Text-to-speech technology converts text on a screen and reads it out loud to you. This can be helpful to you in a few ways:
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It can improve your literacy skills, including word recognition, definitions, vocabulary, and pronunciation.
- It's great for proofreading papers! Listening to your written work being read out loud helps you catch grammatical and spelling mistakes.
- It's great for reading research articles! Use text-to-speech to read articles out loud to you. Research shows that listening to information can help with comprehension and recall.
Text-to-speech can be used with:
- PDFs
- Microsoft Word documents
- Emails
- Web pages
- and more!
If you're a student with accommodation for alternate format textbooks, book an appointment with the Learning Curve.
TextHelp Read & Write
Read & Write is an example of both a text-to-speech and a speech-to-text tool. As a student or staff member, it's available to you for free!
TextHelp Read & Write has many useful tools for reading and writing, including:
- Highlighting what's being read out loud while it's being read
- Changing the font size on documents that you want read out loud
- Changing the sound of the reading voice, including pitch, volume, and the length of pause between words
- Changing word pronunciation with the "say like" function
- Customizing how the text looks when it's read out loud - you can have it read by word, sentence, text box, or within the document itself
To download a copy of the software to a college computer, follow the directions linked below.
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TextHelp Read & Write for Google Chrome
The Read & Write extension is also available for other browsers and functions the same way.
