Top iPad apps for Accessibility

June Coffeecups

4 min

September 1st, 2020

The Internet is a vast resource of information. But what happens when you can't access that information? There are many websites and applications available to help assist those with disabilities—especially those with visual and hearing impairments—access the information they need.

iPads have been an amazing tool for people with disabilities. There are countless apps that enable users to do incredible things, and we have compiled a list of four of the best iPad apps for accessibility.

Voice Dream Reader

Voice Dream Reader is an app designed to help people who have learning difficulties or have trouble reading. This app can help those with dyslexia, ADHD, visual impairments, and more. It has the text-to-speech capability and can read everything from PDF documents to ebooks from the iTunes bookstore. It's also compatible with Dropbox and Google Drive, so you can read anything that you have saved on your cloud storage accounts.

Voice Dream Reader has dozens of voices in 27 languages. The app also allows users to create their own bookmarks, footnotes, and highlights. You can even adjust the reading speed or skip over words or sentences.

Texthelp

There's no denying how difficult it can be to remember everything at once—especially if you're trying to overcome a disability! Texthelp makes life easier by letting you highlight specific parts of your screen so that the important information stands out. Plus, it lets users easily translate certain words or phrases (like if you're visiting a website in another language). The app also provides definitions for words from your native language as well. This is great for people who want to write a blog post but may struggle with reading back their own work.

SignUp for Disney+

We all want to get in on the Disney+ craze, but not everyone can get by without captions—and not every movie and TV show is captioned properly. Enter SignUp: an app that lets users customize their captions by setting font type, size, color, and background color. They can also add timestamps to keep track of how far along they are in a show, bold or italicize words, center their captions, and even adjust the opacity of their captions to make sure they don't interfere with other elements onscreen. With options like these, SignUp is an app that should be in every captioner's library!

Helperbird for Safari

If you need help reading what's on the screen, Helperbird is the app for you. It will magnify anything you want and make it easier to read text. It also has some other cool features like the ability to change text color and highlight important points on web pages.

Have you ever noticed how there's a lot of text online, but not all of it is organized in an accessible way? Helperbird is a great extension that helps you make sense of web pages in terms of accessibility. It makes it easy to toggle between fonts, contrast, and screen readability.

The iPad is quickly becoming a very important tool for the education and entertainment of students, teachers, and children alike. As more people discover this useful device, it is important to consider how these iPad users may be differently-abled than others.

All of the apps listed here are great resources for those seeking to customize their iPad experience. They offer the possibility of greater independence and ease of use. While each app accomplishes its goals in slightly different ways, they all provide valuable accessibility features that benefit users with autism, dyslexia, and other disabilities.