Has anyone used Natural Reader text to speach?

[Darqref]

I keep running into a problem for my mother, who's blind. She listens to audiobooks, but I keep getting recommendations for books that are available in ebook but not audio, either through libraries or through the National Library for the Blind.

The text to speed engine on the Amazon Fire is mostly good enough, except that Mom finds it effectively impossible to manipulate the screen to get to the book. I can set the book and hand it to her, but that makes it difficult to use when I'm not there.

I was just searching for text to speech engines (to see if anything new had come up since the last time I looked.) and Natural Reader was one of the first google entries.

Has anyone used this for complete ebooks, instead of for small docs or web pages?

Darqref

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Darqref

I keep running into a problem for my mother, who's blind. She listens to audiobooks, but I keep getting recommendations for books that are available in ebook but not audio, either through libraries or through the National Library for the Blind.

The text to speed engine on the Amazon Fire is mostly good enough, except that Mom finds it effectively impossible to manipulate the screen to get to the book. I can set the book and hand it to her, but that makes it difficult to use when I'm not there.

I was just searching for text to speech engines (to see if anything new had come up since the last time I looked.) and Natural Reader was one of the first google entries.

Has anyone used this for complete ebooks, instead of for small docs or web pages?

Darqref

What problem does your mom have manipulating the screen on the Fire? My uncle has been using a Fire for over a year with no problems, and he's blind as well.

Shari

[Darqref]

Originally Posted by shalym

What problem does your mom have manipulating the screen on the Fire? My uncle has been using a Fire for over a year with no problems, and he's blind as well.

Shari

She's never used a touch screen of any type, and just gives up. It doesn't help that the behavior is different if you have the voiceview feature enabled (you have to touch the right control to put focus on it, then double tap to activate.) She retired when her sight was going, but also to avoid needing to go through yet another computer change in her library, and never really had good computer skills.

I'm trying to find a way to make a text-to-speech implementation work the way her current books from either library work now. I put one book per flash drive on the chips and she can manipulate them into the digital player (from the Library for the Blind). Since that reads mp3 files ok, I looked for a program that would output to mp3. I was just seeing if anyone else here had used it.