Crossbow Education have been supplying resources for supporting dyslexic students for over 25 years, and we’ve won various awards and accolades along the way. We’ve grown from being a one-man band, when MD Bob Hext was an SEN teacher working from home in his spare (!) time to sell the card games he had designed, to being a substantial company employing 20 people with offices in the UK and the USA and distributors all over the world. But this year is different: although we’ve exhibited at Bett before (about 12 years ago, with our range of hands-on resources for SEN), this is the first time that software will be the focus of our exhibit at any event. And we won’t be coming to Bett with our software offering just one in a range of many other multisensory resources: Tint & Track will be the “main event” on our stand. There will be our reading rulers and coloured overlays as well, because they are all part of our visual stress range, but that’s it. Nothing else. Zilch. Quite scary, actually, when we normally have about 100 products on display…

Tint & Track

So what is Tint & Track, and why are we spending thousands of pounds (have you any idea what it costs to have a stand at Bett?) to show it to you?

Tint & Track is our new kid on the block. Often experienced by dyslexic people – and often confused with it – visual stress is the term used for the discomfort and distortions caused by the glare of a white background interfering with black text (it’s actually the vertical stripes that form many of the letters that cause the problem). A surprising number (as much as 25% of the population) of people are over-sensitive to a particular wavelength in the spectrum: if you filter out the wavelength that’s causing the interference, reading can become so much easier and more comfortable. Yes, really.

Crossbow designed and patented the Eye Level Reading Ruler for reducing visual stress about 10 years ago, and started producing coloured overlays and tinted exercise books soon after that, adding our Visual Stress Assessment Pack to the range in 2010. In 2014 our visual stress collection won the ERA award for the best SEN product of the year (non-ICT). Now Tint & Track brings this expertise to everyone for whom a white screen background (whether online or offline) causes difficulties: whether it’s minor discomfort (still resulting in tiredness and poor concentration) or serious text distortions that make reading extremely difficult. Incidentally, you would be surprised at how many students just cope, unseen, with these problems because they think their experience of reading is “normal”.

The great news is that anyone can benefit: Tint & Track can increase visual comfort, reduce headaches and facilitate better concentration for all computer users.

Visit Crossbow on stand G106 to find out more about visual stress and try Tint & Track for yourself.

For more information, visit Crossbow Education’s website.