microsoft’s Immersive Reader, which saw a 560% uptick in usage between February and May. According to Microsoft, schools are increasingly turning to the tool as they transition to distance learning in response to the pandemic.
Hackathon origins
Immersive Reader is part of Learning Tools, Microsoft’s suite aimed at helping improve reading and writing, especially for people with disabilities. As of June 2018, more than 13 million people were using Learning Tools — up from 100,000 in June 2017 — across apps and platforms in over 40 languages. In June 2020, Microsoft reported that more than 23 million people were using Immersive Reader each month.
Learning Tools was borne out of a project spearheaded by Windows accessibility program lead Jeff Petty in 2015. Petty reached out to Microsoft’s Advanced Reading Technologies team and consulted with the division’s researchers about which features might be most helpful for struggling readers.
“Petty looked at how to bring all of the best science and research around meeting and inclusive design principles to empower students of all abilities,” Azure AI corporate vice president Eric Boyd told VentureBeat. “[The team] saw that this had a lot of value, particularly in the education segment.”
Above: Immersive Reader in OneNote.
With a hand from Microsoft Education principal product manager Mike Tholfsen, Petty assembled a group of more than a dozen people to work on a dyslexia-focused toolkit for Microsoft’s 2015 companywide hackathon, including engineers from Microsoft’s office in Vancouver who had developed a prototype for a dyslexic mode in OneNote. The team created an extension for OneNote that offered text-formatting tools to make reading, writing, and note-taking easier, edging out over 3,300 other projects to win the hackathon.
Audiobro la scoring strings keygen. At the time, Tholfsen was in contact with teachers and school leaders around the U.S. about a related product called OneNote Class Notebook, which lets teachers collaborate within personalized workspaces. Immersive Reader was designed with only black and white backgrounds, but after teachers told Tholfsen that some students with Irlen syndrome — a disorder that impacts the brain’s ability to process visual information — preferred reading with backgrounds in specific colors, the design team incorporated the colors.
Immersive Reader debuted in January 2016. Soon after, with the support of Microsoft corporate vice president Eran Megiddo, who oversees education products, Tholfsen pushed to incorporate the functionality into additional apps, platforms, and languages.
Reading access
At its core, Immersive Reader is an application of audiovisual techniques intended to help people read more effectively. A Read Aloud feature reads text out loud with highlighting aimed at improving decoding, fluency, and dictation. Another feature optimizes font spacing in a narrow column view to bolster reading fluency for people with visual crowding concerns. (Visual crowding refers to the inability to distinguish between words or letters when they’re clustered together.)
“Immersive Reader brings together a number of services across Azure into one,” Boyd explained. “It’s things like translations and text-to-speech … And we really wanted to bring something that connected with as many of our developers as possible.”
Immersive Reader also shows breaks between syllables to enhance word recognition and decoding; supports writing instruction and grammar understanding by identifying verbs, nouns, and adjectives; and can be used alongside Microsoft Translate to translate documents and websites into over 70 languages. One of its newer modules is a dictionary that surfaces picture representations of words to increase comprehension — when enabled, selecting a word shows a picture that best describes the word.
Microsoft says there’s evidence Immersive Reader’s tools benefit a broad cross section of readers — not just people with learning disabilities. A 2017 RTI International study of students across grade levels in Bellevue, Washington found that reading comprehension increased 10 percentage points on a nationally normed assessment among those who used Immersive Reader.
In 2017, Immersive Reader came to Outlook on the web, Word Online, OneNote Online, and the OneNote for Windows 10 app with expanded language (e.g., for Gaelic, Maori, and Arabic) and region support. In 2019, beta integration with Microsoft Forms, Whiteboard, and Team Assignments arrived, followed by a feature that shows formatting like bold, underline, italics, and emojis. More recently, Immersive Reader gained natural-sounding neural text-to-speech voices in English, Spanish, German, Chinese, and Italian and became available in Office Lens for iOS and Android, coinciding with its launch in Minecraft: Education Edition. In Minecraft, Immersive Reader can read and translate text, including the text found in menus and character dialogue boxes.
Above: Immersive Reader in Office Lens.
May 2020 marked Immersive Reader’s jump to Microsoft Edge, preceded by the announcement that Immersive Reader would become available as an Azure AI service to let partners leverage it in their products. Beginning with partners like Code.org, Safari Montage, Oxford University Press, Wakelet, Follet, Pear Deck, and Firefly, Microsoft has worked with students and schools to test and solicit feedback about the newly expanded Immersive Reader.
The latest version of Immersive Reader — version 1.1 — supports having pages pretranslated and read aloud automatically. It also adds 15 new neural text-to-speech voices and new languages, including Odia, Northern and Central Kurdish, Pashto, and Dari.
Microsoft says it will roll out over 10,000 new images in the picture dictionary as Immersive Library comes to Outlook Desktop later this fall, the Mail App on Windows 10 in Q4 2020, and Forms on both Outlook.com and mobile devices.
Expanding reach
As of today, Immersive Reader is available as an Azure API with an accompanying software development kit to facilitate the app integration process. (Using it requires a free or paid Azure account.) Boyd anticipates the tool will make its way into other first-party products as the pandemic drives further growth.
“We will work very closely with researchers in the space, as well as [looking] for feedback from customers and teachers and particularly places where we have partnerships with people,” Boyd said. “We will solicit input on things that are going to be the most impactful for customers — that’s the thing that really guides all of our thought processes.”
Some users consider dark mode a fad. Because of my deteriorating eyesight, I don’t have such a luxury: I can’t read dark text on bright/light colored background, be it on screen or on paper.
