TypeIt ReadIt

TypeIt ReadIt is an excellent free application that reads out loud any text using text-to-speech technology.

Specially devised for blind and visually impaired persons, it allows the user either to type in or paste any text, select the synthetic speech of their choice, and have it read out loud at the playback speed that better fits their needs. Thus, this tool has proved to be extremely useful in a variety of situations. It can be used to check what the users write as they write it, allowing them to correct misspellings or to improve the structure of a sentence by having the text read aloud for them as many times as needed. It can also be used simply to listen to an e-book, a report, or any other document that can be saved as plain text. The audio generated is not stored anywhere, unless the user wants to – the “Save to sound” option will generate a WAV file with the whole audio version of the text.

Visual impaired users will greatly benefit by the layout of the interface. This has been designed taking into account those users with sufficient residual vision, so that all the textual messages appear in giant bold letters. The same options are available as a standard menu bar on top of the screen, which will also help blind users to move around using Jaws (or similar) in the same way they do with other Windows-based applications. The text itself - the one to be read by the TTS engine – can also be customized in both size and appearance, again a very useful feature for those who are partially blind. Together with the possibility of increasing the size of the font, users can change the colors of both the text and the background, so they can select the color combination they feel more comfortable with.

The program is not just a TTS utility – it comes with a fair amount of features and functionality that reminds of those in a simple text editor. Thus, users can spell check their texts, cut, copy and paste any amount of text, print it, etc. Probably not the most sophisticated TTS tool out there, but it is certainly an excellent option to take into account, especially when the price tag is important.