A BASINGSTOKE housing association has teamed up with a software development company to make their website more accessible.

Sentinel Housing Association has teamed up with BrowseAloud, a leader in assistive technology which develops innovative software which supports people with dyslexia and literacy difficulties to help them learn to read, write, study and communicate.

Around 20 per cent of the UK population (10.8million people) are disabled, with 2million of those having a significant visual impairment.

The BrowseAloud software reads website text out loud and gives visually impaired people the tools they need to read more clearly - transforming their online reading experience.

Ten per cent of people in the UK have dyslexia to some degree and up to four per cent of them (over 2million people) are severely dyslexic.

BrowseAloud’s features can improve their online experience by blocking distractions on the screen by masking the unnecessary clutter and leaving a clear letterbox reading window to help them focus on the section they’re most interested in.

The simplifier feature removes clutter from the screen, cutting out unimportant text, so web pages are displayed in a more user-friendly layout.

Kim Dugan, Sentinel’s communications manager, said: “We want to make the information on our website accessible to as many people as possible.

“In the last 12 months, five million disabled people in the UK experienced difficulties accessing goods and services. So we’ve installed BrowseAloud on our website to help make it easier, for people with visual impairments, to use.”

To find out more about using BrowseAloud on Sentinel’s website go to www.sentinelha.org.uk/listen.