The Sensory Markers app icon — a red flag on a pole.

Sensory Markers is a small companion app that puts transparent draggable icons on your screen. The icons sit on top of whatever you’re looking at — you grab them with the mouse and place them where they’re needed. They’re a way to point at something on screen: a section you want to come back to, a phrase a learner should focus on, or a window you want to keep an eye on among many.

Sensory Markers is particularly useful on large displays or multi-monitor setups, where it’s easy to lose track of where you were on screen.

Full Sensory Markers help

What Sensory Markers does

Sensory Markers draws transparent icons on top of the screen. The icons don’t change anything underneath — they just sit there, visible above all your applications. You can drag them anywhere, change which icon is shown, add more, or remove them. Common uses include:

  • Marking a place on screen to come back to
  • Pointing at a passage you want a learner to focus on
  • Keeping your attention on the right window among many
  • Indicating a position on a large or multi-monitor display

How to launch Sensory Markers

Type Markers into the Windows Search box and select the Sensory Markers app from the results. On launch, the default marker appears on screen ready to be dragged into position.

Marker styles

Sensory Markers ships with a range of icon styles in different colours and shapes:

A range of Sensory Markers icons: a numbered red square (1), a blue square with a white arrow, a cyan capital T, a black nested square outline, a blue L-shape, a green square with a black asterisk, a green flag on a pole, a blue horizontal line, a red horizontal line with a dot, a teal horizontal line with a dot, and a red flag on a pole.
A sample of the marker styles included with Sensory Markers — numbered squares, directional arrows, letter shapes, frames, asterisks, flags, and lines.

You can also add your own marker styles if none of the built-in ones fit. New markers can be any image you supply.

The Markers toolbar

When Sensory Markers is open, a small toolbar gives you the current set of available markers plus controls for adding new styles, loading saved sets, and closing the app.

The Sensory Markers toolbar — a vertical strip showing eleven marker styles down the left side (asterisk, arrow, numbered square, T-shape, square outline, L-shape, flag variants, line, and arrow-line variants), with three buttons at the bottom: New, Load, and Close.
The Sensory Markers toolbar — pick a marker style from the strip, then drag it onto the screen. The lower buttons add custom markers (New), open a saved marker set (Load), and close the app (Close).

Adding, changing or removing markers

Once a marker is on screen:

  • Drag it with the mouse to move it
  • Right-click it to change the marker style, add more markers, or remove it
  • Use Close on the toolbar to remove all markers and close the app

Sensory Markers with Readable

Sensory Markers and the main Sensory Readable application work alongside each other without interfering. Common uses:

  • Place a marker next to a passage you want Readable to come back to later
  • Point a learner at the next paragraph to be read aloud
  • On a multi-monitor setup, mark which monitor’s window currently has Readable’s attention