Text to speech tools

Find accessible books/ Articles:

in alphabetical order

Audible, while costing $14.95/month now allows free lending of books, so a teacher could share often used books with students (one at a time)

Audiobooks.com offers over 100,000 premium audiobooks. Over 7,000 can be downloaded for free. Use the audiobooks app for android for listening to the books on the go.

Bard Mobile- free resource for students that have a print disability (vision, reading, motor impairment impacting access to books)- books, stories, magazines etc narrated and recorded with human voices.

Bookshare, a free website that provides over 600,000 accessible books to students with print disabilities (dyslexia, vision impairments etc) for free! The student needs to be signed up and the disability needs to be proven before they get access. Computer synthesized voice , Bookshare can also provide text in refreshable or embossed Braille.  

CommonLit is a free teacher's site that allows you to assign books to students. It offers Read Aloud, Annotation Tools, Guided and Assessment Questions, Translation and a Discussion area. Choose text based on reading level or grade level/ interest areas.

DigitalBook.io gives you access to over 100,000 free Ebook and audiobook titles.

Downpour allows you to rent audiobooks, saving you 70% off of retail price. It allows 30-60 days to complete the book.

DPLA- digital public library of America. Free

Ejunto has free, high quality historical and philosophical audiobooks  

Europeana- Explore 58,112,896 artworks, artefacts, books, films and music from European museums, galleries, libraries and archives. Free

FreeClassicAudiobooks the title says it all!

Hoopla is a digital media service offered by your local public library that allows you to borrow movies, music, audiobooks, ebooks, comics and TV shows to enjoy on your computer, tablet, or phone – and even your TV! With no waiting, titles can be streamed immediately, or downloaded to phones or tablets for offline enjoyment later. 

Internet Archive- The Internet Archive offers over 15,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 550,000 modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.

Kobo is an online bookstore with Ebooks and audiobooks that can be purchased.    Kobo app for Androind or iOS

Learning Ally - $119 annual membership. Has 80,000 human-read audiobooks. An extensive collection of K-12 books including popular fiction, classic literature, textbooks, test prep and study aids are a download away. Listen on mainstream devices using accessible technology with page-level navigation, text highlighting and speed adjustments.

LearnOutLoud has audiobooks, courses and documentaries that are free to access from across the web and some you can download directly through LearnOutLoud.com. You'll find the best free public domain audiobooks from Librivox.org, read by volunteers from around the world. We also feature free audiobooks from great collections like ThoughtAudio, ejunto.org, Literal Systems, and many other great sources.  

LIBRIVOX is a non-profit initiative to record public domain books and release them as free audiobooks. The site boasts over 10,000 projects, with a diverse set of titles

LIT2GO offers audiobooks, plays, short stories, and poems that have been tailored for use in classrooms. Along with each free audiobook, you’ll get citation information, play time, and word count. Some have an accompanying PDF that can be used to read-along with the text.

LOYAL BOOKS shares free audiobooks from titles in the public domain. 

MIND WEBS is a old-time radio dramatization of over 150 of the most classic science fiction short stories.

Newsela online reading resource, requires subscription for some resources, access to news is free- "bring authentic, engaging, diverse and accessible content to all learners. Engage students with topics they care about, while building the background knowledge and vocabulary they need to become active, engaged readers. ".  Post 10 new articles each day. 

Oodles app offers over 50,000 ebooks and 15,000 audiobooks from the public domain 

OPEN CULTURE has combed through the same audiobooks offered other places online, and compiled them into one list to browse. While you’ll still find many of the same classics offered elsewhere, you’ll also find stories by James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, and Virginia Woolf, poetry by Maya Angelou and Charles Bukowski.

OVERDRIVE  provides access to over two million books and videos, and partner with more than 30,000 libraries. You’ll find the newest audiobook releases through OverDrive, and they’re all free.

Project Gutenberg- offers over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which copyright has expired. Free

Readworks is a free online K-12 curriculum, is searchable by grade or lexile, includes comprehension questions. Allows some of the text to be graded down for struggling readers without changing the content. Audio versions of some reading content, including an ever-expanding number of human voice audio narrations. Highlight and annotate, adjustable text size, guided reading strip, split-screen view.

