I recently wrote a small post about the lack of Text to Speech software on mobile devices that are designed specifically for individuals with learning disabilities. Things are slowly improving on Apple’s iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch products with Apps either released or about to be released from Learning Ally and Bookshare.org. These apps provide access to tens of thousands of books, magazines and classroom texts for children with learning disabilities. That’s fantastic, but what about the millions of web pages available on the internet. What about word documents, PDF files, emails, etc…

Enter Web Reader from Banzai Labs. This inexpensive App runs $2 and provides fairly useable text-to-speech reading for a variety of file types. First and foremost it can read web pages. The interface looks and acts much like a simple version of the Safari web browser found on Apple’s mobile devices. The difference is that it enables the user to touch a paragraph of text to have it read back. After tapping the text a play arrow appears (note the play arrow in the picture below). Tap the arrow and Web Reader starts reading. It will read until the Pause or Play button is pressed in the menu bar.

Here is a short list of Web Reader’s other features:

• Male or Female Voice reading voice
• Speed and volume adjustments for the reading voice
• Auto-read a web page as it is loaded
• Reads any text copied to the clipboard
• Highlights paragraphs as they are read (can turn this on or off)
• Start and Stop speech easily from the menu bar
• Ability to open any page from Safari in Web Reader to have it read aloud.
• Supports local reading of Word Documents, Text files and PDF’s (limited)
• Works with online books from Project Gutenberg (m.gutenberg.org)
• Works inside Google Docs

There are a few niggles with how the software reads text – it won’t read text in list items without first copying it, the play arrow can be distracting when clicking a link, local reading only works with a Drop Box account and highlighting only works at the paragraph level, but by and large this is a very useful app. I’ve included a video below to show it in action. Enjoy! (video coming soon sorry my YouTube upload is going very slowly)

Heres another video from the publisher of the App: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk0d1npGoq4