Before dark mode was a thing, I was using a high contrast accessibility theme—which is great but also way too radical for my specific needs. Dark mode has given me the best of both worlds: a more or less ‘normal’ looking setup, only with bigger fonts, less eye candy and, well, darker colors.
So, how does Microsoft Word deal with dark mode? Very well, as long as you do not limit yourself to what the majority of guides will suggest you do, that is to use Office 365 dark mode. There is more to it, as you will see.
But let’s start with the obvious: activating Office’s dark mode.
Activate dark mode in Office 365
- Open Word, go to File->Options.
- In the sidebar, click the General tab.
- Locate the Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office and set Office Theme to Black. You guessed it, this will apply to all Office 365 applications, not just Word.
Let’s have a look at a test document in Word.
As expected, the user interface is dark but the document itself, our page, remains blindingly white. Not really what we were hoping for.
Word offers two ways to go beyond that. Which one to use depends on what you want to do: keep using the traditional page display mode, or not.
Change colors using the Page Color
In the Ribbon, go to the Design tab and then click the Page Color button.
Tip: use Word’s search field to quickly access any command or button: type what you’re looking for:
Once you have opened the Page Color settings, pick a theme in the Theme Colors. You’ve just picked a background color for your entire document, and Word will automatically change its text, using a contrasting color.
“But, I don’t want my page to print in dark and my text in white!”
It won’t. This theme applies only to the screen rendering of your document. Word is clever enough to remember that in general paper is white and text should be printed in black.
Help! My text stays black!
If your document was not created directly in Word or if you have defined a custom Normal style, it’s possible your text won’t update after changing the background color. Don’t panic.
Right-click anywhere on the black text, a little pop-up should appear. Click the “Styles” button to list most used styles in your document. Then,right-click the Normal Style button and choose “Modify…”
A window opens--yeah I know, it’s not using dark mode… maybe in a next update?
This is where you modify your Styles. If you’re not familiar with Styles: every Word document uses a bunch of styles to define the look of everything on the page and on the screen. There are a lot of predefined styles that you can tweak, and you can create your own too. There are styles for headings, for foot-notes, for your paragraphs, for individual characters, and so on. Each style has many options—too much to list here. The one that we’re interesting in is the text color.
Next to the U button, the color drop-down list should be set to “Automatic”, yours is probably set to black, click the list and change it. That’s all.
Immersive Reader: turning Word into a text editor on steroids
Like all the other word processors I can think of, Word relies on the “page” metaphor—what you see on screen looks very much like what you will get once it’s printed on a sheet of paper. That is certainly useful when writing reports or stuff that will end up printed on paper, but it has nothing to do with what I write, or how I write.
I write and I read on a screen. I don’t need to turn pages or to see page borders. I scroll my text like I would in a web browser or any basic text editor. No margins, no page breaks, no headings or footers, nothing but my raw text. Except that I like to have some basic formatting too—I like being able to select the font I’m using, and a first-line indent is a must have for me, and so on. You know, personal preferences.
Word can give you both: the styling you need and the simplicity of raw text.
How? By using its Immersive Reader. Unlike what the name suggests it is not only a great reading mode, but it’s also a great editing mode. If you’re a long time Word user, think of the old Draft mode. Only much better and more polished.
This is the mode I use Word most of the time.
Go to the View tab and click the Immersive Reader button. If you don’t run the most recent Office 365 subscriber version, it may still be named Learning Tools but they share the same icon: an open book with a little loudspeaker on the right page—a loudspeaker because among other features to help students with disabilities, this mode includes a read aloud function.
Once activated, the page view is hidden: no borders or margin. you’re left with your content. One exdeption: drawing/inking won’t show up in Immerse reader, but images will be displayed, and all your styles too—a text editor on steroids.
Tip: The first time you activate the Immersive Reader/Learning Tools, your text will probably look oddly formatted. That’s because this mode was developed to help users with disabilities, and some tools are activated by default. But you can turn them off and Word will remember it the next time.
In the Immersive Reader tab, click the Text Spacing and the Syllables buttons to turn them off:
- Use the Page Color to select the black background. Very recently they added many other colors, but that doesn’t work as well as expected. I reported the bug and do not use it for the moment.
- Use the Column Width to set the width of your text on screen. It won’t change the way it is printed.
- You can zoom freely, from 10 to 500%. Zooming only changes the font on screen, not its actual size on page or printed.
- Another cool feature—even if I don’t use it—is the Line Focus that helps focus even more on the section of text you’re working on by diming all your document save 1, 3 or 5 lines around the active line:
Conclusion
The Immersive Reader is the mode I use all the time, no matter what I’m writing: a book, a blog post, a short story, research notes, and so on. It turns Word into a comfortable app that suits so well my—admittedly very specific—needs while letting me access most of Word more advanced features I also need (styles, macros, and so on).
Is Word the perfect solution? No, of course not. It’s still a huge beast that takes time and efforts to tame. Some windows and controls haven’t yet been updated to use dark mode, and a few insist on using fixed font size and therefor can’t be resized. And you’ll need to subscribe to Office 365 to access all the latest features. And so on.
But if you haven’t used Word in recent years it’s impressive to see how it has changed, and it’s so encouraging to see Microsoft constantly improving it accessibilty-wise and, I’m kidding you not, in user-friendliness.
Microsoft Word Immersive Reader
For example, one thing I did not mention at all that I use as much as the Immersive Reader is the ability to entirely customize the Ribbon—what tabs to show, and what buttons, and in what order—and the ability to quickly show or hide it, turning it into the most useful type of menu ever created, imo. Maybe that could be something for another post? ?
Immersive Reader And Microsoft Word For Mac 2019
Edit: Here is a similar how-to for LibreOffice (it works bestunder Linux, but is useable too under Windows or macOS): LibreOffice Writer: Clutter Free Dark Mode .