Read&Write

Doing heavy research and reading for long periods of time in front of your computer's screen can take quite a toll on your eyes and decreases your productivity. That being said, things are even more difficult for users with impaired eyesight or that suffer from dyslexia or other learning and attention disabilities.

Fortunately, there are numerous products on the market that can help you with these problems, and one of them goes by the name of Read&Write. To put it simply, Read&Write is a comprehensive piece of software that allows you to improve your reading capacity by using your ears more than your eyes.

The installation is hardly worthy of mention since it's as simple as they get. What is worth noting, however, is the fact that once your launch the utility for the first time, it greets you with a very useful configuration wizard, aimed to tailor the functionality to perfectly suit your needs.

To start off with, we will mention the app's interface, which is actually more of a floating toolbar. The neat thing about Read&Write's UI is the fact that it can be docked on either side of your computer's screen. This, plus the fact that your workspace automatically adjusts accordingly,  makes working with the app feel less cumbersome that with other, similar tools.

As with all apps of this sort, you just have to highlight the text and click the Play button from the aforementioned toolbar. Also as expected is the fact that the utility allows you to fully customize the voice-over. For example, you cam change parameters such as pitch, speed, volume, and the gap between words.

Continuing with the good parts, the app's spell-checker deserves special notice as it's no run-of-the-mill spell checker. In fact, Read&Write's spell-checker is optimized for dyslexic people and can be relied on to provide you with the most relevant options. We cannot overlook the word prediction tool that not only offers instant suggestions as you type but it also makes it effortless for you to choose between them with the help of the F keys.

In addition to everything that has been said, Read&Write also helps you improve the way you research for your projects with its appropriately-named Dictionary and Fact Finder features.

For the Dictionary,  you can choose between Advanced, Basic or Web definitions, while the Fact Finder allows you to use Google, Wikipedia, InfoPlease, Yahoo! or FactMonster to enhance your knowledge.

Unfortunately, both the Windows and the Mac clients do not work with content from web browsers, but the good news is that Read&Write comes with specialized extensions for some of the most popular browsers namely, Chrome and Firefox.

Read&Write is a very useful and full-featured application that will most definitely be of great aid to users unfortunate enough to suffer from dyslexia or other attention and learning disabilities, just as long as they have a bit of patience to get accustomed to with the app's functionality.