Microsoft announced earlier this week that they are building on the success of their much acclaimed literacy support suite for OneNote “Learning Tools” by making some of the features available within other products. First though, if you haven’t come across Learning Tools for OneNote take a look at the video below for an outline of what it offers. Take it away Jeff..
As you can see from the video, offering Text To Speech (TTS) with highlighting, easy to read fonts on distraction free, high visibility backgrounds as well as the comprehension supports, Learning Tools could be very useful to those who need a little assistance with text based content. Learning Tools was originally only available for the version of OneNote which comes bundled with Office 2013 and 2016. However earlier this week Microsoft announced that they are bringing some features to other apps, the most interesting and potentially useful of these would be Office Lens and Word. Office Lens is already a very useful multi-platform app with powerful optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities which allow you photograph a document and have it converted to editable text. Now with the addition of the Immersive Reader functionality of Learning Tools you can photograph a document, export it to immersive reader and immediately use the tools mentioned above to support your understanding of the text. For the moment this feature is only available on Office Lens for iOS but my understanding is it’s their intention to gradually roll it out to other platforms.
Within Word even more functionality is offered through the new editor feature. These include dictionary supports such as synonyms of suggested corrections for misspelled words that can be read aloud with TTS and additional support for commonly confused words. I’ll leave it to Jeff again for a full review of the new features (video below).