Learning Tools on Microsoft Edge
Lets first open your favorite website on the Edge browser and open an article you wish to read. Then click on the open-book icon in the address bar which is located almost at the end. This will completely change the layout and offer you the content of the website in reading friendly fashion.
Now that you are in Reading View, we can now switch on the Learning Tools. Click anywhere on the page, and you should see a partially floating toolbar. Click on Learning Tools on it. This will offer you three tabs– “Text options,” “Grammar tools,” and “Reading preferences”–all of these can be used to improve your reading experience.
Text options
Apart from Text options offered by the reading view–Text size, and theme–the text options in Learning tools offer you to increase the space between text using the Text spacing toggle switch which helps in improving reading fluency. You also have an expanded set of Page themes here where you can choose from 22 different background colors and text colors that best suits your experience.
Using wide space between text should only be used if have trouble reading text the usual way. It’s an assistive feature than anything else.
Grammar tools
Grammar tool is offered through Microsoft Immersive Reader app which is integrated with Edge. When you launch it for the first time, it will download the same app in the background. This tool offers options which can help you read words easily by breaking it into how they should be pronounced. You need to enable the Syllables toggle to enable this, and the image below shows how it looks like:
Apart from this it also offers highlighter feature which will mark words which are the noun, adjective, and verb. If you remember school days, these were also called Parts of speech. If you turn on all of them, you can use different color codes for each. If you are not using English as your primary language, it also works in other languages. You will need to install them separately.
These tools can be really helpful for those who want to learn how to use a noun, an adjective and so on.
Reading preferences
I would rather call this feature as ‘Focus Reading’. It helps you concentrate and read only a few lines at a time by zooming into those lines only and keeping rest of them in the background by dimming. You can choose to read one, two or three lines of text at a time.
Click on the Reading preferences > turn on Line focus toggle, and then select how many lines you want to read at a time. To scroll through, there is a dual nav bar at the bottom left to scroll up, and down. It is pretty impressive what they have done with the Learning Tools and Reading View. It’s very useful for kids and anyone who wants to improve their focus while reading. This is especially useful with tablets or 2-in-1 Windows devices which can be used to read ebooks, and web pages at night or for long reading. What do you think of it? Does it help to improve the reading experience? Let us know in the comments section.
