E-Text Reader 8.0

E-Text Reader is much more than just a software tool to let you read electronic texts. In fact, this comprehensive program devised by Premier Literacy (formerly known as Premier Assistive Technology) is also a text editor, a PDF converter, and even a text translator! It supports the most widely used text formats, such as DOC, DOCX, TXT, HTML, XML, and RTF.

Designed to help those with some kind of print impairment to read books in electronic format, it includes text-to-speech functionality and a number of features to help those with residual sight to access the text in a more accessible way. Among these interesting features you will find the possibility of enlarging the text up to 1000% its original size, changing both the text and background colors, choosing the font you are more comfortable with, highlighting the text (using your favorite color) while the program reads the text out loud, etc.

Attractive as all these features may seem to you, it is its “extra” features that make it stand out from its competitors. Thus, E-Text Reader incorporates a practical translator that can turn any English text into Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German, and vice versa. The results are comparable to those you may get using any online translator, but the big advantage is that you will not need to copy and paste any text into your browser to have it translated. Besides, you can have individual words translated (and read aloud in the output language!) just by double-clicking on any of them. To help you move across your e-texts, you can add any number of bookmarks and highlight different portions of the text, and jump from one mark to another with just one click.

Another of its main assets is its Summary feature. Using its own algorithms, the program will automatically select meaningful fragments of the text and will create a parallel document that you can use as a random summary of the content of complicated or/and excessively long documents. However, as with all automatic processes, nothing guarantees that the text selected will cover all the main points in the text. For better results, I would recommend manually marking and highlighting the text and then tell the program to extract all the highlighted text.

Finally, it is important to note its PDF conversion capabilities. This feature, together with its document-conversion functionality, allows you to use E-Text Reader also as a basic text editor.