I am a member of staff who has dyslexia. As part of my job I have a great deal of reading to do, in particular long word documents which I find really difficult to focus on. Do you have any hints and tips to make them more readable for me?

You could autosummarise any long documents -

Did you know that you can actually summarise your long word documents to get a synopsis of the written information? It’s pretty simple to do. Basically you would just go to the tool bar, click on tools and find AutoSummarise.

You then have the choice of how you would like to view that summarized document. You can also decide how long you want that summary to be – 10% of the original document, 25% etc.

Why would you do that?

Part of the reason is that maybe 100% may be too many words for someone to assimilate when reading or making sense of a document and simply summarising a long document for some would be beneficial in getting to grips of the sense of the document before reading in more depth.

Alternatively, you could turn the text into audio -

Read The Words and Spoken Text are two free web based solutions which would allow you to convert traditional text into audio.

Read the Words can convert Word, PDF, PowerPoint, plain text files, web pages, and emails to spoken audio which you can then listen too online or transfer to your iPod.

Using these resources it is easy to provide alternative formats for the text content you place on your web site. Using SpokenText or Read the Words this process is painless you just upload all of your content to their site. Text will be converted and then made available to download to your site