Reading Tools & Text-to-Speech

The common feature of these apps is reading aloud digital text. These applications are very helpful for people with reading difficulties and problems with understanding or following written text (e.g. dyslexia) and for people with visual impairment.

Features of text-reading apps may be very different. They may read highlighted text, read whole documents, allow converting documents into audio files and even assist in typing text. Some of them have OCR (optical character recognition) features, which can be used to scan printed materials, read them, and convert them into accessible digital documents. The OCR feature is also able to read and convert inaccessible digital content. All apps take advantage of speech synthesis (text-to-speech). Some of them are delivered with speech. Others use third-party voices, such as voices already available in the Windows and Mac operating systems.