We are delighted to have new pieces of lending equipment designed to improve your computing experience available to borrow from Media Services at Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. The new equipment includes:

• Dyselxie keyboard for Mac
• Dyslexie keyboard for Windows
• Blue light blocking screen protector
• USB keyboard lamp

All Tulane students, staff, and faculty can borrow any of these items simply by showing their Splash card. The goal is to make these items available to everyone who needs them when they need them. To balance maximum availability and our limited inventory, these items may only be checked out for 1 day to use in the library. Talk to us if this doesn’t work for you! The more we know about how this equipment is used, the better we’ll be able to write meaningful and effective borrowing policies.

Wondering what these items are and why we have them?

Each item was selected after extensive conversation with our partners in the Goldman Center for Student Accessibility. These conversations helped us better understand where our student population is and how we might best support their academic success.

While this collection isn’t intended to replace personal devices, we expect this collection will supplement existing resources and personal devices as well as improve the computing experience of some who didn’t even know they could benefit from these items.

Why the library? The library is more than a source for books, articles, and other information sources; it’s also a space where people come to learn, engage with peers and materials, and eventually write their own papers and articles, websites, zines, and other forms of information dissemination. This is all part of the information cycle that the library supports from beginning to end, so it makes sense for us to develop a Creative Technology Lending Collection that enables our community to meaningfully and successfully engage in innovative scholarship and scholarly communication practices.

Dyslexie Keyboards

According to the International Dyslexia Association, a “core difficulty is with word recognition and reading fluency, spelling, and writing (https://dyslexiaida.org/dyslexia-basics/).” Dyselxie is a font developed by a Dyslexic graphic designer. The heavier base and wider letter shapes create greater visual distinction between the letters, thus reducing letter swapping, improving legibility, and reducing overall mental stress for people with Dyslexia. In collaboration with Dyslexie Font, Logitech has developed a keyboard that capitalizes on everything they have learned at Dyslexie Font by using Dyslexie on the keys and color coding consonants, vowels, numbers, and function keys.

Blue Light Blocking Screen Protector

The blue light blocking screen protectors reduce one of the known migraine triggers for many people – blue light from computer screens (see “What type of light can trigger a migraine attack”). College is also a time when people spend intense amounts of time in front of a computer, so even those who don’t suffer from chronic migraines may experience increased eyestrain and an increase in headaches (see “How blue light affects your eyes, sleep, and health”). Blue light blockers can help minimize that strain for all of us.

The blue light blocking screen protectors selected for our collection are large enough to fit the monitors at any of the computer stations in the library but lightweight enough to also work with most personal laptops.

USB Keyboard Lamp

The USB keyboard lamp can plug directly into keyboards or laptops with a USB port to shine focused light on the computer keyboard. While this type of light was designed for use by people with low vision, it could also have applications in any setting where the lights are low but a computer user still needs to see their keyboard (perhaps when roommates are sleeping or in a performance setting where someone needs to control different electronic components in a darkened performance hall).

4/11/2025