Immersive Reader
Microsoft’s Immersive Reader is an excellent free text to speech tool, built into Word, OneNote, Outlook, Office Lens, Microsoft Teams, Reading Progress, Forms, Flipgrid, Minecraft Education Edition and the Edge browser.
Instructions here for using it on different devices and online.
Immersive Reader in the Edge Browser is great for reading PDFs aloud.
It is also included as a reader in Blackboard Ally.
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Speech on Your Mobile Device
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Text to Speech on iPhone & iPad
There are two ways of getting your iPhone or iPad to read text aloud.
- Speak Aloud – Simply select text and a speak button will appear.
- Speak Selection – Swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen to hear the content on the screen.
To enable these –
- Go to Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content.
- Adjust any of the following:
- Speak Selection: To hear text you selected, tap the Speak button.
- Speak Screen: To hear the entire screen, swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen.
- Speech Controller: Show the controller for quick access to Speak Screen and Speak on Touch.
- Highlight Content: iPhone can highlight words, sentences, or both as they’re spoken. You can change the highlight color and style.
- Typing Feedback: You can configure typing feedback for software and hardware keyboards and choose to have iPhone speak each character, entire words, auto-corrections, auto-capitalizations, and typing predictions.
- To hear typing predictions, you also need to go to Settings > General > Keyboards, then turn on Predictive.
- Voices: Choose a voice and dialect.
- Speaking Rate: Drag the slider.
- Pronunciations: Dictate or spell out how you want certain phrases to be spoken.
Android Phones and Tablets
Instructions for Select and Speak and setting up text to speech are here
Spelling and Grammar Software
Read Aloud is a free Google Chrome extension that allows online text to be read aloud. Click on the underlined text to install it in your Chrome browser. It is needed for reading IADT library ebooks online. More information on this here.
Click on this link for a guide to managing Chrome extensions.
Macbooks.
On Macbooks, just select the text, left-click, select speech and click start speaking.