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Hi there,
My name is Bill Travis and I'm one of the

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accessibility advisors here at the 
Fred Smithers Centre for Student Accessibility at Saint Mary’s University.

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Today I'd like to show you a little bit about some of the assistive technology

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tools that are available to you as a student at Saint Mary's free of charge.

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You have access to Microsoft Word through your

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student e-mail,
through your Outlook subscription.

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So, what I would like to do is share my screen with you 
so we could look at that together.

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This is my login screen.
I just logged into my e-mail online.

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I went to office.com, typed in

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student e-mail address and my password, and this is my login screen.

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From here I have an app launcher that allows me to choose any of Microsoft's

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apps and use them for free.
That would be Outlook to check my e-mail,

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PowerPoint if I want to make a presentation,

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Teams if I want to go on a Teams call, or Microsoft Word if I want to create a

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document.

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So, the two features I want to show you in Microsoft Word,

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first of all are the dictation tools
and the other one will be under view the

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the immersive reader. But first,
Let’s get some text here by dictating.

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This is just an example to show you how well 
Microsoft Word can type for you now.

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This allows you to get your ideas out of your head 
before you forget what you wanted to say,

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Especially if you're a person with ADHD

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and your brain changes tapes from time to time.

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Students with learning disabilities that can affect their ability to spell a word

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as quickly as others would also benefit from this technology because it allows

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them to turn that part of their brain off and just get their ideas down.

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So that demonstrates that. But

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to take this text and have it read,
for example, if you have a reading in

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bright space,
you can copy and paste the text into a

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Word file and use this immersive reader tool to read it aloud to you.

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The immersive readers customizable in terms of the background colour,

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the text size,

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the spacing between words,
but also what I really like is this line

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focusing. Choose 5 lines, 3 lines or one line.

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I'll just show you the three line version for now. And as you're reading it,

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it's almost like a karaoke ball. It

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highlights the word that it's reading

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so you can see it and hear it at the same time.

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This is just an example to show you how well Microsoft Word can type for you now.

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This allows you to get your ideas out of your head before you forget what you

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wanted to say,
especially if you're a person with ADHD

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and your brain changes tapes from time to time.

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Students with learning disabilities that can affect their ability to spell a word
as quickly as others would also benefit from this technology because it allows

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them to turn that part of their brain off and just get their ideas down.

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As you can see,
a couple of pretty helpful tools.

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Thank you for watching this video. And if you're interested,

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do check out our other videos on assistive technology available on our website. 

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Thanks, and have a great day.