Are you familiar with ClaroRead software – a text to speech application to help struggling readers and writer?  They have produced a mobile app for your iDevice called ClaroSpeak!

ClaroSpeak App is now available in iTunes for 5.99 for iPad and iPhone. Described in iTunes as  a high-quality text to speech reader capable of speaking any accessible text with a range of human high-quality voices. ClaroSpeak offers visual highlighting of text in sync with the spoken words. It also has a range of color and font settings to customize the reading options and provides the ability to convert text imported to audio files.

Here are some of the features of the app:

• Text to speech with choices of high quality voices and voice speeds
• Text imported or pasted into the writing environment can be read out loud
• Accepts text from documents, web or PDF to be read aloud
• Visual highlighting of text, choices of highlighting modes and colors of text highlighted
• Font style, color and size can be adjusted according to need
• Can convert text to audio
• Text can be sent via email or SMS

Here are some screen shots of ClaroSpeak:

 I found the voice quality to be good and navigation in the app to be easy to use.  The choices for background color, font, size and style support special needs individuals when working on an iPad for easiler visual access. One drawback, I beleive, is the need to copy and paste text into the app. I prefer the ability to connect to a Cloud resource from within the app for easy import of a document to into the app.  Other apps, such as Voice Dream Reader,  provides the option of retreiving documents directly from cloud storage as Dropbox for ease of accessing text.

This is a basic app that provides text to speech along with visually highlighted text, color choices for text, background and highlighting with a good quality voice at a reasonable price!

What is your favorite app for reading text? Will this be a part of your OT iTool Kit?

Carol