Taking Accessibility to Microsoft Edge

Microsoft is taking accessibility pretty seriously (if ponying up for a Superbowl ad for their accessible game controller is any indication). Their CEO, Satya Nadella, aims to make all of Microsoft’s products accessible to everyone. Now, just a year after that Super Bowl ad, they launched their new Edge browser for macOS and Windows. In an interesting turn of events, this one is based on Google’s open source project, Chromium, meaning the new Microsoft Edge browser will share the same foundation as Google Chrome. Microsoft hopes to gain more momentum than previous versions of Edge, whose market share never got above the single digits.

With Microsoft’s commitment to accessibility, and the new solid browser foundation, we jumped on the opportunity to integrate our Human Learning Tools with Edge. With Edge’s release, we are launching our tools on the Microsoft Edge Add-ons site—adding some powerful tools to Microsoft Edge to help students read and write. With over 32,000 schools using our Human Learning Tools on Google Chrome, schools and districts in the Microsoft ecosystem will get the same opportunity to provide these powerful learning supports to their students.

If you already have a license to Snap&Read, Co:Writer, Quizbot, and/or Word Bank, just download the Extensions on the new Edge Browser.

If you don’t have our tools yet, you can start a free trial (no credit card required).

Co:Writer give access to word prediction, speech recognition, and language tools for ELL.

Snap&Read gives students access to a set of reading tools including text-to-speech, text leveling, translation, reading guides, study tools, color overlays, picture dictionary, bibliographer, and annotation tools.

Quizbot scrapes websites and PDFs for content—automatically turning it into quizzes and worksheets in Google Forms.

Word Bank digests content from any webpage and parses it into a word bank, word cloud, summary, biography of key people, timeline, and Google map with Street View.