Software Screen Tinting, or Colour Overlay for Mac Users with Dyslexia

There are students at the school I work at who are dyslexic, and have the specific strand of dyslexia which doesn't deal well with black text on a white background. One way you overcome this with print is you put a coloured film over the text you're reading - and it really amazing how it improves their comprehension and their fluency (you can see an example of the overlay here).

I'm looking for a way to 'tint' the screen with software in the same manner on the mac. There is a windows solution, and a paid solution, but I'm looking for a free, cheap or built in way to achieve the same result. I've googled, and found a couple discussions but no solution.

Are any of you aware of any software or system preferences I can use to either:

• tint the whole screen a colour (ideal)

• change the background colour of windows / documents to one similar to the tint (better than nothing)

• achieve a comparable result.

If you have dyslexia and have found a workaround for this challenge I'd be really grateful for your input as well!

I thought that this would be achievable with the color setting in System Preferences but I don't think it allows the tinting sense. I might be wrong though.

Thanks for your help!

Solution 1:

I don't use it for this, but it's one of the options available in Black Light. You might also be able to create a custom color profile (System Preferences > Displays > Color > Calibrate...) in expert mode, but unless you can do it just by tweaking the color temperature or gamma then it'll probably require some expertise to adjust the color curves.

Solution 2:

I would suggest that you look at Nocturne:

It allows you to invert the screen colors and create a night mode, which is much easier on the eyes. It is also under the apache license, so open source and free to use.

Solution 3:

I know this may be a bit off-topic, but have you checked out this font for dyslexics ?

Solution 4:

I don't know if this is what you are looking for (and this is an old thread so you might have already found a solution) - I have dyslexia and find that a coloured overlay helps me read so I created a small, open source Java program to create an overlay on screen. It can be found here. Hope this helps