WordRead v3

WordRead v3 is a program designed to help those with poor literacy skills to have text that is displayed on the screen read out to them by the computer.

What can it read to me?

The answer is pretty much everything, though the amount of reading is controlled by the settings within the program's toolbar.

The speech settings allow you to have words read out by either hovering the mouse over the text, or using a combination of the ctrl key and mouse hover. The speed of the voice can be changed as well as the volume and having the ability to have pauses between words being read out for those who prefer staccato style speech.

Just a couple of drawbacks on the ability to read website content though. WordRead will only support Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Firefox web browsers (since web browsers are free, this is a preference issue for most).

The second drawback is a little more severe, but not a 'deal-breaker' in my opinion. Where there are links embedded within sentences on a web pages (an example would be text on the webpage 'BBC fire the TeleTubbies after drunken brawl', where the word "TeleTubbies" is also a link to a related page), WordRead will stop before the link as well as after the link, as though it saw the link as starting and finishing the sentence. Removing the restriction of stopping at the end of a sentence won't cure the problem either. This could get quite frustrating on web pages that are heavy with these embedded links.

The advanced speech options enable the program to speak letters and/or words to be spoken as they are typed, a good addition for those wishing to have an audible check on what they are typing, as they type. Word prediction isn't available in WordRead. Using Window's free onscreen keyboard (which has built in word prediction under Windows 7) would be an option, though WordRead doesn't seem to read out from this keyboard. Is this an accidental omission, or would they prefer you to use ClaroRead Plus that has its own word prediction built in? ClaroRead's prediction will work with input from the Window's onscreen keyboard - however, as you type each letter, the ClaroRead's predicted word starts with the newly typed letter ! 

Voices

If you're going to have text read out for you, you need to have a voice you can understand, and ideally a voice you like the sound of. WordRead uses RealSpeak voices, which gives you a choice of male and female voices that are of a high quality. The voices are adult sounding, but the quality box is definitely ticked.

To prevent you hearing too much information in one go, there is an option to stop reading at the end of a sentence. This is especially important for those who take time to comprehend what they have just heard, though since this is an option, the program can carry on reading to the end of the page or document if you wish.

A highlight of WordRead

WordRead works slightly differently with text when the text is editable, such as in word processing and email software. The text that has been written on the page itself will not be read out by hovering your mouse over it. To have the text read out, you would either switch on read character/word/sentence as mentioned previously, or by selecting the text with the mouse.

Once the text is selected, you can press the Play button on WordRead's toolbar to have the selected text read out to you. Now comes the neat addition, you can also have the text highlighted as the words are read out, having WordRead either highlight the background of the text and/or the text itself. You can even choose the highlighting colour which can be of benefit if there are any dyslexic or visual impairment considerations involved.

Saving something for later

Another nice touch in WordRead is the ability to save text as an audio file. By selecting text with the mouse, and then selecting the 'Save to audio file' button, it will allow you to save the selected text as a sound file that can be read back whenever you want. You will need to play this through a media player such as Window's free Media Player (found on every computer).

One drawback here is that it doesn't seem to work when you select text from within a web browser, perhaps because it is uneditable text. To get round this problem, first highlight and copy the chosen words and paste them into a text document. Then highlight them in the text document and save to an audio file - seemples !

Conclusion

WordRead is quite a nifty, unobtrusive program that does what it says, and does it well. There are a few gripes such as the ones mentioned above. Another is the fact that, although the program toolbar does reposition itself out of the way in relation to the active program, you aren't able to drag the bar to reposition it yourself.

Taking into account the cost of assistive technology software, WordRead is relatively inexpensive at just over £70 (incl. VAT).