Enhancing Inclusivity - Role of Accessibility Software in Modern Classrooms with Helperbird

Thirty students in your room, thirty different reading speeds.

A browser extension will not close that gap on its own. What it can do is let your students change how a page looks and sounds. No hand up required.

What students can switch on without you

Your students get these without a subscription:

• Text to speech. Plays a page or a selection using the voices already on the device. The higher quality neural voices come from Microsoft Azure and need Helperbird Pro.
• Font. 32 typefaces in the picker, including OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Andika and six Lexend widths. On iPad and iPhone the list is 29.
• High contrast and Dark Reader. Five contrast themes and four dark themes, for pages your students find hard to look at.
• Immersive Reader and Reading Mode, which strip a page back to its text. Immersive Reader sends that text to Microsoft Azure. In the browser extension, Helperbird Free stops it at 2,000 characters.

What needs Helperbird Pro

• Summarize, Simplify and Screenshot Reader
• Equations
• Spell check, Grammar and Word prediction
• Voice typing
• Reading list
• Sticky note on a page, and creating a highlight
• Showing and hiding saved Highlights
• Word spotlight, and the Dictionary inside the Highlight Menu

Grammar runs when your student selects text and presses Check. That text goes to OpenAI.

The full list is in what Helperbird Pro includes.

Putting it on every device

You push Helperbird out from wherever you manage the browser: Google Admin, Microsoft Edge management, or a Firefox policy file. Installing that way gives every student Helperbird Free. Pro arrives separately, from your organization's subscription key set in the same policy.

There is no managed policy on Safari, iPad or iPhone. Those students enter a subscription key themselves.

Two policy settings are worth deciding before your term starts:

• Sites to keep Helperbird off. Up to ten domains. A domain matches itself and its subdomains. Your students keep their own list of ten alongside yours.
• The Floating Toolbar. Switch this on and every website carries a Helperbird logo that expands into a bar of actions. Forced on, a student can move it but cannot switch it off. Five of its buttons need Pro: Dictionary, Immersive Reader, Word prediction, Voice typing and Screenshot Reader. On Free, Play stops at 5,000 characters.

Neither takes effect unless your policy also switches admin control on. You will find the steps in setting Chrome storage managed keys and Helperbird Firefox enterprise deployment.

What it does not do

• Fonts, text size, spacing, Immersive Reader and Reading Mode do not apply inside Google Docs or PDFs.
• Grammar does not check as you type and it underlines nothing.
• Spell check supplies no dictionary and no suggestions of its own, only the browser's.
• The High contrast keyboard shortcut needs Pro.
• Notes and highlights do not always sync. They sit in the browser's own storage. If that storage runs out, they stay on that one device and nothing tells your student.

Where to go next

How to use Helperbird as a teacher covers the features teachers reach for most, and how to run Helperbird during a quiz or test. If your school runs Chromebooks, start with setting up accessibility tools on school Chromebooks.