Making learning accessible for everyone with Microsoft Education

Carla  Gonzalez Fernandez

Carla Gonzalez Fernandez

Microsoft, Modern Work & Surface

Read Time, 4 min.

Every student deserves a solution to help them achieve great things. Learn in this article how Microsoft’s accessibility tools can support diverse learning needs.

More than 1 billion people across the world have disabilities. Yet only 1 in 10 have access to the tools they need to fully participate in society. It is a challenge that every organization has a responsibility to help solve.

Accessible technology can help bridge the gap, providing people everywhere with the tools they need to thrive. Nowhere is that more important than in schools and classrooms, where every student should have access to the resources and support they need to fully engage in learning.

Our commitment to digital inclusivity in education extends through all aspects of the solutions we offer, from product design to customer support. Our goal? To enable every student to fully participate in learning and life and empower every teacher to connect with each of their students, wherever they are, whatever challenges they face.

The accessibility solutions we offer have proven to enhance students’ learning experiences and environments, providing multiple ways for students to create, engage and participate. These tools are designed to help all students, regardless of ability, as outlined below.

 

Learning and speech

  • Our Immersive Reader breaks down syllables, increases spacing between lines and letters, and reduces “visual crowding” to support students with different learning styles to both read aloud and listen to text. It’s a free tool that’s built into Word, OneNote, Outlook, Office Lens, Microsoft Teams, Forms, Flipgrid, Minecraft Education Edition and the Edge browser.

 

  • Other integrated tools like Read Aloud support students with visual impairments by narrating web pages, news, documents, eBooks or your own custom contents. While Presenter Coach can help students prepare for presentations by evaluating pace, pitch and language used, helping to build confidence and improve students’ presentation style.

 

 

  • Teachers can keep track of reading fluency by identifying accuracy rate and trouble words using Reading Progress with Insights. This tool helps students build confidence and reading fluency through personalized reading experiences built into Assignments in Microsoft Teams.

 

  • Additionally, students can develop critical literacy skills using the reading practice tool, Reading Coach. The new offering, which complements other tools such as Reading Progress and Immersive Reader, automatically generates individualized exercises based on each student’s specific needs and provides guidance on the likes of pronunciation and syllabification.

 

Vision, hearing and mobility

    • The built-in screen reader Narrator provides simplified navigation and audio descriptions so students can easily interact with everything on their screen with their keyboard or Braille device.
    • And for students with limited mobility, Dictate enables them to use their computer microphone to dictate presentations or documents.
    • We also provide captions on Microsoft Teams for students who are hard of hearing, have dyslexia, or need support focusing. Teams can detect what’s said in a class session or meeting and present real-time captions with speaker attribution.

 

Neurodiversity and cognitive

  • Microsoft To Do is a list, task and reminder app that can help students get organized and manage their school work and activities from a smartphone, tablet or computer.
  • For students who need support focusing, Reading view removes distracting ads and excess information to reduce cognitive load while using the Edge browser, so every student can stay on-topic.Screenshot of a sample of writing in Microsoft Word in the reading view layout

 

Mental health

  • We’ve made it easier to check on your students’ social-emotional wellbeing with tools within Microsoft Teams. Reflect helps students recognize and navigate their emotions by providing regular opportunities to share and be heard, broadening learners’ emotional vocabulary and deepening empathy for their peers. And there’s support for teachers too with Insights, which provides valuable feedback to help educators build a healthy classroom community.

 

  • Teachers can encourage everyone to learn and share their thoughts using Flipgrid. A safe video expression tool, Flipgrid encourages students to informally share details of their successes, interests and weekends – especially good for quieter and shier students.

 

All learners

  • For students who aren’t learning in their native language, the Translator app, PowerPoint’s Presentation Translator and Teams can be set to translate content into their preferred language.

  • Regardless of the challenges that students may face,The Ease of Access Center in Windows allows everyone to personalize their computer to best support their needs. By making it possible to customize mouse actions, trackpad options, keyboard preferences and more, every student can define a digital experience that matches the way they interact with the world.
  • Before sharing documents and spreadsheets or sending emails, teachers and students alike can run the Accessibility Checker to ensure the content is easy for people with disabilities to read and edit.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased demand for accessibility tools in education, so it’s more important than ever to empower every student with technology that facilitates personalized learning. Because when educators adopt a technology-driven approach to learning and teaching, anything is possible for students of every ability.

