LISTEN2READ: Text-to-Speech Tools for Accessibility and Enrichment

For all its power, the printed word can be a barrier -- sometimes a large one -- for lots and lots of people. With ever more weight being put on reading and writing performance in higher ed, the pressure on people with language challenges has never been greater.

But even aside from limited vision or dyslexia and other language-specific issues, many of us come to the task of reading with cognitive traits that make for moments more difficult than people face.

For lots of people, in other words, the spoken word just sticks better. And for pretty much everyone, having the same text delivered by print and through our ears is bound to increase our capacity to understand and remember over print-only consumption.

Cornerstone has resources for any student who wants more than ink on a page or pixels on a screen.

We have Kurzweil 3000 running in the Tech Lab, which can take in text that's already in electronic form or, with a handy scanner, turn just about anything electronic. It has some really sophisticated character recognition and image cleanup capabilities that can take a lot of manual labor out of turning letters into bits.

Kurzweil is very expensive, about $1000, and only runs on one dedicated PC in the Lab.

But it also has the ability to output audio not just live to the person sitting in front of it but as high-quality MP3 files, which one can then save onto a portable media player such as the ubiquitous iPod.

Freeware Alternatives

The ability to read from formats like PDF or Word is pretty much limited to expensive desktop applications like Kurzweil. But there are some free applications out there that each offer a piece of Kurzweil's capability.

Adobe Reader 9, the ubiquitous PDF reader, has a live text-to-speech reader that serves well if you're sitting in front of a computer. The voice and pronunciation qualities have been getting better and better -- it's a perfect tool for the multitasker who wants to listen to a printed text while doing the laundry, say.

Text2Speech is a freeware application available via SourceForge that can take raw text -- in other words, anything you can select, copy, and paste -- and read live or export a WAV file. The sound and pronunciation are a bit rough.

VozMe is a web-based text-to-speech product if you need something truly on the go. It does what Text2Speech does minus the desktop application. Just paste text into the blank at vozme.com, and the page will spit out an MP3 file -- though with much lower quality than Kurzweil, Adobe, or even Text2Speech.

Come by the Cornerstone Tech Lab to try out any of these tools. Dr. Getty or any of the Tech Lab Assistants would be happy to give you the cook's tour.