News

NHS Education for Scotland (NES) helps to provide better patient care by designing, commissioning, quality assuring and, where appropriate, providing education, training and lifelong learning for the NHS workforce in Scotland.

As part of their ongoing commitment to reducing accessibility barriers, NES have enabled an innovative new product on their website called BrowseAloud.

BrowseAloud helps people with literacy problems, learning difficulties, dyslexia, mild visual impairments or for who speak English as a second language by reading website content aloud, highlighting each word as it is spoken.

BrowseAloud is free for people to use; simply click the BrowseAloud logo on the homepage www.nes.scot.nhs.uk to download the product free of charge.

Equality and Diversity Advisor for NES, Kristi Long comments about the recent adoption of BrowseAloud, "NES is committed to making our communications and our educational solutions accessible. We see the addition of BrowseAloud to our websites as an important tool to help us deliver on this commitment. We chose BrowseAloud because it offers a user-friendly way to enhance the accessibility of our websites for users with dyslexia, visual impairments or other communication support needs at no cost to the user."

BrowseAloud is a text-to-speech solution that reads all accessible website content aloud in a high quality human sounding voice which can be altered to suit the individual's specific needs. As text is read aloud, words are highlighted; a useful tool which aids literacy and comprehension.

BrowseAloud features include a Translation tool; allowing for single word translations in English, French, Spanish, German or Italian, and a Screen Masking facility which allows users to mask information on the screen to help with concentration.

For further information about BrowseAloud visit www.browsealoud.com or email d.thomson@browsealoud.com. Alternatively, call 028 9442 8105 to talk to a member of the BrowseAloud team.