Browsing the web can be a very inconsistent experience for anyone, but when you’re a person with disabilities, those minor inconveniences might actually become massive barriers.

Today we are going to look at tool that is designed to make reading on the web much easier for persons with disabilities, students, and essentially anyone else who reads content online. Helperbird is an accessible reading and writing toolbar that functions as an extension to virtually any browser. The app offers a variety of reading features including Reading Mode, Immersive Reader, Highlight Menu, and more. It also allows you to tweak and customize the look of the content you are reading, from fonts, to colors, to spacing, borders, and more.

And because this app is highly focused on accessibility, they also offer dyslexia-friendly fonts, and a variety of background options to choose from. Helperbird also offers a variety of color overlays, a reading ruler, keyboard shortcuts, OCR functionality, highlighters and page summary tools, picture dictionary, customizable themes, and more.

Helperbird also offers a suite of writing features as well, including word prediction, auto-summaries, voice typing, spelling and grammar checker, screenshot tool, sticky notes, and more.

With an app so packed with features, layout design is crucial, and I really like how Helperbird lays out its tools. When you turn it on, Helperbird adds a toolbar to the right of your screen with each tool category existing as its own drop-down menu. The tools are all listed by category and grouped together logically.

Right now, the main “categories” of tools are Reading Options, Paragraphs, Writing Tools, Extract text, Styles & Colors, Reading tools, Dyslexia tools, Text-to-speech, Simplify, Speed Reading, Voice Typing, Translate, Auto scroll, Math Reader, Screenshot, Display Options, Media Options, Accessibility, and Settings. And below each of these categories is a variety of relevant features to choose from.

With all that in mind, we think that this app is definitely worth checking out, especially if you are someone who struggles with reading or writing online.

Please note that while the base version of HelperBird is free, the pro version of the app costs $40 CDN yearly. To compare which features are available for each version of the app, please click here.

This post originally appeared on the AT Help Desk website.

Tags: apps, assistive technology, AT HelpDesk, Atlantic Regional Office