Personalizing the Lesson Player for Your Student
Every lesson has a gear icon in the top-right corner of the lesson card. It opens a small toolbar of reading accommodations that apply just to that lesson session, separate from the account-level Accommodations tab covered in Touring Your Student's Dashboard. Two weeks in is a good time to check whether these are actually working for your student, not just functionally, but comfortably.
On this page
The settings icon
Tap the gear icon inside a lesson (not the account-level gear in the site's top navigation) to open the toolbar. It has four groups of controls:
- Aa toggles a dyslexia-friendly font.
- S / M / L / XL changes text size.
- Five color swatches apply a tinted reading overlay, and the circle with a line through it turns any overlay off.
- Full / Pages switches between a single continuous scroll and the paginated card view.
Every setting here applies for that lesson session only. If a change helps, your student (or you) will need to turn it back on next time, unless it becomes part of your regular routine.
Dyslexia-friendly font and text size
The Aa toggle switches to a typeface designed to reduce letter confusion (b/d, p/q) and improve line tracking. Combine it with a larger text size, L or XL, for a student who tires easily when reading dense text. Both can be turned on together, as shown above.
Color overlays
A tinted overlay is a common accommodation for visual stress or tracking difficulty: some readers find that a page of plain white background causes glare or makes text seem to shift. Try each of the five colors, since the right one is different for every student, and there's no way to predict it ahead of time. If none of them help, the circle-with-a-line-through-it swatch turns any overlay back off.
Full view vs. Pages view
Pages is the default: a paginated card a student clicks through one screen at a time. Full removes that and lets them scroll continuously through the whole passage instead. Some students focus better with one small chunk at a time; others find clicking through pages more disruptive than a single scroll. There's no wrong answer, and it's worth letting your student try both.
Listen to this lesson
The owl icon in the control bar below the passage, separate from the gear-icon toolbar, is a play button labeled Listen to this lesson. Clicking it reads the current page aloud; while playing, the icon becomes a pause button and a 1x speed indicator appears next to it. This is a per-lesson control. If you'd rather every lesson be read aloud automatically by default, that's a separate, account-level setting: the Read Lessons Aloud toggle on the student's Accommodations tab.
Sound-out words
Certain words in the passage appear as a highlighted chip with a small link icon. Clicking one has the app sound the word out for the student, breaking it into its component sounds rather than just reading it aloud whole. This isn't a toggle you turn on; it shows up automatically on words that match the specific skill a lesson is teaching.
Deciding what to try
Most families never open the settings icon at all, since none of this is required to use a lesson. But if your student seems to be fighting the page itself rather than the material, a small change here is often the fix:
- Losing their place or skipping lines: try Full view, or a larger text size.
- Saying letters or small words feel like they "swim" on the page: try the dyslexia-friendly font, or a color overlay.
- Reluctant to read at all, but engaged when things are read aloud: try Listen to this lesson, or the account-level Read Lessons Aloud accommodation for every lesson going forward.
None of these settings are diagnoses, and none of them are permanent. They're worth revisiting any time a lesson feels harder than it should.