E-Text Reader

E-Text Reader is a literacy tool intended for those people who have trouble reading or understanding printed texts.

This program uses digital voices to read electronic texts.
The interface of E-Text Reader is very similar to that of a text editor, so it is unlikely that you find any difficulty using it. The main working area shows the traditional view of a white page where text can be typed or copied to. It also supports opening existing documents in some of the most popular file formats, such as TXT, RTF, HTML, XML, DOC and DOCX. The program also supports editing formatted text in a WYSIWYG style.

Compared to other editors, the main difference is the availability of a set of buttons to control text-to-speech functions. In this regard, you will find buttons to select one of the voices installed on your computer and to read the whole text or just the highlighted parts of it. There are also buttons to use functions such as summarizing a document or extracting text based on the highlighted segments.

Unfortunately, the trial version did not allow me to test some of the translation features available in the full version, which is said to let you translate to and from six different languages. However, I was able to translate single English words into Spanish by double-clicking on them.

In general, E-Text Reader is a fine application that can help not only people having difficulty reading but also students of foreign languages who need to learn the pronunciation of words. However, I was disappointed to see that the program uses the same text-to-speech engines installed on the system and does not provide any alternative to them.