My daughter is a college freshman and has a reading disability. She learns best by listening to audio books on CD read by real people, not computer voices. However, she has had difficulty finding audio books for many of her textbooks. Are there software programs or devices that might help her with these texts? She might also benefit from having the text appear on her screen as it is read to her, but I’m not sure what would work best for her.
With the strong public interest in books in MP3 format, portable reading devices and the availability of simple to use scanners, more and more books are becoming available in a variety of formats. While you are correct in that many of the audio books available through bookstores and others are not college textbooks, there are options for finding audio versions of academic texts.
One of the first places for your daughter to check is Learning Ally. Learning Ally has a wide variety of textbooks available freely accessible by anyone with a documented disability. She will more than likely be able to find some of her required textbooks there.
Additionally, many textbook publishers are making digital versions of their textbooks available. It would be worthwhile for your daughter to check with publishers to see whether any of her required readings are available in another format. If your daughter can get her texts as PDFs, she can use the built in text-to-speech feature in Adobe Reader. Adobe’s Read Out Loud is a scaled-down text-to-speech application, so it may not have every feature your daughter needs. However, it is freely available and would be a good tool to use with digital texts.
Both Apple and Microsoft computers also have simple text-to-speech capabilities built into their operating systems. Again, these built-in programs are very basic and so they may not meet all of your daughter’s needs. They are also generally designed for the blind or those with low vision; however you can use them to read selected text aloud rather than reading the entire screen.
Because you aren’t sure whether a text-to-speech program might be beneficial for your daughter, one of these free programs might be a good place to start. If she tries using a simple speech-to-text program and finds it helpful, she can investigate purchasing a more full-featured program. I wouldn’t advise starting off purchasing a piece of software until you and your daughter are sure it will help her.
She might also try talking to the Office of Disability Services at her university. They may have text-to-speech software available on some university computers. This could allow your daughter to try out a program or two before making a purchase. You can also search for and compare programs with text-to-speech capabilities on the Tech Matrix.
Topic
Reading & Dyslexia