Scribl free and paid Ebooks, audio Ebooks, and podcasts. Has nice filter searches that allows filtering by genre elements, story and content elements, audience knowledge, etc.

Storynory provides free audiobooks/podcasts for younger students, including classics, fairytales, educational books and songs. 

Storyshares is an online resource that offers graphic novels with topics interesting to most middle- and high school students, but at lower reading levels. Has several built-in accessibility features (Read Aloud, Dictionary, BeeLine, change font size and color scheme). Books can be downloaded as PDFs. Free version (35 titles) and paid- $5/month or classroom for $325, whole school $3500 (350+ books)

Spotify has audiobooks that can be listened to for free. Premium account will allow you to listen without ads, for students $4.99/month.

SYNC is a free summer audiobook program for teens 13+. 2 YA titles are posted each week throughout the summer.

Thoughtaudio  free audiobooks for a selection of classic literature and philosophy titles. 

Vooks is an online resource for children's books that has illustrations animated and read by human voice to encourage reading along. Target age group is toddlers-early elementary age. Has free trial, then $4.99/mo or $49.99/yr

Access digital writing/ Audio supported reading:

Screen Readers for vision impaired students:

Screen Reader options for the blind by AFB

JAWS is a screen reader and keyboard-only navigation tool for the Windows platform.

NVDA is another free Windows OS screen reading option (open source)

Text Readers for students with visual access:

Android TTS (Select to speak) has features to control speed, pitch of speech as well as type of language.  

Audiobooks app (free on iOS)

Bookshare Reader free Bookshare tool. Doesn't allow bookmarking, but provides synchronized highlighting, modified fonts, voice options. Available online, iOS and Android. 

Bound app (iOS and soon on Google play) to read audiobooks on your device, download books from Dropbox into the app, allows use of bookmarks. $3.99

Capti Voice for Windows, iOS and online. Offline and online reading support tool for education, work, and entertainment. Capti makes it easy to create playlists with textual content to have them narrated by high quality text-to-speech in over 20 languages, improve vocabulary, and develop active reading strategies, offers easy access to OCR for digitizing PDFs and images to make them accessible, contextually-aware reference tools for vocabulary building, active reading tools. Pricing

ClaroPDF- an iOS and Google app that converts pdf and pictures of paper documents (worksheets!) into readable and workable text. $6.99 with 5,000 credits included. $4 for 5,000 additional credits (1 credit per OCR page), has free, limited version (only works for PDFs, has 50 optical character recognition credits).

Claro ScanPen OCR Reader- Android and iOS app that provides OCR capabilities. Free first 10 scans to try, then $9.99 per year for Premium features

ClaroSpeak is a text to speech and writing app available for iOS, Android and in the Chrome browser as a Google App, but is also available for Windows 10. It is free and can read PDFs and other documents, but has a synthesized voice. It allows for text customization and has an integrated word prediction program with voice feedback while writing.

Dolphin Easy Reader- free iOS/ Android app, 30-day free trial for Windows, then $55. Browse & download from the World's largest collection of talking book and newspaper libraries including Bookshare. Open & read books from your device, email or the cloud. Or copy text from anywhere on your phone & hear EasyReader read it back to you. Experience perfectly synchronized text & audio. Or for text only titles, EasyReader can add a human sounding voice of your choice. Boost comfort or contrast - choose colors, text size and highlights to suit your visual needs. Navigate your books or newspapers by skipping directly to specific pages or headings. Search your book for words or phrases. Add text bookmarks or record your own audio bookmarks and return to them with ease. 

Go Read for Android FREE accessible ebook reader for people with print disabilities. Go Read is directly linked to the Bookshare library, letting you find, download, and read Bookshare books within seconds. You can use Go Read with or without TalkBack and enjoy reading Bookshare books with useful features that make reading accessible to people with visual, physical and learning disabilities. 

