Dolphin is bringing full reading accessibility to education users with blindness, low vision and dyslexia.
About Dolphin
Millions of blind, partially-sighted and dyslexic people across the globe have chosen Dolphin products for their personal and professional use. Dolphin empowers users with all degrees of sight loss, computer skill and reading ability, through their Windows software and free apps including SuperNova, Guide, EasyReader and EasyConverter. Dolphin is the only specialist software house producing accessibility solutions for individuals, organisations and those in education. Founded in 1986, this UK-owned company is now a global market leader with over 50 staff worldwide. Dolphin supports an international community of users from their Worcester HQ and offices in New Jersey, USA and Falköping, Sweden.
Challenges and Objectives
Dolphin EasyReader gives their customers access to libraries of books in EPUB or PDF formats which contain 100,000’s of titles. However, Dolphin did not have the ability to display PDF books without converting them to formats such as EPUB first. Before working with Foxit, Dolphin investigated the different options they could use, such as open source libraries, writing their own code and what their competitors do. Dolphin’s main objectives were to have full PDF opening and displaying capabilities, and an accessibility layer algorithm that ensures the PDF can be accessible for people with disabilities and other reading differences.
Why Foxit?
Dolphin did a lot of research in the build-up to choosing a PDF SDK. They evaluated the Foxit SDK and concluded that the features and modules we offer met their needs. They also determined they are easy to implement.
“Foxit’s PDF SDK was easy to implement and provides us with the additional functionality our app requires. The features provided by the SDK enable our blind, low vision and dyslexic users to experience a richer form of learning in schools and beyond.”
– Mattias Karlson, Product Manager & Lead Developer, Dolphin
Results
As a result of choosing our PDF SDK, Dolphin can now bring PDF accessibility directly to their education users without requiring a conversion tool. The added functionality that Foxit’s SDK provides allows them to enable more visually impaired learners to access PDFs through EasyReader. The success has also opened the possibility of EasyReader’s expansion into Mac and Windows platforms.