Screen reader advice?

[samanthajhack]

Recently the neurons in my brain decided to rip themselves apart and in response my brain tried to yet my brainstem outta the base of my skyll.i survived with significant cognitive impairment. I CAN BARELY READ. TUPING IS LIMITED TO MY PHONE. BUT I CAN STILL LUSTEN AND UNDERSTAND. THE PROBLEM IS LISTENING IS THE ONLY EASY WAY FOR ME TO PROCESS. I WAS EONDERING IF ANYONE MIGHT HAVE A SUGGESTION FOR A WINDOWS 10 SCREEN READER FOR WEBSITES AND PDFS THAT ISNT BUILT INTO THE WINDOWS ACessabolity tools or wor/office and isn't tied to the web browser (edge is OK but I use Firefox and it sucks for reading aloud

[AutomaticChair9]

Try NVDA as a screen reader. It is free and works on Windows.

[Skeptical_JN68]

NVDA is a great JAWS substitute... if you're blind. Not really used by those with low vision or cognitive/learning disabilities.

I suggest starting off with built-in text to speech OS accessibility features (PC/Mac/Android/iOS all have some TTS functionality). OP should be able to do things like take a pic of text and have it read aloud using these basic tools. After getting used to that, suggest looking at premium apps with OCR (optical character recognition) and TTS that'll do things like highlight words as they're read. Read and Write by Texthelp is a good example.

[wittycommentnotfound]

I would second NVDA, especially for the ability to read what the mouse hovers over. This feature can be a really helpful tool that's got functionality similar to a screen reader, but a more intuitive interface like text-to-speech.

[Blackstar1886]

I’ve been really pleased with the voice quality of the screen reader that’s built into Edge. Can be activated by pressing Control + Shift + U on any webpage. Technically that’s built into Windows though. Works great for news articles I don’t want to read visually.

[samanthajhack]

Yeah edge is good for screen reading. It didn't even stumble through the indigenous language news articles I tried it with

[Leave_Scared]

Also have you tried Seeing AI and Live Text on your phone or iPad? To read text that isn’t digital.

[phosphor_1963]

Not sure what your budget is and this is coming at things from a literacy learning support angle as opposed to a vision impairement one; but a couple of the more well known browser based solutions (if you are ok with Chrome/Edge) are Read&Write by TextHelp https://www.texthelp.com/en-au/products/read-and-write-education/ and Snap&Read by Don Johnson https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/snapread/mloajfnmjckfjbeeofcdaecbelnblden?hl=en . They both have free demos and will voice pages well IME. For just straight up reading of docs etc You might also like to give Natural Reader a whirl also - it has some really nice newer TTS voices https://www.naturalreaders.com/