Read&Write is a commercial flexible floating toolbar containing features to make reading and writing easier. It can read out text from almost any program such as:
- Adobe Reader,
- Microsoft Word,
- internet browsers.
Features
- Play, Stop, Pause, Forward and Back reading buttons
- Speak words on hover
- Synchronised colour highlighting and text-to-speech
- Save text to audio - Mp3 and Wav
- Spelling and homophone corrections
- Pronunciation Tutor
- Optical Character Recognition (scanned text)
- Screenshot - converts Flash and images to readable text
- Talking calculator
- Speak as I type - reads aloud typed characters, words and sentences
- Screen reading - reads aloud menus and other desktop items
How do I use Read&Write?
- Click on the sentence or paragraph where you want to read from.
- Click on the 'Play' button to start.
- Click on the 'Stop' button to stop.
(To read internet pages, ensure 'Read the web' is checked).
Choose to read by word, sentence or paragraph
- Click on the arrow next to the Play button.
- Choose Read by word, sentence or paragraph.
Changing the voice
If you have your own voices installed on your PC then they can be changed via the Speech Option....
- Click on the arrow next to the Play button.
- Select 'Speech Options...'.
- Under the 'Select a voice' menu choose the voice required.
You can download free high quality Scottish voices which are available freely for the Scottish public sector.
Reading a PDF
To read PDF documents with Read&Write you need to use the 'PDFaloud toolbar' that is added to Adobe Reader (or Pro) when you install Read&Write.
To do this:
- Open your PDF file with Adobe Reader (or Pro).
- From the 'Tools' tab (right hand side) click on the 'PDFaloud toolbar' tab.
You now have all of the controls required to have your document read back to you.
Adobe Reader DC has its 'Tools' menu in the top left of the program.
Can't see the PDFaloud toolbar?
When Read&Write is installed, it places a PDFaloud plugin under the default PDF viewer. Now if you have two PDF programs installed, i.e. Adobe Reader and Adobe Pro, then it will only have placed it into one of these. You'll need to copy the plugin into the other.
In this example we'll copy the plugin from Adobe Pro to Adobe Reader:
- Navigate to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 11.0\Acrobat\plug_ins\
- Copy the 'Texthelp' folder by right clicking on it and selecting 'copy'
- Navigate to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 11.0\Acrobat\Reader\plug_ins\
- Paste it into the folder by right clicking and selecting 'paste'.
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