Quote:
Originally Posted by demingite
My mother is losing her eyesight to where even the biggest fonts on her e-reader are barely big enough. I have heard about text to speech on the Kindle. I understand that it is not available for all books, but is it available on all models? If not, which models do offer it? I can't find the information on the amazon site.
Thanks
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Couple of suggestions here:
1. Audio books, as stated above. Depending on your library, there are usually audiobooks available for checkout. Most are on CDs, there are still some on cassette tape (but these are declining as libraries decline to buy new ones), and there are also downloadable e-audio books and occasionally a "player", which looks like an mp3 player with only a single book installed on it (you check out the whole device, including earphone and spare battery).
2. If your mother is actually legally blind, then get a doctor to certify this. Then, find the "library for the blind" for your state. This will link to a national library for the blind which can check out audio books in a protected format for which there are no legal audio versions. The current player machine is digital, and uses books put onto a usb stick in a protected format. The protected format is required because the service is legally allowed to distribute these books ONLY to those who are legally blind. (My mother has been blind for years, but only recently decided to try the library for the blind, since the local library (kcls.org) has a relatively large selection of audiobooks.)
Notes: Audiobooks in public libraries are subject to what is commercially available. Many/Most mid-list authors have not had their older works made into audiobooks, and a given library frequently does not have all those which might be available. This is frustrating, and is one reason why one might seek to use a text-to-speech version instead. Then you trade the un-available audiobook for the not-yet-available ebook version.
I understand that there are free-standing software products that can convert a text file to an mp3 file using the machine voice. There are supposed to be "hints" that you can insert into the text file so that the software does a better job of reading it, and this appears to work. However, the work of adding those hints is not trivial, and wouldn't be done routinely - and I don't know what those hints would look like to a person actually reading the text file.