Free text to speech screen readers
We are in a pretty cool technological time where screen readers exist that can read aloud text on a computer screen. They are mainly used to help the visually impaired surf the web and access documents that the rest of can find. There are plenty of expensive screen readers, but this page will only list the ones that are free. Make sure you pay attention to the supported operating systems, because the screen readers listed here work for either Windows or Linux, but not both.
Free Screen Readers: Text to Voice Utilities
NVDA – NonVisual Desktop Access (Windows only)
NVDA is a free and open source screen reader, licensed under the GNU General Public License. It supports web browsing with Internet Explorer and Firefox, Microsoft Office documents, Outlook Express, Microsoft Excel, using command line programs in DOS, and general computer functions like Windows Explorer, Control Panel, and other general Windows tasks. It supports a whole bunch of languages. It uses the speech synthesizer engines that come with Windows XP and Vista, but you may prefer to use the free eSpeak speech synthesizer, which most feel is a better version.
Thunder Speech Reader - (Windows only)
Thunder is a free Windows XP and Vista program that contains a text browser in order to browse the Internet. It includes an Internet radio software which supports RSS news feeds and podcasting.
Orca (Linux)
Orca uses a combination of speech synthesis, Braille and visual magnification to provide visual assistance. It is a Linux program and part of the GNOME platform. It works with applications that support the assistive technology service provider (AT-SPI).
Emacspeak – The Complete Audio Desktop (Linux)
Emacspeak is a free Linux text to speech assistance program. They claim that they not only convert the text to speech, but also try to make sense of the data they are given. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but it seems like a really neat feature.
