Introducing Helperbird Academy
Reading about a tool is not the same as using one. You can finish a help article about reading rulers and still not have moved one down a paragraph.
So we built Helperbird Academy: free, hands-on training where the work happens on a real page, and the page checks it as you go. It takes about half an hour, and at the end you can print a certificate.
The page checks your own work
Turn on learn mode and a small progress bar follows you across the site. Then the challenges begin.
One of them asks you to switch the font to OpenDyslexic or Lexend and open up the letter spacing. When you do that, Helperbird changes the page you are reading — and because the Academy is a page, it can watch its own text change. The challenge ticks itself while you are looking at it. No screenshots to paste, no box to check saying you promise you did it.
It also checks that you did something rather than nothing. The letter-spacing half only counts if you move the value, so a reader who already runs wide spacing every day does not get it for free. And if you had dyslexia-friendly fonts switched on before you arrived, the page marks it Already on instead of claiming it watched you do it. You still get the credit. It is honest about how you earned it.
Another challenge deliberately sends you away: open Reading Mode on the help article that explains Reading Mode. The progress bar travels with you, so the challenge completes over there and you come back with it already done.
When the page cannot see something, it says so
Read aloud happens in audio, and a web page cannot hear. So that challenge asks you to name one word the voice got wrong, and your certificate prints it as Self-reported rather than pretending we observed it.
Every line on the certificate carries how it was earned — detected, already on, witnessed, self-reported, or observed. A certificate that overstates what happened is worth nothing to the person holding it, and worth less to whoever reads it.
Two levels, and no dead ends
Level 1 covers the free tools: color overlays, text to speech, the reading ruler, the Screenshot Reader and the help documentation itself.
Level 2 covers Helperbird Pro — word prediction, voice typing, annotation and the Immersive Reader.
Nobody hits a wall. Every Pro challenge can also be completed by watching how the feature works instead of running it, for half the points and a stamp that says Observed. A reader on the free plan can finish the whole thing.
Everything stays in your browser
This matters most for the schools using it. There is no account, no sign-up and no upload. Your name, your answers and your progress are saved in your own browser on your own device, and are never sent to us or to anyone else. We hold no record of anybody's training.
The certificate is printed by your own browser, so you can send it to a printer or save it as a PDF. That is also why it works on a locked-down school Chromebook.
For educators running it as training
There is an educator mode. It swaps the wording for professional language, adds a facilitator line to the certificate, and turns the reflection questions into ones worth discussing in a room. If you run professional development for a district or a school, you can take a group through it in a session and everyone leaves with something printed.
If you are looking at Helperbird across a school or district, Helperbird for education has the deployment side.
Where this came from
The Academy is not our idea. Elisa Wern, Lead Occupational Therapist and AT Specialist at Alachua County Public Schools, sent us a scavenger hunt she had built on paper for her students, along with a professional development module.
Her paper version asked students to paste in screenshots as evidence, because paper cannot check anything by itself. That constraint is what gave us the whole design: a web page can check, so the challenges verify themselves and nobody has to prove anything twice. The challenges in the Academy are hers.
Start
Helperbird Academy is live and free. Turn on learn mode and do the first challenge — it takes about a minute, and you will see the page notice.
If you would rather read first, the help guides are still there. But the Academy is the faster way to find out what the tools actually do.