(Availability of Heather, Stuart and many of the other excellent Cereproc voices, for only £0.59, is one of the few advantages that Android devices have over the iPhone / iPad. The best, inexpensive, solution that I could find involved the use of the Easy Text Reader app, in conjunction with the Heather Scottish voice from Cereproc. If this happens, you may be tempted to use a two-fingered gesture, but it won't help! Would I recommend TalkBack for a user with dyslexia? Definitely, not! What DOES work? You have to learn a totally new set of gestured and it is easy to forget something crucial and become totally stuck. TalkBack is designed for users with a visual impairment, but can be very confusing for a sighted person, especially for someone with dyslexia.

(Trying to support somebody using an Android can be a nightmare as you can never be sure what their operating system looks like.) I had to revert to using TalkBack on an old Hudl. Unfortunately my phone doesn't seem to have TalkBack and it looks very different from the one in the video. This one looked promising as it showed the use of TalkBack in the Android 6.01 (Marshmallow) operating system - the same as I had on my phone. What about the TalkBack Screen Reader?Ī Google search for 'Android Kindle Text to Speech' came up with several YouTube videos and web pages describing the use of the TalkBack to read text from the Kindle app.

I next tried the Google Text to Speech system, as described on the TunesGo web site, only to see that, as I suspected, it does not work with the Kindle app. I first tried the Select to Speak facility in available in recent Android versions (See my colleague, Craig's blog from 5th July.) This lets you select a block of text and have it read back automatically, but having selected some text from a Kindle book, I just got a spoken message saying 'no text found at the location'. I should make it clear that I quickly decided to call the enquirer back, rather than leave him hanging on for a couple of hours! Do 'standard' text-to-speech options work with the Kindle App?įrom past experience of Kindle apps I wasn't expecting the 'standard' Android solutions to work, but I decided to give them a try. You would expect this to be relatively straightforward, but it took over two hours of investigation and I'm still not sure that I found the 'best' solution. I had a phone call this week from an adult with dyslexia wanting to use text-to-speech with the Kindle app to help him read books on an Android tablet.

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