Text-to-speech technology has developed so well over the years that now it is available to use within so many different contexts such as at university or within the workplace in order to remove the barriers of accessing text. Equally, information technology has advanced so much that accessing information on electronic media such as websites and documents can be done on many different types of tech including mobile technology such as tablets and phones.

In fact, if you do a Google search on the number of people who now access the internet using mobile technology then you will see statistics reporting that more than 80% of internet users are doing this using a mobile phone.

With the development of mobile technologies come the challenges associated with using a smaller screen as well as difficulties with visual impairment or reading difficulties associated with neurodiversity (dyslexia).

The need to have text read out on a mobile device has never been so pertinent as so many of us access information on the go.

When we consider the use of technology to access information, one of the challenges of incorporating assistive technology into the day-to-day work activities, is the ability to work across platforms, for example, using text to speech to read out a PDF document on a laptop and then being able to read out the same document on a mobile phone whilst traveling to one’s next meeting. It can be difficult to find text-to-speech technology that allows this kind of cross-platform flexibility.

Mary Wilcox at Aventido recently filmed a short video about how to read websites on a mobile phone using TextAid.