Screencast Video

BeeLine Reader

This video is an example of one of the technologies featured on the Technology Tools page. BeeLine Reader makes reading from a digital screen easier. This screencast explains and demonstrates the features available in the free trial of BeeLine Reader.

A transcript is also available below the video.

Transcript

Hi everyone. Today I'm going to show you a demo of some of the features of BeeLine Reader. BeeLine Reader is a Chrome extension that makes it easier to read digital text by adding a color gradient that guides your eye along as you read.

Like I said, it's a Chrome extension so you can see that it's installed here to the right of my address bar.

Let's take a look at a website. This is just a Wikipedia article and as you can see, my BeeLine Reader is set to automatically color pages. So you can see that it has applied this blue and red gradient to the words on this website.

There are some other features of BeeLine Reader. Let's take a look at those. So first is the color. As you can see, mine is set to color blue and red. You can also choose shades of blue, darker shades of blue and red, grayscale as well. Night gray and night blues are not available on this version because this is the free trial version. If you upgrade to the pro version, those will also be available.

Some of the other things you can do with BeeLine Reader are you can change the size of text on a screen. So you can increase the font size. You can increase the space between the lines, or you can increase space between letters. For me, this text is a little small, so I'm going to increase it-make it a little bit bigger.

Some other settings here are that you can change the font to OpenDyslexic font. OpenDyslexic font is designed with heavily weighted bottom parts of letters, which indicates line and direction. Also, each letter is specifically designed to be different than other similar letters. For example, the tails on "g"s and "y"s are very different, which helps people with dyslexia more easily recognize letters.

Some of the other features under setting are enable auto color. Like I told you, mine is set to automatically color when I open a website. This bar allows you to choose how sensitive the auto color is. You can drag it to the left to make it only long-form pages or if you would like for it to color all pages, you scroll to the right. Mine is set in the middle. So it will color long-form pages such as this. But short-form pages like Twitter here are not colored.

Some more features in setting are you can set certain sites that you never want to be colored. You can also use focus mode, which is great. When you turn on focus mode, it will dim content on the screen that is unnecessary. So you can see here that it has dimmed the sidebar and the top and only left the main content visible. You can change it to completely disappear if you would like. You can also adjust the color of the fade if you would like.

Like I mentioned earlier, this is the trial or the free version of Beeline Reader. There is a pro version that you can pay for. It's about $2 a month. I use the free version quite frequently when I'm reading information digitally. It makes it easier for me to concentrate and follow along without losing my place.

So there are some of the main features of BeeLine Reader. If you would like more information, you can visit their website at www.blinereader.com. I'm also going to put a link in the description. You can also find more information about BeeLine Reader on the technology tools section of my webpage.

Thank you for your time today.