Today, we are pleased to announce two new features for Office Lens—the Immersive Reader and the Frame Guide for iOS. Combined, these new updates expand our toolbox, which we first brought to OneNote and are now bringing to OneNote Online, Word for the desktop and Word Online.
Previously, you could capture an image using Office Lens and then insert the image into OneNote to take advantage of Immersive Reader. With today’s updates, the Immersive Reader is now built directly into Office Lens. We are also proud to reveal an all-new tool within Office Lens called Frame Guide, which empowers the visually impaired with cues that help them capture images in Office Lens.
Immersive Reader in Office Lens features
The Immersive Reader helps users to easily scan and read content, helping them move from the physical to digital world. Learn more about each feature below.
- Read aloud—Reads text out loud with simultaneous highlighting that improves decoding, fluency and comprehension while sustaining focus and attention.
- Font size—Allows the user to increase or decrease the size of fonts.
- Wide text spacing—Optimizes font spacing in a narrow column view to improve reading fluency for users who suffer from “visual crowding” issues.
- Back five words and forward one page—Allows the user to move backwards and forwards in the content.
- Speaking rate—Allows user to control the speed of the voice reading back the words.
Introducing Frame Guide for Office Lens
Office Lens helps users by utilizing orientation detection and column recognition to transform text on a printed page into searchable and readable content. To empower people with visual impairments to get an image of exactly what they’re trying to capture, we’re launching Frame Guide. Using Apple’s Voice Over technology, Frame Guide shows users how to capture their desired content by telling the user to move back, to the right or in other directions to get the full page in the frame. Frame Guide leverages learning from the work of the Seeing AI research project. To learn more about how to set up the new features in partnership with Apple’s Voice Over, read our support article.
Get Office Lens with Frame Guide and Immersive Reader for free in the iOS App Store and please continue providing feedback for Office Lens at our UserVoice or in the comments section below. We welcome your input to continue making Office Lens amazing!
—The Office Lens team
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