ColorVeil
ColorVeil is an app that allows you to put a colour filter over your screen. Many people find this reduces eye strain, and can help with dyslexia and visual Stress.
- Customisable colour filter over screen that tints whatever you’re looking at, from your desktop, internet browser, video player, documents, email, or programs. You can adjust the colour and opacity easily to suit your needs.
- ColorVeil can help people with Dyslexia and Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome (also known as Irlen Syndrome or visual stress). It applies a coloured tint across the screen, that can match the prescription from the optometrist.
- Eye Strain: ColorVeil can reduce screen brightness, even below its lowest available setting. This helps reduce eye strain, especially at night, and can save battery on notebooks and tablets.
- Easy On/Off: ColorVeil makes it very easy to instantly turn the color filter on and off: simply click the ColorVeil icon in the notification area. Or press a (customisable) keyboard shortcut.
- Portable and installable: Run ColorVeil on any PC without installation: just download and unpack the ZIP archive. If you want to use it across your entire workplace, you can also install and deploy it across your network using the MSI setup program.
If you need to read large amounts of text from a screen it’s a very simple fix that can make a big difference if you’re prone to visual stress or eye strain.
F.lux
F.lux is a great tool that adjusts your screen’s brightness according to the time of day and helps avoid eye-strain. Staring at a bright screen, especially at night, is hard on your eyes and it can affect your sleep too. F.lux learns where you are and where the sun is in the sky and matches your screen to your eyes.
- Adjusts the colour of your device’s display to the type of light around you – warmer at night and more like sunlight during the day.
- Working late mode: for extreme night owls, this setting removes its solar timing and gives you 14 hours of bright waking light.
- Darkroom mode: Removes 100% of blue and green light and inverts colors. Darkroom mode also preserves night vision while using a screen.
- Movie mode: Lasts 2.5 hours. Preserves colors and shadow detail for watching movies with reduced alerting light.
- Compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS devices and Android.
F.lux is a really simple way of removing glare from the screen that otherwise can leave your eyes feeling tired and bleary at the end of the day behind a computer.
Read&Write
Read&Write is a text-to-speech program (TTS) that can be used to listen back to text documents, web pages and common file types in Google Drive (including: Google Docs, PDF and ePub). This is a great tool for proofreading, where listening back to what you have written can make it easier to pick out mistakes, for example if you have missed a word. It can also support general comprehension of texts, particularly if it’s a long document. Being able to use your two senses to read and listen can help reinforce your understanding.
- Text-to-speech to hear words, passages, or whole documents read aloud
- A dual colour text highlighting system that allows you to follow along really easily
- Translator to see and hear text translated into other languages
- The basic text-to-speech feature work across Android, iPad, Windows, Mac OS, Chrome and Microsoft Edge. The premium versions unlock more tools.
It’s great to be able to listen to texts instead of having to sit down and read them. This means you can listen to them whilst you’re up and about, which makes a nice change to having to read from the screen. If you are prone to eye-strain, this is a great strategy.