Library Subject Guides
Use this guide to learn about how you can use the VLE accessibly; change fonts, background colours, spacing, and more.
In Google Chrome, you can customise your browser settings in order to change colours and fonts. These font settings will apply to all possible content in google.
You can choose the fonts you find easier to read. Fonts such as verdana, arial, comic sans, and helvetica are considered more dyslexia-friendly.
You can also choose your font size.
In order to have these fonts apply to VLE content, you can use Blackboard Ally's immersive reader function.
Go onto the module page that you want to view. Click the ally button in the right hand corner.
Choose which item on the page you want to view in immersive reader.
Click on immersive reader.
You can now change the background colour, font, font sizes, spacing, and how many lines appear at once. You can also click the play icon to have the page read out to you, and customise the voice.
If you select BeeLine Reader instead of the Immersive Reader, you can download an HTML file which opens in a new tab and allows you to customise the colour of the font as a gradient, making chunks of VLE text easier and faster to read. There is also a night mode, which has a black background.
This is what the 'bright' colour option looks like:
To discover more uses of Blackboard Ally, go to our Blackboard Ally guide
On a mac computer, you can change your screen display settings to change settings such as screen colour and contrast. This can allow you to make VLE content easier to read without going into immersive reader, and will also apply to content outside of the VLE such as downloaded powerpoint lecture slides.
Similar settings are available on windows computers, see Change display brightness and color in Windows
To find the display settings, go into your mac system preferences, then to accessibility, then display:
From display, you can change settings such as contrast and colour tints. You can also make your pointer larger or a different colour to make it easier to see. Please note the effect of colour tints and contrast will not appear on the screenshots below.
In Panopto, the software that plays lecture and workshop recordings, you are able to do the following to access recordings accessibly:
Find out more in the guide below:
