Screen reading

If you are very hard of seeing or blind it’s not going to help just increasing the text size or using screen magnifiers. What you’ll need is software that will read out the text on a webpage to you through your computers speakers. Mac OS X 10.4 and above has this built in, but for windows you really have to get special software for it.

  Windows screen readers

Free downloadable software that will read webpages out aloud for you. Also available for Mac OS X.

A popular professional screen reading software, as such it is also quite expensive.

Another professional screen reader which also has support for braille displays.

  Mac OS X built-in screen reader

From the Apple menu: Select, System Preferences> Universal Access > Seeing

Here you can activate “VoiceOver” (might also be called “Spoken Interface” on older versions) which will read out text to you through your computers speakers. VoiceOver which comes with Mac OS X 10.4 and above is a fully functional screen reader, just as good as the professional ones you would normally have to pay for.