Google Play Bookshttps  free Android app syncs across all devices that you have connected to your Google account 

Google Supports for Reading and Writing (PDF)

HelperBird is available as Chrome, Edge, and Firefox extension, Docs and Slides Add-on, as iPad app, and for use on websites via widget. Has some free features, $6.99/mo for Pro or $99.99/mo for unlimited licenses. Pricing info. Very similar features to Read+Write and Snap+Read available.

iBooks - iOS app pre-installed on most iOS devices. With iOS Speech Accessibility Settings on: content is highlighted by words, sentences, or both; sentence highlight style is by underline or background color; multiple word and sentence highlight colors; multiple voices (Alex is the most natural sounding); font size options; search text; bookmark; add notes; navigate by contents, bookmarks, and notes 

Immersive reader on Windows 365 OneNote- free with Windows 365 (free for students and teachers). Tools that reads text out loud, break it into syllables, and increase spacing between lines and letters. Color code nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. 1,3, or multi-line focus, Can adjust font size and style, background and font color. Included picture-dictionary. Built-in translator. Adjust speech speed, male and female synthesized voice. Has OCR function built-in.

Kurzweil is an online program that gives students with reading difficulties/ ELL/physical disabilities access to common core curriculum. Requires Windows operating system.  Features: 31 Natural Text-to-Speech voices, Text-to-Speech in 18 languages and dialects, Customizable reading rate and presentation, OpenDyslexic font and Text magnification, OCR-highest accuracy in reading aloud, Magnify text, Keyboard shortcuts, Read text in Word, PDF, EPUB, RTF, Daisy, and on the Web, Read locked text in PDFs and images, exactly as they appear, Access to over 1,800 classic literature texts, Create MP3 files and add to iTunes Playlist, Resume Reading brings opens the exact page you were last reading, Ensure reading and test-taking integrity—now even faster—with Dual Zone Editing, Use Page Range to bring in select pages or chapters into the online library, Read aloud basic math with Talking calculator, Change background and text color.

Libby  free Android application to manage the content you borrow from public libraries. You can use more than one library card, and all the content from different libraries will appear in the unified, user-friendly library. Most importantly, if your connected libraries offer audiobooks, you can borrow them just like ebooks. And you can play them within the app.

Natural Reader  is a text to speech tool available for all platforms (iOS and Android apps, chrome extensions, online version and downloadable) free online for 20 minutes per day and for limited downloadable version. Apps are free for basic version, upgrades are $0.99-$9.99

Read and Write has multiple access features (text to speech, speech to tecxt OCR option, hover speech, text simplification, picture and word dictionary, highlighting and collection of highlights , practice reading, screen masking, translation, vocab lists.). All features are free for teachers indefinitely, 30-day free trail for students, then only basic features like text to speech available for free (list of free features)- available as on-screen keyboard for iOS and Android, as Chrome extension usable on Chromebook, Windows and Mac systems.

Snap and Read for iOS and Google Chrome. It reads both accessible and inaccessible text aloud, it levels vocabulary, and it translates, delivering usage data to teachers who then can more easily assess students’ reading needs individually. It now reads math, has picture dictionaries, definitions, and removes distractions $4.99/month with educators and parents getting free access with student enrollment. 

Speak it- Google Chrome Extension that reads accessible PDFs! Free

Speechify- AI-powered OCR capable reading tool, available as Chrome Extension, Edge add-on, Web-based, Android or iOS app. FREE for up to 3 documents loaded at a time (need to delete if you'd like to add more) with limited voices, the paid version has high-quality, natural-sounding voices. Can read neatly written handwriting and inaccessible PDFs!  Integrates into browser with extensions/ add-ons.

Open Lore Windows based reads electronic text and e-books (ePUB and DAISY formats) out loud using text-to-speech (TTS) with synchronized word/sentence tracking. The software provides a user configurable library, voice and visual tracking settings, dictionary, and custom background appearance. $19.99

Voice Dream Reader for iOS. Pull in text/books from Bookshare and various other sources. Pause, rewind, change speed, finger-read. Change font, size, spacing, color for optimal readability. Highlight and take searchable notes. Speed-read. Finger Read. Synchronized highlighting. $19.99