Recite Me has won the Tech for Good award at the Prolific North Tech Awards, recognising our approach to developing accessibility technology shaped by the people who use it.
From our founder’s experience of dyslexia to product development with young disabled adults, lived experience continues to influence how we help organisations remove digital barriers.
Built from personal experience
Founder and CEO Ross Linnett created Recite Me after experiencing first-hand the limitations of traditional assistive technology. Solutions were often expensive, tied to individual devices and placed responsibility on the person trying to access information.
The Recite Me Assistive Toolbar offered a different approach: cloud-based technology that organisations could add to their websites, giving visitors tools to personalise their experience. Text-to-speech, translation, reading aids and styling controls help people engage with content in ways that work for them.
Seventeen years later, that founding purpose continues to guide our work. Our technology has grown into a suite of accessibility solutions that help organisations identify, prioritise and remove barriers across websites and digital documents.
Developing with the people who use our tools
One recent example is Focus Audio, an Assistive Toolbar feature inspired by students from The Orpheus Centre, a specialist independent college for young disabled adults.
Following six work experience sessions, student feedback and user research helped shape an audio experience designed to support concentration and deeper engagement with digital content.
This collaboration reflects a wider commitment to involving users in product improvements, alongside embedding accessibility throughout development.
Our team considers accessibility from the earliest design stages, reviewing user journeys, layouts, colours, interactive elements and content against WCAG 2.2 guidelines. Features undergo peer review, manual testing with assistive technologies, and checks across browsers and devices before release.
Testing continues after launch, supported by regular client health checks and ongoing improvements.
Helping people access more opportunities
In 2025, the Recite Me Assistive Toolbar was launched more than 8 million times, helping people personalise and access over 60 million webpages. Today, Recite Me supports more than 12,500 organisations and websites globally.
Behind those figures are people looking for information, education, social connection and accessing everyday services such as looking for a job.
Recruitment provides one example. PageGroup used the Recite Me Accessibility Checker to identify and resolve more than 12,700 accessibility issues across 36 international websites, saving over 2,000 hours of manual auditing time.
Nearly 26,000 users also personalised more than 125,000 webpages through the toolbar, helping them engage with recruitment content in ways that suited their needs.
Individual feedback helps explain the difference these choices can make. As one user commented: “The option to turn the website to monochrome really helps with brain fog, migraines or fatigue associated with my disabilities.”
Keeping lived experience at the centre
As our technology evolves, collaboration with people who experience digital barriers remains central to our approach. Their feedback helps us understand where challenges arise and develop tools that respond to real needs.
Winning the Tech for Good award recognises the work of our team, clients and user community. It also reinforces the principle that started Recite Me: people’s experiences should shape the technology designed to support them.
