Using the Immersive Reader

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The Microsoft Immersive Reader is now available on Canvas Pages for staff and students. It isn’t a replacement for a screen reader, but may appeal to people who prefer to hear the page being read to them.

The Immersive Reader reads out the text on a page. It offers a variety of additional options that help to enhance the reading experience e.g. text formatting to help reduce visual crowding (e.g. change font, change colour theme, change background); grammar (highlight the grammatical structure of text) and reading preferences (e.g. choosing the type of voice, displaying an image of some simple words, highlighting words and sentences).

• At present, the Immersive Reader is available only on Canvas Pages, not quizzes, discussions or other tools.
• Enable the reader when viewing a page by clicking on the button Immersive Reader:

 

The reader opens in a new page, with the Play button to activate the audio reading of the text on the page. Click the left arrow at the top of the reader screen to return to the page.

 

Handling a page with multiple languages

In the teaching of modern languages, there may well be a mix of languages on one page. The algorithm usually defaults to reading out the language of the majority of the text on the page. Language teachers may control which language should be used by the Immersive Reader by inserting the following tag(s) in the HTML code of the page:

 

Click on the icon for the Raw HTML Editor </> and insert the 'lang' tags where necessary, in the correct format as shown. This will force the Immersive Reader to use the selected languages, where indicated.

You can use this 'lookup app Links to an external site.' to find the correct tag for any specified language.

 

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