"ellisfaith" <> wrote ...
> work with a student who has C. P. ( Cerebral Palsy) she uses a computer
> most
> the time. IO was wondering if there is any soft ware that will read ANY
> text
> that she scans over with her mouse. I know that there is some thing that
> reads word documents as you type them but I was looking for some thing
> that
> reads all text such as this question?
Hi
The type of software you're looking for is called a "screen reader". As
other replies have noted, Windows has a built-in screen reader, Narrator;
although this is very limited, compared to the stand-alone products. This is
"by design"; in the online Help for Narator it says in effect: this is a
basic tool to get users started, & if they want a full-featured tool they
need a stand alone product. Analogous to Notepad and text editors.
Microsoft has a catalogue of third party assistive technology tools at:
http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/sh....mc_id=0107_24
The most popular screen reader for Windows is JAWS, from Freedom Scientific.
This is about as full-featured as you can get; JAWS is an amazing program
which does lots of things to help vision impaired people use computers. The
only downside is that JAWS is rather expensive. See:
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_...tware_jaws.asp
Other popular screen readers for Windows are:
HAL
http://www.dolphincomputeraccess.com/products/hal.htm
and Windows Eyes:
http://www.gwmicro.com/products/
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have follow-up questions, I've dabbled
in assistive software a bit, over the years.
--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au