1 hour

Accessibility: Build the foundation for inclusive learning

Every student should have the support they need to fully engage in learning. Discover how to create a more inclusive learning environment with the Microsoft Learn Course.

4 digital tools that can help educators create a more inclusive classroom

To find out the best digital tools for an inclusive classroom from an educator’s perspective, read our article here.

Discover more related articles per industry:

Education

  • Unlock the potential of your students with Microsoft’s new Learning Accelerators

    Unlock the potential of your students with Microsoft’s new Learning Accelerators

    Personalized learning is a goal that educators everywhere have been trying to achieve for years. But the pandemic shone a light on the complexity of that challenge for teachers, who face a more diverse set of student needs than ever before.  Because delivering a truly personalized learning experience for every student has traditionally required lots […]

  • Girl studying

    Secondary school Kirchdorf: Reimagining hybrid learning with Surface and Teams

    “What we really wanted to achieve was simplicity for both our students and our educators. Through our digitalization efforts, we’ve seen that using technology to complement traditional teaching and learning is an investment for the future, not just for children, but for everyone.” Martin Schnetzer, teacher and IT admin at Mittelschule Kirchdorf, Austria, reflects on […]

Finance & Insurance

  • a large building

    Luxembourg Stock Exchange: building a transparent, agile and innovative cloud infrastructure

    “We are proud to be the first financial institution in Luxembourg to migrate its entire financial core system to the cloud.” Laurent Pulinckx, CIO at Luxembourg Stock Exchange and his team have helped their company reach a significant milestone this year. By becoming the first financial institution in Luxembourg to be approved by the regulator […]

  • Two people wearing a suit and tie smiling at the camera

    Why the bank of the future is in the cloud

    Financial services company Belfius will transfer all of its banking services to the cloud over the next seven years. This initiative is an important pillar in the company’s strategy to adapt to the changing needs of its customers – making its processes more cost-effective, safe and sustainable. This is a pioneering step for Belfius. In […]

Government

Healthcare

  • Two people working in Healthcare with a Windows device

    Medical device provider builds an Azure data estate for any future

    Danish med-tech company Coloplast makes innovative care products for people with intimate health challenges. To help maintain productive customer relationships and better understand the needs of patients, Coloplast migrated from an on-premises data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) solution to Microsoft Power BI, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and other Azure services. The migration is part […]

  • two people working in a lab

    Terumo migrates its SAP environment from ‘on-premise’ to Azure

    Terumo, a major player in the healthcare industry, has been active for nearly 100 years – and operating from Belgium for 50. The global company is a leading provider of medical devices, from hypodermic needles and stents, to life-saving heart and lung machines. Recently, the company’s EMEA headquarters fully migrated its SAP Enterprise Resource Planning […]

Manufacturing

Retail

  • Male store associate helping female customer in tech shop

    Creating great experiences for employees and the customers they serve

    Retail is experiencing ongoing labor shortages in the aftermath of the pandemic. Many people have retired early, found new jobs, or have simply decided to leave the labor market. As competition for skilled and experienced staff has become fiercer, attracting talent and retaining staff is crucial for survival and success.  While increasing wages and benefits […]

  • A woman wearing HoloLens

    Natuzzi: A new way of seeing your home with HoloLens

    In retail, the gift of the sales rep has always been to conjure up a vision for the potential buyer. Transport them to another world, surround them with artefacts – imagined or otherwise – that complete a picture in which the customer can envisage themselves. Because when we buy, we buy into something. The object […]

Discover more related articles per dossier:

Customer Stories

  • Two people working together

    Making Every Day Better with Microsoft Teams

    Finland’s second-largest public sector employer, HUS Helsinki University Hospital, deployed Microsoft Teams extensively in its organization of 27,000 employees. Microsoft Teams provides HUS with a foundation for customer-oriented digital transformation, which acts as a part of its vision to be a trendsetter in healthcare. The deployed Microsoft services offer an easy-to-use solution for remote appointments […]

Digital Transformation

Security & Privacy

Tips

  • Group of two female and one male office workers brainstorming in informal office setting. Both women are using laptops while the man is writing. Large screen shown in background.

    2019 Modern Selling Trends in 5 webinars

    The relationship between buyers and sellers grows more complicated each day. Every potential partnership requires finding the right buyer, fully understanding their business, tracking progress through the buying cycle, and engaging them with the right content—when and how they want it. These shifting dynamics underscore the artistry of modern selling. When the time is right, […]