Reading Printed and Electronic Material

Many literacy learners have difficulty reading print or electronic material. This can be due to visual problems or low literacy levels. There are many types of assistive technology to help learners with the printed word.

Many of the assistive technology devices described here use Text-To-Speech (TTS) or Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

• Text-to-Speech (TTS) is software used to read aloud a computer document such as word processor text or a web page. Words can sometimes be highlighted as text is read. It may be helpful to people who need or want to hear what they are seeing in print.
  
  

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of converting an image of text, such as a scanned paper document or electronic fax file, into electronic text. The text in an image is not editable.