Point

Point: Online Symbol Support

Point is an online tool enabling website visitors the support of Widgit Symbols to access text-based information. Point offers a way to make online content accessible to those who may have problems reading it, without altering the appearance of the webpage.

What is Point?

Point is a new piece of augmentative software that website owners can use to assist visitors to their website. When the visitor hovers their mouse over a word, a list of symbols that illustrate the possible meanings of the word appears.

Who is Point for?

Point is most suited to emerging readers and readers who don’t have English as their first language. It can also provide people who find reading difficult with a useful prompt for understanding new or unfamiliar words.

Why should I use Point?

Point helps websites to meet or work towards the identified criteria within the Disability Discrimination Act and the resulting Code of Practice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Point only displays symbol support when and where it's required, so you don't have to make any changes to the design of your website.

How does Point work?

When a visitor hovers their mouse over a word, a request is sent to our dedicated symbolisation servers. A list of appropriate symbols is compiled and the results are displayed seamlessly to the visitor without interrupting their browsing experience.

Some Websites that use Point:

Social Services

www.grantahousing.org.uk

http://www.thecaredivision.co.uk/

http://www.dotcomunity.co.uk/

Companies

www.bridges-canada.com

http://www.sensorysoftware.com/

Schools

www.gosh.camden.sch.uk

www.downhamschool.co.uk/

Using Point

Using Point is Extremely Simple:

By hovering the mouse over a word, a small box will appear containing a symbol(s) illustrating the meaning of the word. The online visitor has total control over this symbol support and the amount of symbols they see, knowing that the support is there for any words they are having difficulty understanding.

If the online visitor feels confident in reading a web page without symbol support, they can choose to turn Point off by clicking on a small button at the top of the screen. The online text then behaves as normal, with no symbol support appearing when the online visitor hovers their mouse over a word. If the individual visits another page within the website and struggles to understand the messages within the text, Point can easily be switched back on.

On Your Website

Getting Point on your Website:

Setting your website up to use Point is very easy. It only takes a few moments to upload the client files to your server and add a link to the header of your pages. The text processing and serving of images happens on Widgit's dedicated symbolisation servers, so you can be sure that you always have full access to the latest symbols from Widgit. Using a Content Management System? Point can be inserted into a template so you don't have to be an HTML expert to add Point to new web pages.

Technical Description

Point is an easily installed and configured AJAX service that enables you to use Widgit Symbols to support the content on your website.

When a visitor to your website hovers their mouse over a word, a request is sent from your web server via a secure proxy to the Widgit symbolisation server. The symbolisation server responds with a list of symbols that match the word and they are displayed to the visitor.

Integrating Point into your website is a straightforward procedure. There are two configuration files to edit, lines to add to your page header and a handful of client files to upload. The client files can be provided as PHP or ASHX (for ASP.NET), depending on the type of server that you are running. Everything else is hosted on the Widgit symbolisation server, so there is no ongoing maintenance or storage overhead and you can be sure that you will always have access to the latest Widgit Symbols and vocabulary.

Once Point is installed, you can choose which content will be supported with symbols by simply adding a CSS class to the appropriate HTML element. You can choose the name of the CSS class in your configuration files. You can also configure the display size of symbols and exclude specific words from being symbolised at all.

System Requirements
Point requires a server running PHP 4.3.0 or ASP.NET and a modern browser such as Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 2, Opera 9, Safari 3 or Google Chrome; with JavaScript enabled.

Free Trial


Clients First Name	:
Clients Last Name	:
Company	:
Clients Email	:
Clients Phone Number	:
Street Address	:
Apt / Suite	:
City	:
Postal Code	:
Province	:
Country	:
Website / URL Address	:
Technology Used In Building Website (Ex: .net/.php/.aspx, etc..)	:
Best Estimate of Number of Pages (Fair Usage Policy)	:
Technical Contact - First Name	:
Technical Contact - Last Name	:
Technical Contact - Email	:
Technical Contact - Phone Number	:

Please enter the text in the image: