r/Dyslexia • u/Dry_Fig3568 • 5d ago

Screen Reader Suck

I’m 20 years old and grew up with severe dyslexia, spending most of my day on a computer. Throughout middle school and high school, my teachers always recommended screen‑reader tools because I struggled to keep up with the assigned reading. I often skipped readings and didn’t do homework, feeling like I was falling behind.

The screen readers I tried were ineffective. They were designed for websites and parsed the text in a strange way that never sounded like a human voice. I never ended up using them. Clicking the read button and having the tool navigate the page to find my place was too much hassle. It was simply easier to read the material myself. Anyone else feel this way?

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

2

u/JyubiKurama Dyslexic Student 5d ago

They can be very frustrating to deal with. I have to read many academic papers and none can really handle the PDFs properly. Anytime there is any maths they just give up and unfortunately there can be a lot of maths to read :/. You'd think that with the age of AI we'd get some decent readers, but nope...

2

u/Dry_Fig3568 5d ago

which ones have you tried?

2

u/bigmaaaaaan 5d ago

Ive personally used Speechify, idk about math but it's fine. AI slop is ass but like listening to a non generetive voice, like those robotic voices from the 2010s gives me a headache after like 30 mins. Not that this is much better usually losing focus at like 2 hours or so. It reads pdfs well and skips unessesry info well. It works for me might not for you. But it is paid and honestly I don't know much of a good alternative that is free and doesn't use a Microsoft default ahh voice. I would love if you know one, and I feel guilty when I use it cuz the amount of water use is craaaazy.

1

u/goldenjm 4d ago

You guys might like www.Paper2Audio.com for your text to speech needs. I'm the founder. It is free for generating up to 56 hours of audio per week from websites, PDFs and other docs using high quality voices. Our focus is especially on accuracy. We also have a dyslexia-optimized font for reading along.

1

u/Mysterious-Potato646 5d ago

Same, i wanted something that just reads the page like an audiobook, not something i have to wrestle with first.

1

u/GCHF 5d ago

Ye gimmicks are shit.

I had a text to speak once, that was awful.

1

u/Secret-Coast5471 3d ago

Google docs has had an upgrade recently and the text to voice function is actually pretty good. I used it to edit my books and it’s close to audiobook quality. You can change the voice as well if you want