![]() While Chrome’s extensions work within its browser, Chrome’s apps are independent apps that run in their own windows or tabs in Google’s browser. When using this tool, students also have the ability to create “customized annotation legends and add bookmarks to important pages.” Once the website is annotated, the student can save it for later use. In sum, it is a popup toolbar which can be used on any website and contains: multicolored highlights, sticky notes, and the ability to underline and alter the color of the website’s text. Scrible is a Chrome extension offering a full set of annotation tools, “which can help students identify key information and take notes during online research.” Though this is a basic text-to-speech tool, students can still select different speaking rates and a variety of voices. To activate it, students simply select the words they want read aloud, then either click on the toolbar icon or use the keyboard shortcut. SpeakIt! is a basic text-to-speech Google Chrome extension. “The advantage that Ginger has over the spell-checker in Google Docs is that it will look at words in the context of entire sentences–and thus identify more errors, such as homonym confusion.” The Ginger extension also features a rephrasing tool which will make suggestions for stronger sentences. Ginger is a Chrome extension that proofreads text once it’s placed in Ginger’s popup window. Users can even combine a text-to-speech extension with Readability to transform it into a helpful tool for those with dyslexia and attention issues. The text can also be saved to an account and even sent to a Kindle e-reader to read later. Once these items are removed, the text is customizable (font, size, etc.) to make it easier for each student to read. Readability is a Google Chrome extension that decreases distractibility by removing images and advertisements. “ They can perform several functions that are helpful to dyslexic students, including text-to-speech, dictation, word prediction, and text-leveling.” Each extension can be downloaded directly from the Chrome Web Store. Google Chrome extensions are resources that can be added to the Chrome browser. Google Chrome is a great, free resource as it offers many accessibility features and extensions to benefit students with or without disabilities! 7 Google Chrome extensions and apps for learning disabilities: Google Chrome Extensions: word processing, reading, etc.) tends to be easier on a laptop or desktop computer. In several posts, I’ve written about different smartphone and tablet apps that may benefit these students. Several students with learning disabilities are able to complete their work along with their peers, the only difference is they may need tools to help them complete certain tasks. In all the tests, I also included Chrome and Firefox so that the tested browsers could be compared to the two major browsers available for Linux.Written by Laura Medcalf on November 4th, 2015 November 4th, 2015. (Note: Two of the browsers, Dillo and Lynx, could not be tested with any of the above applications because neither supports JavaScript.)įinally, in order to test memory usage, I used the pmap command in Linux and reported the results after I opened one tab, opened nine more tabs (for a total of ten), closed five of the tabs and then closed four more tabs (leaving one left open). To measure browser speed, I used the Speed-Battle test from U-Double-U. ![]() In addition, I used two benchmarking applications: the Acid3 test, which checks a browser's compliance with JavaScript, Document Object Module (DOM) and other standards and the HTML5 test to check the browser's compliance with the draft HTML5 specification. I used each browser for at least 4 to 5 hours, during which time I researched the browser I was using on the Web and also visited Google, Gmail, Facebook and YouTube. How I testedįor this review, I tested the five browsers on a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB RAM using Ubuntu 13.04. Some of them strip away too much functionality for my taste, but one strikes just the right balance and has now become my daily go-to browser. Each browser has its strengths and weaknesses, I've discovered.
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