Laura Snow
Laura Snow is a Parent Special Education Representative in Westport, CT. She is taking courses toward certification in Assistive Technology.E-readers are not designed to read text but there are two major online libraries that have books with highlighted text and audio, and they would be available to your daughter if she has a documented language-learning disability.
Bookshare.org has 480,000 free books which can easily be uploaded to an iPad, Android, iPhone and computer. The words are highlighted as a digitized voice reads the text. The Bookshare library has current books, textbooks and newspapers. Their website is Bookshare.org.
Learning Ally is another service with a library of human-narrated books. This subscription costs $135 a year. Some of Learning Ally’s books have the text highlighted as it is being read. This is called Voicetext. Their informative website is LearningAlly.org.
Both of these services require a letter from a competent authority. This could be your family doctor, special education teacher, neurologist or learning disability specialist.
VoiceDream ($9.99) is an app that is available for the iPad/iPhone and Android. This app will read text to speech (also known as tts): pdf files, Bookshare books or classic books from the Gutenberg library. Gutenberg’s books are free to everyone.
Another resource for you to look at is the chrome extension Read&Write that can be added to your daughter’s school google account and has the ability to read online text. (She might have it already and not know it.)
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