Thread: Not a landy question How do i make my Mac read the screen

Hi all,
I just have a lot of work reading that i need to do and was wanting to turn on, the switch that makes the Mac read the screen and then tape it, so i can listen to in the car, any help would be great. can IBM laptops do read the screen if so well that will do.


Thanks all

If you need to listen to text a lot there is a great free plugin for OpenOffice (on Mac, Windows, Linux too) that will convert a properly laid out document into a format called DAISY used by the blind and vision impaired. We use it extensively where I work at the Association for the Blind of Western Australia to produce audio books using Macs. On PC, I know that there is a similar plugin for MS Word but I believe it's not as good as the OpenOffice one at the moment. See Save as DAISY - OpenOffice.org | DAISY Consortium

Included in DAISY are MP3 audio files - DAISY augments them with sophisticated navigation such as to the page or paragraph, bookmarking, etc.

If you can use the Mac then Apple "Alex" is a very good voice, better than most out there and probably better than the Windows voice.

NB For anyone with an interest in such things, our audio book producer was interviewed last week on Phillip Adams' Late Night Live show on Radio National Making books for the blind - Late Night Live - 26 August 2010

(Not wanting to hijack the thread, just thought it would be of interest and potentially relevant.)