Dyslexia is a condition that affects how people learn to read and write, usually inherited from the parents. It is the most common cause of reading difficulty in children.

The term dyslexia was used for the first time by Rudolf Berlin, an ophthalmologist from Stuttgart, Germany in 1887. He used the term “word blindness” to describe his patients’ inability to read. The term “dyslexia” was adopted in 1891 by W. Pringle Morgan, a British physician who noticed that some children have difficulty learning to read.

The word “dyslexia” derives from the Greek duslexikós, meaning “bad with words.” Dyslexics are not bad with words or lazy; they simply have trouble reading and writing despite having normal intelligence and being creative, highly analytical thinkers.

Chrome Extension For Dyslexia

In today’s post I am sharing with you this collection of Chrome extensions to help particularly students with dyslexia enhance their reading skills. The tools bring added functionalities to Chrome browser converting it into a clutter free space where students can focus on their reading. Most of these extensions offer features such as annotations, OCR services, speech to text, special fonts, dictation, and many more. This selection is based on my own experience as an EdTech blogger. If you think I missed a good title to include to this list, please share with me on my social media profiles.

Read&Write
Features: Text to speech, text and picture dictionaries, dictation, word prediction, summarize text on web pages…

Helperbird
Features: Dyslexia fonts, adjust word and letter spacing, font size, and paragraph width;embedded dictionary, highlighter, OCR, dictation,screenshot capture, translation, Immersive reader, Dyslexia ruler, colour blindness controls, text to speech, word prediction, spell check, and more.

Snap&read
Features: Read aloud, dynamic text leveling, translation (supports 100+ languages), study tools, remove distractions,color overlay, picture dictionary, screenshot reader, OCR, annotation, and more.

Mercury Reader
Features: remove clutter from web pages, adjust typeface and text size, send to kindle functionality, printing optimization, sharing through social media.

BeeLine Reader
“BeeLine uses a color gradient to guide your eyes from the end of one line to the beginning of the next…he BeeLine extension works on millions of news websites and blogs, and you can even read Kindle books, Google Docs, and gmail with it.”

Open Dyslexic
“Open-Dyslexic is an open sourced font created to increase readability for readers with dyslexia. This extension overrides all fonts on web pages with the OpenDyslexic font, and formats pages to be more easily readable.”

Reader View
“Strips away clutter like buttons, background images, and changes the page’s text size, contrast and layout for better readability.”

best chrome extensions for dyslexia

If your child has reading issues and uses Chrome, there are several tools that can help. Check out these seven apps and extensions. (Extensions add functions to the Chrome browser.) These tools can be used on Chromebooks or on any device with a Chrome browser.

Price and availability may vary but were accurate as of September 17, 2018. Understood does not endorse or receive financial compensation for the sale of any of these products.

Snap&Read Universal
Snap&Read Universal is a text-to-speech (TTS) tool that starts reading aloud from where a student clicks on a word. It can read digital text. It can also read text in pictures and images. This is known as optical character recognition (OCR).

This Chrome extension can simplify words and phrases for readers who struggle with vocabulary. Kids can also highlight and organize text into an outline to help with reading comprehension.

Price: $3.99/month (free to try)

Read&Write for Google Chrome
Read&Write includes a bunch of tools to help kids with reading and writing. Its TTS offers several voices, plus dual-color highlighting. (This highlights both a sentence and individual words as they’re read aloud.) Its OCR can read text from screenshots and images.

This Chrome extension has a text and picture dictionary to help with reading comprehension. It also lets kids highlight in different colors as they read, then compile highlighted notes in a document. Read&Write has a tool to simplify the text on a page, too. It collects just the important sentences to give a summary.

Price: $145/year (free to try; free for teachers)

SpeakIt
SpeakIt is a simple TTS tool. Kids highlight text in Chrome, click a button, and listen as the words are read aloud. This extension can read in more than 50 languages. Kids can adjust the speaking pace and select from a few voices.

Price: Free

Learning Ally Link
This audiobook reader opens directly from Chrome and lets kids read books from Learning Ally’s library of 80,000 audiobooks. To use this app, your child must have a Learning Ally membership. Learning Ally is a nonprofit organization.

Price: $135/year for unlimited audiobooks

Scrible
Scrible is a set of note-taking tools that let kids mark up and save information from web pages. It can help with reading and researching online.

Using a pop-up toolbar, kids can highlight text in several colors and add sticky notes. They can also underline, bold, strike through and italicize text. Kids can bookmark pages and save annotated pages to a Scrible account, which they can access whenever they use Chrome.

Price: $28/year (the basic version is free)

Read Mode
Read Mode removes visual clutter from web pages to make them easier to read. It eliminates ads and animations and converts web pages into simple black-on-white text articles.

Chrome has a few variations on Read Mode that your child may want to try. For instance, Reader View also converts pages into text, and lets kids change the font and font size. And with EasyReader, kids can select one section or part of page to view as reader-friendly text.

Price: Free

OneNote Web Clipper
With Web Clipper, kids can save anything from the Internet to OneNote, Microsoft’s note-taking platform. (Microsoft applications like OneNote and Word can be used in Chrome and other web browsers.) This allows kids to use Microsoft’s Immersive Reader to read text aloud from web pages. They can also look up word definitions and control the spacing, color and size of text for easier reading.

Price: Free

Conclusion

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