Assistive technologies

There are a wide range of assistive technologies available to help people access the information on our website.

In this section we provide a summary of the different technologies and which people they cater for.

Please click on the name of the technology to read more.

Useful links have also been provided at the bottom of the page as well.

Technology	People it helps	Extra information
Browsealoud	People with a mild visual impairment, low literacy and reading skills, dyslexia, people with English as a second language.	You need to download a free application onto your computer. Browsealoud then reads content to you
Text based browsers	People with mild visual impairment.	Text based browsers strip out images and styling from pages. They rely on websites to be coded correctly in order to display content appropriately.
Screen magnification software	People with visual impairment.	You can also change contrast and colour. One drawback is you can end up having to scroll through large areas of white space to get to the next item of content.
Browser controls to increase text size	People with visual impairment.	You can achieve similar results to screen magnification software simply by adjusting levels on your browser. Our section on browser controls will tell you how.
Speech and Braille output software (or ‘Screen readers’)	Blind and partially blind people.	Screen readers are expensive – but they are the most effective way for blind and partially blind people to access the web. Like text-based browsers, they rely on websites to be coded correctly in order to achieve the best results.
Assistive technologies for users with physical impairments	Physically impaired people.	There are many different types of physical impairment. A wide range of assistive technologies have been developed to help.

Useful links

• Apple website  - Assistive technology help For Mac users. It includes the useful option of filtering products by the following categories: Commercial (retail), Shareware, Freeware and Open source.
• Microsoft website  – Accessibility and assistive technology help for Microsoft Windows users. It includes accessibility tutorials on common Microsoft products (including Internet Explorer) as well as information about assistive technology products that can be used on Microsoft systems.
• AbilityHub  - Assistive Technology for people with a disability who find operating a computer difficult, maybe even impossible. This website will direct you to adaptive equipment and alternative methods available for accessing computers.
   

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