Thursday, February 20, 2014

Screenreader is a google chrome extension (it's completely FREE) to read ebooks aloud, with single key presses to jump to next/previous sentence

Find it on the chrome web store screenreader standalone

 The idea is simple.Since reading ebooks while looking at the computer screen causes eystrain and headaches, the extension provides a very simple way to read aloud the text. You can
 jump from one sentence to another, read same sentence multiple times , jump to a particular point and read from there etc.Also importantly, using the software you can put your own pronounciations
 for words , as read "not equals" for "!="  etc. Also importanty you can specify pronounciations for unicode characters as alpha, beta etc. The program is targeted primarily at normal sighted people and not blind people.
 Infact i am using it myself to read any ebooks,tutorials etc. and give my eyes a rest(I can see quite well ). Infact using it you can avoid eye work almost completely(while reading only, of course) and avoid
 all of eye strain problems while working at computers. also you need not assume a constant pose( thus avoiding back problems etc). you can just lean your head down, since you are only listening.
 Just press a single key and you can jump to next sentence,prevois sentence, jump to sentence start, read word by word, i.e press a key once
 to read next word only etc.
Next version will have the option of holding down a specific key , for example ctrl key. This can be very useful in situations like when an application repeatedly requires a specific modifier key to be held and also helpful for certain games.