Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

Effective text-to-speech options have proliferated in recent years. A couple of days ago, Richard Byrne pointed us to yet another one that is worth knowing about. The developers indicate that their initial purpose was, “to assist students with learning disabilities with their studies, by means of auditory learning and auditory processing.” In keeping with the principles of UDL, the developers have discovered that the demand for their text-to-speech service extends way beyond the world of students with learning disabilities.

ReadTheWords.com is a free and extremely versatile online text-to-speech service which allows you to enter text with the keyboard, to copy and paste it, or to upload text files in a variety of formats from your computer or from other websites.

Speech is generated quickly, and you then have a choice of 15 high quality voices whose reading rate can be varied easily. You can listen online, download an mp3 file for use offline, or embed your speech file elsewhere online. It was very straightforward to embed the audio player from ReadTheWords.com on a wiki page. Unfortunately, it isn’t so straightforward on edublogs, and I haven’t been able to embed it here on my own blog.

ReadTheWords.com offers text-to-speech in French and Spanish as well as in English.