A simple and portable accessibility tool that works!

I hate reading on a monitor. Years ago, when I doing my MSc I bought a kindle keyboard. But this now 12 years and 2 batteries later, it does not work very well. I cannot send converted PDFs to it any more or even connect to my PC. As I am currently reading a lot, I wanted a way to make reading on screen that little bit easier. For a start, I am not dyslexic or have any other learning or reading need, but I want to find something to help with just making it easier. I have been using AI to look for a way to put grid lines on my monitor as an overlay to help with PDFs. I could not find something that wasn’t expensive or did what I wanted it to. So I tried MyStudyBar.

MyStudyBar is a set of tools from CALL Scotland, more than I need. I already use my browser to read to me, and NotebookLLM to summarise large amounts of information in an interactive PodCast. But I wanted a ruler, this gave me more and for free. CALL (Communication, Access, Literacy and Learning) Scotland sets out to…

help children and young people across Scotland to overcome disability and barriers to learning created by their environment, and to fulfil their potential.

and takes part in R&D and offers a service unit, and appears to be situated within the University of Edinburgh, but I cannot confirm that reading their website.

MyStudyBar is a portable mini-application, so you can run it from a USB if you cannot download it onto an organisations computer, that has accessibility tools built in. The ones I have been using are the T-Bar and the Vu-Bar. Both help to focus when you are reading, and unlike some are not browser based so can be used with any application, for me it was Adobe and PDF research articles (although, I don’t know why we still build these in print formats…).

I tried out the ssOverlay – a screen tint – but found it to be too strong and I could not get it low enough for me. It also only worked on two of my three screens (annoyingly, screen 3 is my portrait screen for reading). It would overlay on the desktop, but not over the PDF. Very strange, but not something I need or would use. I had a go with the dictation, and it relies on an old Windows application and Word does this much better now so this is something I would not use. You can change the default fonts and text within your Windows set up, which might be useful for some. There are also some mindmap, planning and sticky notes tools, but I use MSFT to do all this already so will probably never click those again. If you copy some text, you can use a reader (AT-Bar) but there are so many tools now that are built into applications with a much more human voice and more settings. I think mainly because this application is built on an older windows build with only 2 very computer-esque voices.

Overall, this is simple tool and does a lot more than what I wanted. It does what I wanted very well, but the extras I think you can find much better options built into applications now if you use the MSFT universe of programs.