Sonant Software WordRead review

WordRead has been designed to meet a need shared by many groups of word processor users: having text read aloud to them.

We all need to proofread our work and the pitfall is that we tend to read what should appear on the page rather than what is on the page. WordRead helps overcome this and is particularly beneficial for those with dyslexia or visual impairment.

There are two installations, one for Windows 98/ME and one for Windows 2000/XP, which provides a greater range of voices to choose from. Otherwise, they work in the same way by providing a toolbar that appears onscreen and in the system tray.

The main use of the WordRead toolbar is when creating or editing Microsoft Word documents. Place the cursor where you want audio playback to commence and click on the video-style play button. Each sentence is highlighted as it is read out.

The software uses the Scansoft Realspeak voices (a demo is available at www.wordread.com). We found the British Female voice to be the easiest to understand. The quality of the reading is also impressive. In our 500-word test document, only a couple of words were mispronounced.

WordRead fully integrates only with Microsoft Word. It is reads text from other applications only if you copy the required text to the clipboard. This isn't particularly practical and is nowhere near as good as the integration with Word.

WordRead will be welcomed by anyone who has problems checking for errors or inelegant phrasing. But it's hardly groundbreaking and is quite expensive considering you can download basic screen readers for free. That said, its integration with Word makes it a good choice for Microsoft users.

Author: Sue Gee