How Libraries and Community Centers Use Helperbird to Support Senior Visitors

Someone sits down at your public computer and cannot read the screen.

You have two minutes and no idea what the next visitor will need. This guide is for the person on your side of the desk.

What you can set once for every machine

Installing the extension across a fleet is the browser's job. Use the Google Admin console for Chrome and ChromeOS, or group policy on Windows. There is a guide to force installing the Helperbird extension and a separate one for deploying Helperbird on Mozilla Firefox. Safari on a Mac reads no admin policy, so you set those machines up one at a time.

After that you can push nine settings, plus admin control, the switch that turns them on. The ones that earn their keep in a public space are:

• The organization subscription key, which turns on Helperbird Pro on every machine that takes the policy.
• A list of features to remove from Helperbird's menu. It needs its own switch as well as admin control.
• Up to ten sites where Helperbird stays off. Visitors keep their own list of ten alongside yours.
• The Floating Toolbar, forced on for every page and set to the left or right edge. A visitor can drag it elsewhere, and that drag wins until settings are reset.
• The word highlight during read aloud, on or off, and its color. It paints on a text selection and in Reading Mode, and only with the browser's own voices.

The Floating Toolbar stays on excluded sites.

None of these apply until you also switch admin control on. All ten settings, admin control included, are listed in setting Chrome storage managed keys.

What policy cannot preset

This is where deployment plans go wrong.

You cannot push a default font, font size, page color or overlay. None of the reading preferences are in the list, so there is no house default for a visitor to fall back to.

Admin control does not lock the interface either. Three things lock, and only three.

• The Floating Toolbar button, once you have forced it on.
• The read aloud word highlight, when your policy names it.
• Your own list of excluded sites, which visitors can see but cannot change.

Everything else stays editable, so the next visitor can change it.

Two minutes at the desk

Ask what is hard to see, then change one thing at a time.

1. Words too small: open Text settings and move Font size to Maximum.
2. Still too small: turn on Magnifier in Display. It zooms much further than Font size can.
3. Page too pale or too bright: pick one High contrast theme, or turn on Dark Reader. One or the other, not both.
4. Pointer keeps getting lost: turn on Cursor size.
5. Reading is too tiring: select a paragraph, then open Text to speech and press Play. With nothing selected it reads the article it finds on the page, and some pages have none.

Pin whatever worked to Quick actions so the visitor can find it again. None of those five needs Helperbird Pro, and none of them asks a visitor to sign in.

Why each one helps is in the companion piece on everyday web browsing for seniors.

What the Floating Toolbar gives a visitor

If you push one setting, push this one. The Floating Toolbar puts a Helperbird logo on the page, and clicking it expands a bar of actions.

Play, Stop, Reading guide and Reading Mode are free. Dictionary, Immersive, Word prediction, Voice typing and Screenshot Reader need Helperbird Pro. Chrome and Edge get one more button, Settings, which opens Helperbird in the side panel. Firefox and Safari do not.

Without Pro, the toolbar's Play button stops after 5,000 characters, whether the visitor selected text first or not.

What carries over to the next person

Helperbird saves settings in the browser, not per visitor, so whatever one person turns on is still on for the next. Yellow on Black is a gift to the person who chose it and a problem for whoever sits down after.

You have two ways to handle that. Use Reset all data on Helperbird's settings page between visitors. Or, on a Chromebook, run the machine as a managed guest session, where everything is wiped at sign-out.

For the wider picture, see how public libraries make digital resources accessible.

Grant-friendly pricing

Helperbird offers annual pricing that works with grant-funded budgets. There are no per-seat fees for public-access machines, and multi-year commitments are not required. Organizations can renew year by year as funding allows.

Getting started

Start with the two minutes at the desk, then decide what to push by policy.

Contact the Helperbird team about deployment for your organization, or see what Helperbird Pro includes.